Peter Watson

• PhD Statistics
• Medical Research Council (UKRI)

Frontal lobe lesions have been associated with executive impairments and changes in emotional/social function. Empirical studies using emotion recognition tasks in people with frontal lesions have indeed reported impairments that are predominantly associated with medial lesions. However, work has also identified a fronto-parietal ‘multiple demand’...

Introduction: Love addiction, a negative emotional construct, can significantly impact an individual’s personal and social life. It is characterized by emotional dependency involving both positive and negative emotions, specific interpersonal needs, and elements of self-hate. In recent years, machine learning has become increasingly valuable in pre...

Background Shame, as a complex and global self-conscious emotion, plays a significant role in mental health. Self-criticism is a crucial factor in generating negative emotions, including shame, while self-compassion and self-forgiveness can mitigate the effects of self-criticism and shame. The present study examines the coexistence of these psychol...

Parents are typically the first individuals a child communicates with, and their acceptance or rejection significantly affects the child's personality traits and psychological well-being. Therefore, a comprehensive tool to assess parental acceptance-rejection behaviors is crucial in any culture. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate the psyc...

Parents are typically the first individuals a child communicates with, and their acceptance or rejection significantly affects the child’s personality traits and psychological well-being. Therefore, a comprehensive tool to assess parental acceptance-rejection behaviors is crucial in any culture. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate the psyc...

Frontal lobe lesions have been associated with executive impairments and changes in emotional/social function. Empirical studies using emotion recognition tasks in people with frontal lesions have indeed reported impairments that are predominantly associated with medial lesions. However, work has also identified a fronto-parietal 'multiple demand'...

This guide presents a detailed overview of the most used machine learning (ML) techniques for psychologists who may not be familiar with advanced statistical methods, algorithms, or programming. Recognizing the growing interest in using data-driven approaches within psychological research, this guide describes applying ML techniques to investigate...

The intersection of machine learning (ML) and cognition is often referred to as 'artificial intelligence', whereas the intersection of psychology and ML is a term we would like to coin as 'Artificial Psychology' or "PsAIchology". The main purpose of this paper is to introduce three commonly used machine learning algorithms for mind research along w...

Background Chronic pain’s influence on emotional well-being can be significant. It may evoke feelings of despair, frustration, nervousness, and melancholy in individuals, which often manifest as reactions to enduring pain and disruptions in their daily lives. In this study, we seek to perform Bootstrap Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA) on the Persia...

Background This study explores the intricate web of symptoms experienced by academically gifted high school students, focusing on procrastination, rumination, perfectionism, and cognitive flexibility. The well-being of these gifted adolescents remains a pivotal concern, and understanding the dynamics of these symptoms is vital. Methods A diverse s...

Introduction Social pain is an emotional reaction which is triggered by social exclusion and has been extensively investigated in the literature. The Social Pain Questionnaire (SPQ) is a self-report instrument which is the only scale for measuring social pain as a dispositional factor. The current study aimed at examining the psychometric propertie...

Background Mindfulness-based programmes (MBPs) are increasingly offered at work, often in online self-guided format. However, the evidence on MBPs’ effect on work performance (WP) is inconsistent. Objective This pragmatic randomised controlled feasibility trial assessed procedural uncertainties, intervention acceptability and preliminary effect si...

In artificial intelligence and psychological research, understanding how artificial intelligence interprets human emotions through facial expressions is challenging, thus emotion recognition became a crucial task in many computer vision applications, and in the development of emotionally intelligent artificial intelligence systems. Although there h...

In the year 2022, this research conducted an in-person study involving 780 single or widowed women, aged between 20 and 70, falling within the bottom three economic deciles and possessing varying levels of education. All participants held educational qualifications below a high school diploma and were beneficiaries of charitable financial support i...

Adolescence is a developmental stage in which vulnerability to mental health difficulties increases. One promising strategy to reduce risk of difficulties developing could be to specifically target a key, pan-therapeutic skill broadly relevant for individuals exhibiting preliminary symptoms. Psychological decentering describes the skill of voluntar...

Adolescence is a developmental stage in which vulnerability to mental health difficulties increases. One promising strategy to reduce risk of difficulties developing could be to specifically target a key, pan-therapeutic skill broadly relevant for individuals exhibiting preliminary symptoms. Psychological decentering describes the skill of voluntar...

Background Acquired brain injury (ABI) is linked to increased depression risk. Existing therapies for depression in ABI (e.g., cognitive behavioural therapy) have mixed efficacy. Behavioural activation (BA), an intervention that encourages engaging in positively reinforcing activities, shows promise. The primary aims were to assess feasibility, acc...

