Research

OVERVIEW

The Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Group focuses on neurocognitive development in typically developing adolescents. We are particularly interested in the development of social cognition and decision-making during adolescence. Understanding how the brain and behaviour change during adolescence is of particular importance given that 75% of mental illnesses first appear before age 24, with half of all lifetime cases first appearing by age 14 (Kessler et al., 2012).

The Social Brain

Humans are inherently social. A large proportion of the human brain is involved in social interaction and understanding other people. The social brain is defined as the complex network of areas that enable us to recognise others and evaluate their mental states (intentions, desires, beliefs), feelings and actions. Over the past two decades, research has shed light on how the brain enables the diverse set of functions that allow humans to understand and interact with each other. Several brain areas are involved in social cognitive processes (see Figure below).

Social brain development during adolescence

Areas within the social brain network continue to develop throughout adolescence, demonstrating some of the most protracted neural development in humans. In a longitudinal study of 288 individuals, Mills et al. (2014) examined the structural changes associated with mentalising; that is, the ability to infer the intentions of others. Grey matter volume and cortical thickness in the medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction and posterior superior temporal sulcus decreased from childhood into the early twenties. The anterior temporal complex increased in grey matter volume until adolescence and in cortical thickness until early adulthood. Surface area for each region followed a cubic trajectory, peaking in early or pre-adolescence before decreasing into the early twenties.

We found that susceptibility to social influence decreases from late childhood to adulthood. Furthermore, young adolescents' perception of risk was more strongly influenced by other teenagers than by adults, whereas this was not the case for any other age group (Knoll et al., 2015; 2017).

Peer influence is largely associated with negative outcomes, but other studies from our group found that adolescents were equally influenced by both adults and adolescents in terms of prosocial behaviour (Foulkes et al., 2017; Ahmed et al., 2020), even when prosocial behaviour is costly (Chierchia et al., 2020). This provides evidence that younger people’s heightened susceptibility to social influence can also result in positive behaviours

Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation is the ability to recruit processes to influence how we feel about a situation (Ahmed, 2015). The ability to recruit these processes is being increasingly recognised as an important component of positive mental health. Brain regions associated with the generation and regulation of emotions undergo protracted structural and functional development during adolescence. During this developmental stage, young people also become increasingly susceptible to conditions such as depression and anxiety.

We are interested in understanding how young people learn to regulate their emotions and whether we can improve emotion regulation through online training.

MYRIAD: mindfulness in adolescence

The MYRIAD (MY Resilience In ADolescence) project is a Wellcome-funded Strategic Award that aims to investigate whether mindfulness training in schools has the potential to improve wellbeing and mental health in young people.

Mindfulness is a way of being present to experiences as they happen, rather than worrying about what has happened or what might happen in the future.

We are comparing the effects of a mindfulness programme and an existing social and emotional learning programme. The project will assess whether and how these programmes change young people’s resilience and cognitive control.

More information about MYRIAD can be found here.

DoBAt: Digital delivery of Behavioural Activation to overcome depression and facilitate social and economic transitions of adolescents in LMICs

Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and it is particularly problematic among adolescents given the risk for greater depression chronicity across the lifespan. Untreated depression exerts a huge economic toll as it impairs cognitive functioning, interpersonal relationships, interferes with schooling and disrupts work and productivity.

These impairments have a greater impact on adolescents in low- and middle-income countries due to the additional adversities they face and the lack of available, effective treatments.

This three year project will use smartphones to deliver a digital intervention for adolescents, supported by local lay counsellors, to reduce depression and facilitate successful transitions to adulthood. We will adapt a tailored psychological therapy, Behavioural Activation (BA), among adolescents (15 to 19 years old) living in rural South Africa and Uganda. We will test the effectiveness of delivery of BA for reducing depression (primary outcome), and possible mechanisms, principally executive function and social cognition. As secondary outcomes, we will assess risk-taking behaviours and a range of human capital outcomes. Further, the proposed work will produce relevant measures of executive functions and social cognition through language translation and cultural adaptation and evaluate their reliability and validity in a rural context.

The team comprises a multidisciplinary group of psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists and economists from South Africa (University of the Witwatersrand), Uganda (BRAC), as well as from the UK (University of Oxford, University of Exeter, University College London) and the USA (University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA).

Read more about the DoBAt project in the Agincourt website and in the University of Oxford Child & Adolescent Psychiatry department research page