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Researchers launch app to explore how our brain deals with emotional information in everyday life

5 August 2019

Researchers from UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN) launch a new app, tracking an individual’s moods and emotions, which could lead to better management of mental health disorders, such as anxiety and depression, as we age.

First page of Emotional Brain Study app

The ‘Emotional Brain Study’ app – released to the Apple Store and the Google Play Store – has been developed to test whether individuals who are less distracted by emotional information feel better.

Research by the UCL team and others has shown that performance on these type of tasks in the lab can indicate whether a person is psychologically healthy or currently experiencing mental health problems. The Emotional Brain Study will reveal whether the same differences can be observered when people play these games on their mobile phones in their everyday environments.

The app includes a mood tracking component which people complete before playing one of five games. Each game presents players with emotional and non-emotional information, with the app testing whether a person’s mood is related to their performance on these games. The games require participants to do various memory and attention based tasks, such as remembering numbers that are presented over either emotional or neutral distractor images. Another game involves beating the app at a card game, using neutral and emotional card decks.

There are also optional questionnaires in the app to find out whether people’s current mental well-being is related to how easy or difficult it is for them to play the emotional brain games.

Dr Susanne Schweizer (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), creator of the app, said: “In the lab, performance on these types of tasks differentiates between individuals who are psychologically healthy and those with a wide range of mental health problems including disorders such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia.”

“The games are fun and engaging – people can track their performance in relation to their mood and their surroundings, for example, whether they are alone or with others.

“Another important factor that the app allows us to explore is how these abilities develop across the lifespan. We currently know very little about how our brain develops the ability to deal with emotional information in everyday life. We are particularly interested in understanding how these abilities develop during adolescence, which is the time of peak onset for mental health disorders.

“If we are able to show these patterns in a large-scale dataset, we can potentially use these types of tasks to detect early signs of low mood in a non-stigmatising and fun way, especially when thinking about young people,” said Dr Schweizer.

Understanding how the abilities tested in the app relate to everyday mood will help the researchers determine which capacities should be targeted with cognitive training interventions. These cognitive training interventions can then be used to improve dysregulated emotions across a range disorders including depression and anxiety disorders.

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