Mental Health Cover

Amy Hardy (pictured above) is a Research Clinical Psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London and Psychology Lead for Posttraumatic Stress in Psychosis in the Psychosis Clinical Academic Group, South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.  In this post, Amy describes a paper  published in the journal  Schizophrenia Bulletin  by the Psychosis Research Partnership that supports the causal role of childhood victimisation in psychosis by demonstrating how understandable reactions to trauma contribute to psychotic experiences. We know there is a relationship between trauma and psychosis, and research is unraveling the puzzle of how they are linked. Findings point towards childhood victimisation playing a causal role in psychotic experiences, at least for some people. For example, trauma has been shown to occur before the onset of psychosis, trauma severity is associated with the magnitude of psychotic experie...

This post is by Angharad de Cates  (pictured above), a Senior Registrar in General Adult Psychiatry and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Unit of Mental Health and Wellbeing at the University of Warwick. Broadly, her research interests are neurocognition, self-harm, mood disorder, and mental health promotion and wellbeing. In this post, she summarises her recent article “ Can we use neurocognition to predict repetition of self-harm, and why might this be clinically useful? A Perspective ” co-authored with Matthew Broome, and published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychiatry in January 2016. The first issue in research about self-harm is to define what it actually is, which in part depends on which style of terminology you wish to use. According to patient and user groups, self-harm as a general catch-all term is preferred, where there is no attempt by clinicians or researchers to restrict by method or intent, but instead to focus on the fact that one has harmed oneself....

This post is by James Shepperd , Gabrielle Pogge and Jennifer Howell who recently authored a paper entitled, " Assessing the Consequences of Unrealistic Optimism: Challenges and Recommendations ", to be published in a special issue of Consciousness & Cognition on unrealistic optimism , guest-edited by Anneli Jefferson, Bojana Kuzmanovic and Lisa Bortolotti. In this post, James, Gabrielle and Jennifer summarise the content of their new paper. James Researchers have argued that unrealistic optimism (UO) can have both desirable and undesirable consequences. Yet, understanding the consequences of UO is a remarkably difficult. We identified eight challenges faced by researchers wanting to understand the consequences of UO. Gabrielle Unrealistic comparative optimism might be overstated . Recent evidence suggests that measurement decisions may exaggerate both the frequency and magnitude of UO in research—UO may neither be as common or sizable as once believed. Accordingly, th...

Tablet recognizes the prosthetic as a wireless Bluetooth mouse. Scientists from Stanford University's BrainGate program revealed that a woman suffering Lou Gehrig’s disease can successfully control a Nexus tablet with her brainwaves. The team built upon eye-tracking technology that uses eye movement to control mouse cursors and “click” by focusing on a single spot. However, the technology can be inaccurate and tiring for users. The program instead “cut out the middleman” by implanting a baby-aspirin-sized 100-channel electrode micro array into the left side of the patient's brain that’s responsible for movement. Image Courtesy of FreePik Neural signals were decoded in real time by algorithms to control the mouse cursor. This method let the patient type out words on a custom keyboard by concentrating on the words they wanted to spell. A Nexus 9 was incorporated into the setup when they realize the touchscreen controls of a tablet was similar to the existing the point-and-click s...

She works hard for the money, but she works even harder for pizza. That’s what Duke University psychology professor Dan Ariely found in an experiment he describes in his new book, Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations . To conduct the study, Ariely sent three out of four workers at a semiconductor factory in Israel messages at the start of the week that promised them specific rewards for assembling a prescribed number of chips each day. One group was promised a “Well Done!” text message from the boss at the end of the week. Another group was promised a bonus of about $30. A third group was told they would get a voucher for a free pizza. A fourth group, roughly 25 percent of the workers, got no message and no offer Then the participants were told to get to work. So what motivation, if any, really works? During the beginning of the week-long experiment, free pizza came out first, showing a 6.7 percent increase in productivity over the control group. A "Well Done!...

In this post, Matilde Aliffi (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) reports from the 7th International Summer School of Affective Science (ISSAS) held at Château de Bossey between the 7th and the 14th July 2016. This year ISSAS was entirely dedicated to investigating the role of emotions in fiction and virtual worlds. World leading experts in philosophy, psychology, educational science, neuroscience, affective computing and game design gave their lecture to an audience composed by an international and interdisciplinary community of about forty PhD students.   During the school, workshops were also held on thought experiments, data-analysis, programming and text-based emotion recognition. Participants were divided in eight teams and had the opportunity to design and present a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project tied to the topics of the school. Alongside the lectures, participants also enjoyed artistic events that complemented nicely the lectures with a more...

This post is by Miguel A. Vadillo  (pictured above), Lecturer in Decision Theory at King's College London. In this post he writes about cognitive biases, error management theory, and the reproducibility of research findings.  The human mind is the end product of hundreds of thousands of years of relentless natural selection. You would expect that such an exquisite piece of software should be capable of representing reality in an accurate and objective manner. Yet decades of research in cognitive science show that we fall prey to all sorts of cognitive biases and that we systematically distort the information we receive. Is this the best evolution can achieve? A moment’s thought reveals that the final goal of evolution is not to develop organisms with exceptionally accurate representations of the environment, but to design organisms good at surviving and reproducing. And survival is not necessarily about being rational, accurate, or precise. The target goal is actually to avoid...