The surge in the popularity of image-based social media (IBSM) raises concerns about its negative impacts, such as fostering unrealistic beauty and body-shape (BBS) standards and triggering appearance-related worries. The Concern about Appearance on Social Media (CONAPP) scale was developed to investigate this aspect within IBSM. However, the compr...

Mindfulness-based programmes (MBPs) are increasingly offered in work settings, often in online self-guided format. However, the evidence on MBPs' effect on work performance (WP) is inconsistent.This pragmatic randomised controlled feasibility trial assessed procedural uncertainties, intervention acceptability and, preliminary effect sizes of a MBP...

Various key concepts are introduced here, including artificial intelligence and explainable artificial intelligence and their implementation in artificial psychology in model building. We recommend the use of a training set to estimate models and a separate set of data to test, in an unbiased manner, the predictive validity of the model obtained fr...

We present the assumptions and philosophy underlying artificial psychology (AP) and motivate the need for a set of models that can incorporate information from complex mental systems using ideas such as fuzziness of a system and unsupervised algorithms that use artificial intelligence. We discuss the need for a multiplicity of modeling approaches t...

The importance of shared personal experience and how this is quantified are shown. In particular, the Delphi method introduced in the 1960s leads to the gathering of qualitative information from surveys or checklists, which can be used in a fuzzy cognitive map (FCM). FCM is a mathematical tool to model experiences expressed through language by peop...

Further examples of network analysis using the directed graphs introduced in Chap. 4 are given. These networks are graphs showing the degree of relationship between variables. Given the complexity of relationships between concepts, network models are multivariate and often highly dimensional, so there is often a need to reduce the number of variabl...

A particular form of network used in brain imaging, the neural network, is the topic of this chapter. Properties of neural nets are presented together with a detailed description of the structure of neurons and artificial neurons that comprise these networks. A neural net is a conceptual model based upon the human brain. It has an observed input la...

In machine learning, there is often a large range of possible features to use for classification into groups. This chapter concentrates on methods of feature selection to narrow down characteristics of interest to create more parsimonious and cost-effective models. Aspects of feature selection such as choice of method (wrapper, embedded, and filter...

Fuzzy set theory and its role in psychology are introduced in this chapter. Fuzzy models accept that the human perception of the world is not black and white but includes a degree of grayness (e.g., in diagnosis where the presence or absence symptoms may or may not lead to a diagnosis of a particular illness and in the use of language where, for ex...

Artificial Psychology (AP) is a highly multidisciplinary field of study in psychology. AP tries to solve problems which occur when psychologists do research and need a robust analysis method. Conventional statistical approaches have deep rooted limitations. These approaches are excellent on paper but often fail to model the real world. Mind researc...

We begin with the Bayes theorem, which combines a priori information with information from the data to create a posterior conditional probability, such as the probability of a patient having a severe memory impairment given their gender. We then compare this approach with classical Fisherian inference giving Bayesian analogs based on summarizing th...

The literature has shown that sexual health literacy has limited applicability in many developing countries. The present study, therefore, aimed to develop and examine the validity and reliability of the Sexual Health Literacy Scale (SHLS) among a sample of 595 Iranian university students. The first analysis yielded themes obtained from a qualitati...

Background Phenotypic studies have identified distinct patterns of autistic characteristics in genetic syndromes associated with intellectual disability (ID), leading to diagnostic uncertainty and compromised access to autism-related support. Previous research has tended to include small samples and diverse measures, which limits the generalisabili...

The purpose of this study was to predict Social Emotional Competence based on childhood trauma, internalized shame, disability/shame scheme, cognitive flexibility, distress tolerance, and alexithymia in an Iranian sample using Bayesian regression. The participants in this research were a sample of 326 (85.3% female and 14.7% male) people living in...

Feature selection is a method for removing redundant and noisy variables in cognitive psychology. There are already some methods for doing this which use approaches such as genetic algorithms and random forest models. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the use of fuzzy feature selection methods using R software. .....

Feature selection is a dimensionality reduction technique and it aims to select a small subset of the relevant features from the original features by removing irrelevant, redundant or noisy features. The main advantages of applying feature selection before using machine learning algorithms in psychological research are 1) Reduction of overfitt...

APA conference August 4 - August 6 ,2022

A Data-Driven Method for Capturing Comorbidity Structure in Mental Disorders Hojjatollah Farahani, Parviz Azadfallah, Peter Watson, Marija Blagojević Building: Zoom Room: Zoom Date: 2022-06-01 03:15 PM – 03:45 PM Last modified: 2022-05-07 ABSTRACT The concurrent presence of a mental disorder with another mental disorder is common in the clinical...

