Fragile minds in a scary world: trauma and post traumatic stress in very young children
Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a prevalent and disabling condition that affects larger numbers of children and adolescents worldwide. Until recently, we have understood little about the nature of PTSD reactions in our youngest children (aged under 8 years old). This talk describes our work over the last 15 years working with this very young age group. It overviews how we need a markedly different PTSD diagnosis for very young children, data on the prevalence of this new diagnostic algorithm, and the development of a psychological intervention and its evaluation in a clinical trial.
Multimodal tracking of motor activity, sleep and mood
This talk will (1) describe patterns and correlates of objectively assessed motor activity (2) present findings on the inter-relationships among motor activity, sleep and circadian rhythms and mood disorders; (3) describe potential of cross species studies of motor activity and related systems to inform human chronobiology research
Nutritional psychiatry: diet and mental health over the lifecourse
Conceptual Change Induced by Analogical Reasoning Sparks “Aha!” Moments
Although analogical reasoning has been assumed to involve insight and its associated “aha!” experience, the relationship between these phenomena has never been directly probed empirically. In this study we investigated the relationship between representational change and the “aha!” experience during analogical reasoning. A novel set of verbal analogy stimuli were developed for use as an insight task. Across two experiments, participants reported significantly stronger aha moments and showed greater evidence of representational change on trials with more semantically distant analogies. Further, the strength of reported aha moments was correlated with the degree to which participants’ descriptions of the analogies changed over the course of each trial. Lastly, we probed the individual differences associated with a tendency to report stronger "aha" experiences, particularly related to mood, curiosity, and reward responsiveness. The findings shed light on the affective components of analogical reasoning and suggest that measuring affective responses during such tasks may elucidate novel insights into the mechanisms of creative analogical reasoning.