Mental health

…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.

…research explain refugee trauma, mental health and recovery after resettlement. Belinda Liddell discusses neuroimaging evidence on the effects of visa insecurity, family separation, discrimination and social exclusion on brain function, trauma recovery and psychological wellbeing. The biological consequences of uncertainty are considered alongside implications for interventions and refugee mental health care. Tahereh Ziaian presents an international study of refugee and migrant youth in Australia, Canada and the United States. It

…understand neural circuits relevant to mental health disorders. Projects should connect measurements or causal interventions with mechanistic questions about brain function. This R21 mechanism provides up to USD 275,000 in direct costs over two years, with no more than USD 200,000 in either year. The next deadline for new applications is 16 October 2026, at 5 p.m. in the applicant organisation’s local time. Therapeutic device intervention trials are outside this call’s intended scope.

NIMH funds development of new or substantially improved brain-stimulation devices for mental health research and treatment applications. Relevant work includes greater spatial or temporal precision, closed-loop control and multi-site stimulation, with proof-of-concept hardware or software development. Clinical trials are not allowed. Support is up to USD 275,000 in direct costs over two years, with a USD 200,000 annual limit. The next new-application deadline is 16 October 2026 at 5 p.m. in the applicant organisation’s local time.

Fund pilot studies and early research addressing public-health priorities, including infectious disease, AI diagnostics, digital health, cancer, maternal health, mental health and healthy ageing. Proposals should generate evidence useful for health policy and practice. Submit the English EOI, budget and investigator CVs together as one PDF by 2 October 2026, 18:00 EAT. The linked Google submission form requires sign-in.

Aim Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are related to worse mental health outcomes and reduced grey matter volume (GMV) in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), amygdala (AMY), and hippocampus (HC), which has mostly been observed in samples of 12–50-year-old individuals. We hypothesize that these anomalies persist in middle- to old-age and brain structure (ROIs: HC, AMY, DLPFC) mediates the association of ACE with anxiety and depression symptoms. Methods The study uses data from the Hamburg City Health Study, which randomly sampled adults between 45–74 years (N=2,525) and tested them for a

…National Survey of Children’s Health data including 25,967 children ages 6-11 years. Home TSE status was defined as no home TSE or not living with a smoker, home thirdhand smoke (THS) exposure only or living with a smoker who did not smoke indoors, and home secondhand smoke (SHS) and THS exposure or living with a smoker who smoked indoors. Family resilience, a protective factor for mental health problems, was a compo

…in cognitive constructs relevant to mental health, enabling the design of theoretically precise interventions, a mechanistic understanding of existing interventions, and/or a means to enact cognitive training. However, barriers to entry are high: computational modelling is still a niche skill, and interpretation of model fitting estimates can be opaque without appropriate

Maternal diet is a key determinant of later child’s metabolic and mental health outcomes. Human and/or animals consuming a western diet (WD), as compared to a healthy diet (HD), exhibit microbiota dysbiosis, low-grade inflammation, behavioral alterations and defects in the central reward circuit. Accordingly, epidemiological studies show that WD consumption during pregnancy is associated with adverse metabolic and mental health outcomes in offspring. We have developed a mouse model to study the impact of maternal WD on the offspring and challenged hypotheses related to dysbiosis, inflammation

…impact of social isolation on mental health is a top priority.In a cohort study with 317 young adults (mean[SD] age, 23.08 [2.83] years; 181 females [57.09%]), utilizing accelerometry, electronic diaries, and functional neuroimaging, we examined the effectiveness of physical activity in offsetting affective loss due to social isolation in everyday life and investig

…to enhance performance, cognition, and mental health. Drawing upon interdisciplinary collaborations in the University of California San Diego, Human Performance Optimization Lab, this talk explores the application of cognitive neuroscience principles in three domains to improve human performance and alleviate mental health challenges. The first section will discuss studies addressing the role of vision and oculomotor function in athletic performan

…neuroscience methodology and experimental neuroscience, it aims to improve the understanding of the relationship between anatomical connectivity, brain dynamics and cognitive function. These workshops have a unique format, featuring only short presentations followed by intense discussion. This year’s workshop is co-organised by Wellcome, putting the spotlight on brain connect

…to lifelong struggles including with mental health. Fortunately research also indicates that solutions and interventions at various stages of life can be developed to help. But even among people who remain resilient or do not experience acute stresses, a lack of opportunity early in life due to poverty or systemic racism can still constrain their ability to realize their full potential. In what ways are health and other outcomes affected by early life difficulty? What can individuals and institutions do to enhance opportunity

Post-diagnostic research on rare genetic developmental disorders presents new opportunities (and a few challenges) for discovery neuroscience and translation. In this talk, Kate will describe and discuss neurodevelopmental phenotypes arising from rare, high penetrance genomic variants which directly influence pre-synaptic vesicle cycling (SVC disorders). She will focus on Synaptotagmin-1 Associated Neurodevelopmental Disorder (also known as Baker Gordon Syndrome), first described in 2015 and now diagnosed in more than 50 children and young people worldwide. She will then present work-in-progre

…negative effects of daily stress on mental health. They will also highlight which characteristics are likely to cause more stress related issues, and why recovery time is very important. They will give an understanding of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in relation to daily stress and they will discuss the app, SAM the stress autism mate, developed and investigated (SCED design) in co-creation with their patients with ASD.

In this talk I will present our recent behavioural and neuroscience research on how the brain motivates itself to form particular beliefs and why it does so. I will propose that the utility of a belief is derived from the potential outcomes associated with holding it. Outcomes can be internal (e.g., positive/negative feelings) or external (e.g., material gain/loss), and only some are dependent on belief accuracy. We show that belief change occurs when the potential outcomes of holding it alters, for example when moving from a safe environment to a threatening environment. Our findings yield pr

…have a potent impact on our mental health and the health of our brain. BrainPark is working to harness this power by developing lifestyle-based interventions for mental health and investigating how they do and don’t change the brain, and for whom they are most effective. In this webinar, Dr Rebecca Segrave and Dr Chao Suo will discuss BrainPark’s approach to developing lifestyle-based interventions to help people get better control of compulsive behaviours, and the multi-modality neuroimaging a

…data relevant to neuroscience and mental health. However, the translation of this progress into improved understanding of brain function and dysfunction has been comparatively slow. As a result, the development of therapeutics for mental health has stagnated too. One central challenge has been to extract meaning from these large, complex, multivariate datasets, which re

…The Thuret lab investigates environmental and molecular mechanisms controlling the production of these adult-born neurons and how they impact mental health. We study neurogenesis in healthy ageing as well as in the context of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and depression. By approaching neurogenesis in health and disease, the strategy is two folds: (i) Validating the neurogenic process as a target for prevention and pharmacological interventions. (ii) Developing neurogenesis as a biomarker of disease prediction

…lifelong struggles including in mental health, research also indicates that solutions and interventions at various stages of life can be developed to help. And while many people manage to remain resilient, a lack of opportunity early in life, including because of poverty and systemic racism, can constrain their ability to realize their full potential. In what ways are health and other outcomes affected? How can systems instead restore opportunity? "The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory's biennial

Mental Health problems among youth constitutes an area of significant social, educational, clinical, policy and public health concern. Understanding processes and mechanisms that underlie the development of mental health problems during childhood and adolescence requires theoretical and methodological integration across multiple scientific domains, including developmental science, neuroscience, genetics, education and prevention science. The primary focus of this presentation is to examine the relative role of genetic and family environmental influences on children’s emotional and behavioural

Concerns about the impact of social media use on adolescent well-being and mental health are common. While the amount of research in this area has increased rapidly over the last 5 years, most outputs are still marred by a multitude of limitations. These shortcomings have left our understanding of social media effects severely limited, holding back both scientific discovery and policy interventions. This talk discusses how developmental, cognitive and neuroscientific approaches might provide a new and improved way of studying social media effects. It will detail new studies in support of this

…of interoceptive processing in mental health. Indeed, many mood and psychiatric disorders involve disturbed feelings and/or beliefs about the visceral body. However, current methods to measure interoceptive ability are limited in a number of ways, restricting the utility and interpretation of interoceptive biomarkers in psychiatry. I will present some newly developed measures and models which aim to improve our understanding of disordered brain-body interaction in psychiatric illnesses.

Historically pregnant women and their unborn baby have been amongst those with the poorest outcomes in previous epidemics, most notably the Zika virus. For much of 2020, with the emergence of the novel coronavirus, the effect on the fetus remains unclear. While initial reports suggest that vertical transmission with SARS-CoV2 is reassuringly rare, the complex socioeconomic, domestic and broader maternal lifestyle factors which can influence a child’s lifelong well-being have been modulated during the experience of this pandemic. The developing brain is particularly susceptible to maternal stre