Mental Health

Team: Charlotte Crisp, Laura Chapman, Zoe Reed, Ian Penton-Voak, Angela Attwood, Helen Bould, Olivia Maynard, Jasmine Khouja, Jennifer Ferrar

Summary: We explore psychological and behavioural factors associated with mental health and wellbeing across the general population and within groups affected by mental health conditions. Our approaches include identifying health behaviours and risk factors that may causally influence the development of mental health conditions using population level data. We investigate the mechanisms that may maintain or underly these relationships with a focus on emotion recognition and cognitive biases using a range of online and lab methods. This work informs development of interventions aimed at supporting people with mental health conditions and autistic people, and improving wellbeing.

Overview of projects:

Epidemiological projects:

Examining the relationship between health behaviours and mental health outcomes including psychosis, depression, anxiety and wellbeing.

Emotion recognition and bias projects:

Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) training for emotional facial expressions.

Mechanisms of CBM as an adjunct therapy for antidepressant medication in depression using fMRI (MILESTONE).

Gamified version for people with low mood.

Chronotype and time-of-day effects.

Body dissatisfaction and its relationship to attention towards lower-weight bodies using eye-tracking.

Interpretation of facial micro-expressions in depression and anxiety.

Reward learning and Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) of mood and anxiety.

Intervention and toolkit projects:

Using the Person-Based Approach to develop novel virtual reality treatments for eating disorders. Link to website: https://virtualrealityandeatingdisorders.co.uk/

Emotion recognition toolkit to support autistic children (DAISEE).

Funders: