Our broad interest is in understanding the mechanisms of mental health factors, such as motivation and mood.
Our latest study on age-related on aged related positivity bias in emotional recognition has received coverage from major outlets in the UK and Israel. This work reveals a link between the age-related positivity bias in emotion recognition and cognitive decline, hightlighting associated structural and functional brain differences - a connection that may serve as a potential marker for neurodegeneration.
New research reveals schizophrenia's negative symptoms fall into two distinct categories: emotional expression and motivation deficits. While standard clinical tools effectively measure emotional expression, they inadequately capture motivation problems—critical for patient outcomes. This discovery may explain why many treatments have failed and highlights the need for more precise assessment methods in both research and clinical practice.
Jakub’s paper was published in Emotion. We investigated the cognitive mechanisms behind attentional negativity bias in depression, linking slower processing of angry faces to increased activity in the insula, inferior frontal gyrus, and parietal cortex. The findings suggest this bias may persist beyond depression.
Mental effort is widely used but poorly defined. Here's a talk I gave at CRCNS that summarises what we think about mental effort. The paper is here or in our publications page.
