Psychology seminars

Jenna Traynor examines how personality-disorder assessments, cognitive measures and neuroimaging can describe and predict changes in suicidal ideation among high-risk psychiatric populations, including people with borderline personality disorder. The talk presents findings linking these different measurements to outcomes and considers emerging brain-based treatments that target neural networks involved in cognitive control and emotion regulation.

Bessel van der Kolk examines how psychedelics may facilitate integration of disparate experiences and changes to established habits. The webinar explores self-compassion, neuroplastic windows and critical periods, asking how therapeutic support and integration relate to these opportunities for change. The discussion connects potential increases in flexibility with the opening of therapeutic windows and includes audience questions.

Sandra Wachter examines how European AI policy might assess social benefits alongside economic growth and risk mitigation. General-purpose AI creates uncertain societal risks while benefiting from public funding, tax concessions, infrastructure, data and other forms of subsidy. Reducing risk alone does not establish that technology benefits society, and economic growth does not ensure equality. The talk proposes public happiness as an additional policy criterion: companies seeking public support should predict measurable benefits and be accountable for delivering them. Psychological research on relatedness, competence and autonomy supplies a framework for evaluating those benefits.

Rainer Friedrich presents closed-loop, high-resolution virtual reality for head-fixed adult zebrafish, linking spatial cognition to telencephalic circuits. Behavioural training, two-photon imaging and circuit-level methods reveal how functional neuron types represent virtual environments and how experience refines those representations. Virtual-environment manipulations test cognitive inference and prediction, connecting internal models used in navigation and planning to neural organisation.

Automatic analysis of affective and social signals creates opportunities for collaboration between computer scientists and behavioral researchers. Albert Ali Salah examines the field’s main research directions and challenges, including differences between computational and statistical methods, their goals and assumptions, and data-driven versus theory-driven approaches. Examples include automated analysis of children’s interactive play-therapy sessions and the use of multimodal cues in bipolar-disorder diagnosis. Facial expression, body movement, gesture and speech illustrate how AI can support human monitoring and decision-making in behavioral and clinical science. The talk considers human–AI collaboration and the roles of explainability and interpretability in developing trustworthy computational tools.

John Constantino and Jeffrey Borenstein examine how schools can support children with developmental and behavioural challenges. Teachers, counsellors and other education professionals are often among the first to recognise difficulties, and sustained school experience can strongly influence development. The discussion considers the design of individualised education plans and how educators and clinicians can apply more precise, child-specific approaches to make daily learning environments effective supports for maturation and mental health.