In August 2019, Rachel Nesbit successfully defended her PhD thesis in the lab titled ‘The role of social-emotional factors and lateralisation for emotion processing in adolescent facial emotion recognition’. Rachel’s PhD work focussed
on understanding some of the factors that might relate to facial emotion recognition skills in adolescence. Below we asked Rachel some questions about her PhD work and what her plans are post-PhD.
Why did you decide to look at emotion recognition in adolescents?
The ability for us to be able to recognise emotions is an important skill that allows us to navigate in our social environments. It allows us to know how someone is feeling and thinking and modify our behaviour accordingly. We know that a core component to many psychiatric disorders is the difficulty to recognise emotions in others. Adolescence is a period of considerable change, and a time where mental-health disorders emerge. How emotions are processed in the brain may also link to emotion recognition ability – with the belief that those who are more right-hemisphere dominant (process emotions in their right side of the brain) may be stronger at emotion recognition. The aim of the PhD was therefore to examine these factors together in adolescents.
What were your main findings from the work you conducted?
Throughout my PhD work I showed that social anxiety, depression and where about in the brain emotions are processed are really important in understanding adolescent’s facial emotion recognition skills and that these factors are also important over time (although the relative importance of these factors may change over time). When I looked at where individuals high on social anxiety and depression looked when making decisions about emotions, it was found that those with higher levels of social anxiety did not show large differences in where they looked during emotion recognition – which may highlight that it may be more to do with subjective feelings and not attention processes. It was found that those higher in depression did look less at the facial features during emotion recognition, which might reflect less social motivation in these individuals.
What are you doing post-PhD?
I have recently started as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Anxiety and Depression in Young People (AnDy) research group at the University of Reading. I will be working on a UKRI funded project examining adventurous play as a mechanism for reducing anxiety in children. My particular focus of the project is trying to understand what the barriers and facilitators are for opportunities and engagement in adventurous play through carrying out qualitative interviews with headteachers, teachers, parents and playground assistants. This work will then inform interventions for school-based programmes with the aim of increasing adventurous play in schools – which may play an important role in reducing anxiety in children.