Our work focuses on understanding how young people interact with emotional information in the world around them, including how they respond to positive and negative feedback and learn from this information to make decisions. We think that this has important links with the development of common mental health difficulties like anxiety and depression, and that understanding these links may also help us understand why some people are more likely to respond to certain treatments (e.g., talking therapies, medication) than others.
Our work explores these links at multiple levels, including brain and behavior.
Naturalistic emotion processing
We are interested in how young people’s brains respond to emotional information like facial expressions. A lot of what we know about this has come from research that uses standardised or posed images of faces. Recent work at UCL has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity in adults while they watch movies, where faces appear as part of complex scenes and stories, closer to how they would be processed in real life situations. We are extending this work to adolescent participants, to characterise individual differences in neural responses to emotional stimuli, and to investigate whether these responses are related to mental health difficulties.
Learning and decision making
Different cognitive styles in learning and decision making are thought to be involved in mental health and social and emotional wellbeing. We use computational modelling to model how young people process information in developmentally appropriate versions of existing cognitive tasks.
Context-dependent mood and emotions
We are interested in how moods and other aspects of wellbeing fluctuate over time in everyday life. We are using an experience sampling app called eMoodie to get regular snapshots of how young people are feeling. We are interested in how this changes over time, particularly while young people take part in mental health treatment interventions provided by schools.
Effects of intervention
Common mental health interventions like cognitive behavioural therapy are thought to work by altering maladaptive decision-making and learning processes, for example by challenging biases and ‘faulty’ thinking patterns. We are interested in using cognitive tasks to investigate whether these cognitive functions do change over the course of treatment interventions, and whether this relates to improved outcomes. We hope this may help us to understand why some people benefit more than others from treatments like CBT.
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