Social and Biological Contributions to Anxiety and Depression in Health and Disease

The current plan for my project is to test whether biological factors, cognitive function and social factors predict both depressive symptoms and anxiety using structural equation modelling (SEM). I will use SEM to test the direction of the associations that exist among these variables. Two separate SEMs will be performed, one addressing the relationship between biological factors, cognitive function and SES and symptoms of depression, the other addressing the relationship between biological factors, cognitive function and SES and symptoms of anxiety. The plan is to then apply this model to healthy individuals and individuals with cognitive dysfunction (e.g. ageing, dementia and stroke).