‘I’d like to see Psychobiology embedded more into psychological research’

Could you tell me about your research areas?

My research centres around psychobiological processes involved in mental health – and that's across the spectrum of mental health from wellbeing to disorder adopting genetic, molecular, physiological and cognitive methodologies. I think this is representative of the move that I made from psychiatric neuroscience into psychology, but also the movement in terms of the evidence base now – there's more linking mental health disorders with mental health states, and thinking about wellbeing and mental health on a continuum and as a consequence of gene-environment interactions.

More recently, I've also been involved in evaluating the impact of cognitive and wellbeing programmes using psychobiological measures – for example, the changes in cortisol levels and heart rate variability following an eight-week mindfulness programme. I'm thinking about the best way of measuring these psychobiological factors and how they can be the most useful and objective to us understanding mental health.

The mindfulness research was made possible from funding that I received from The Mindfulness Association to investigate the cognitive and physiological effects of their eight-week mindfulness programme, and my PhD student Laura Pellegrini is currently in the process of writing up the findings from her randomised controlled trial in a University student population. My previous PhD student, Sam Cooke, recently had his PhD work published where he measured brain-derived neurotrophic factor as a measure of neuronal plasticity in serum in individuals with diabetes before and after a cognitive training programme.

What was your involvement in the Psychobiology Section before becoming Chair?

I first attended the section Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM) in 2018 in the Lake District. We have around 170 members in the Section and around 40 people attended the ASM. It's a very friendly, very supportive Section and the people who attend are really enthusiastic about psychobiological research and having a scientific community to share their work and ideas with.

I joined the Section as a Committee Member the following year and later, when the pandemic hit, I helped then-chair Dr Phillipa Jackson organise an online ASM and chaired one of the sessions on mental health and the role of psychobiology. I really enjoyed bringing people together to think about how different research fits within a theme.

In 2023, we held a nested event at the European Congress of Psychology in Brighton including an invited symposium, which I chaired. That brought together speakers to talk about poverty and the effects of inequality on psychobiological processes relevant to mental health. I do some research on childhood trauma as well as the impact in later adulthood on cortisol levels and stress reactivity… so this really helped me to think about these wider issues.

Why did you want to become Chair?

Since first attending and presenting I found the Section to be collegiate, welcoming, and importantly, really interested in psychobiological research and activity. Having a community like this is really important to me as often I feel I am involved in persuading psychologists and psychology students that biology is important… I sometimes think it is viewed as being a very deterministic view, with difficult language and dense content due to the neuroscience involved.

Through teaching from a biopsychosocial perspective I embed biology into the teaching of my mental health module – for example by encouraging them to think about the effects of antidepressants on the brain and of the effect a placebo can have. We all have biology and we all have individual differences, and a lot of that is linked to our experiences and interaction with our environment. Being able to enthuse about psychobiology through this committee was another reason why I took on the position of Chair.

I have also really enjoyed helping to organise events in the past couple of years – I like bringing groups of people together. Phillipa did a fantastic job as Chair for many years so I really wanted to continue that work and maintain a yearly get-together for people to talk about the issues they feel are important in psychobiology.  

Can you tell me about some of your plans and hopes for the section?

I've got a great committee with lots of enthusiasm and expertise in broad areas of psychology and psychobiology and I hope to represent each of those. Each year in preparation for the ASM I want to ask different committee members to suggest a symposium topic and then ask them to invite speakers and act as chair. I would also really like to build support through bursaries to increase the number of people funded through our section to attend events which should help to grow our membership.

I'd also like to see the importance of psychobiology recognised by embedding it a little bit more into psychological research – having those multidisciplinary conversations with people to help see where psychobiological methods and approaches may help enrich different areas of psychology.

Could you tell me about the methods workshop you've got planned for April and your next ASM?

Professor Catherine Loveday is hosting our first day-long methods workshop at the University of Westminster on the 24 April and we're hoping this will be both an in-person and online event. The morning session will be on wearables and the use of wearable data and the potential challenges of physiological data collection. We've got Professor David Ellis from the University of Bath giving an hour-long talk to start off the session and then we'll have smaller research-based talks from members of the Section and committee.

The afternoon session will be on secondary data sets. I've got someone from the UK Biobank coming to talk about the psychobiological measures that they have available to access and then there'll be smaller talks around secondary data set analysis in psychobiological research.

The ASM is going to be hosted by Dr Eimear Lee at Anglia Ruskin University from Thursday 5 to Friday 6 September. We'll have an undergraduate, postgraduate and early-career researcher bursary for people to attend.

See more information and deadlines.