Introduction Mental ill health is a major cause of disability. Workplaces are attractive for preventative interventions since most adults work; meanwhile, employers are interested in improving employees’ well-being and productivity. Mindfulness-based programmes are increasingly popular in occupational settings. However, there is inconsistent eviden...

Introduction Decentering describes the ability to voluntarily adopt an objective self-perspective from which to notice internal, typically distressing, stressors (eg, difficult thoughts, memories and feelings). The reinforcement of this skill may be an active ingredient through which different psychological interventions accrue reductions in anxiet...

Introduction. Decentering describes the ability to voluntarily adopt an objective self-perspective from which to notice internal, typically distressing, stressors (e.g. difficult thoughts, memories, and feelings). The reinforcement of this skill may be an active ingredient through which different psychological interventions accrue reductions in anx...

Introduction. Decentering describes the ability to voluntarily adopt an objective self-perspective from which to notice internal, typically distressing, stressors (e.g. difficult thoughts, memories, and feelings). The reinforcement of this skill may be an active ingredient through which different psychological interventions accrue reductions in anx...

Autistic people report difficulties with the demands of a neurotypical world, but little research has assessed the impact of the environment on such difficulties. We investigated the effect of ambient sounds on decision-making and heart rate variability. Adults without intellectual disability were allocated to autistic (n = 38) or neurotypical (n =...

Cognitive difficulties are common following stroke and can have widespread impacts on everyday functioning. Technological advances offer the possibility of individualized cognitive training for patients at home, potentially providing a low-cost, low-intensity adjunct to rehabilitation services. Using this approach, we have previously demonstrated p...

Kernel methods are a class of machine learning that has received more attention and become an increasingly popular tool for learning tasks such as pattern recognition, classification or novelty detection. The purpose of this research was to compare the accuracy classification of the linear and non-linear Kernel Support Vector Machine(SVM) and Naive...

Background The introduction of developmentally adapted criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has improved the identification of ≤6‐year‐old children with clinical needs. Across two studies, we assess predictors of the development of PTSD in young children (PTSD‐YC), including the adult‐led acute stress disorder (ASD) diagnosis, and prov...

Cognitive difficulties are common following stroke and can have widespread impacts on everyday functioning. Technological advances offer the possibility of individualised cognitive training for patients at home, potentially providing a low-cost, low-intensity adjunct to rehabilitation services. Using this approach, we have previously demonstrated p...

Autobiographical memory distortions are a key feature of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In this proof-of-concept randomized controlled trial ( N = 43), we evaluated an autobiographical memory flexibility intervention, MemFlex. We aimed to determine whether the mechanism-focused intervention, which aims to improve autobiographical memory proc...

Mental ill health is a major cause of disability. Workplaces are attractive for preventative interventions since most adults work while employers are interested in improving employees' well-being and productivity. Mindfulness-based programmes are increasingly in occupational settings. However, there is inconsistent evidence whether mindfulness inte...

Low-intensity psychological interventions that target cognitive risk factors for depressive relapse may improve access to relapse prevention programs and thereby reduce subsequent risk. This study provides the first evaluation of an autobiographical memory-based intervention for relapse prevention, to establish whether memory-training programs that...

Objective: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating condition which when left untreated, can have severe life-long consequences for an individual's psychological, social and occupational functioning. Initial conceptualizations of PTSD were centered on adult presentations. However, the instantiation of developmentally appropriate PTSD...

Background: Acquired brain injury (ABI) affects approximately 79.3 million individuals annually and is linked with elevated rates of depression and low mood. Existing methods for treating depression in ABI have shown mixed efficacy. Behavioural activation (BA) is a potentially promising intervention. Its premise is that individuals with low mood a...

Purpose: Posterior fossa brain tumours (PFT) and their treatment in young children are often associated with subsequent cognitive impairment. However, reported follow-up periods rarely exceed 10 years. This study reports very long-term cognitive consequences of surviving an early childhood PFT. Methods: 62 adult survivors of a PFT, ascertained f...

Background Affective dysregulation is central to depression. However, emotion regulation (ER) tendencies in depression remain poorly understood. It is critical, therefore, to validate measures of habitual ER in clinical populations. The current study aimed to validate the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) in a sample of individuals...

Objectives: The Imaginator study tested the feasibility of a short mental imagery-based psychological intervention for young people who self-harm and used a stepped-wedge design to investigate effects on self-harm frequency reduction at 3 and 6 months. Method: A total of 38 participants aged 16-25 were recruited via community self-referral and m...

Background: Acquired brain injury (ABI) affects approximately 79.3 million individuals annually and is linked with elevated rates of depression and low mood. Existing methods for treating depression in ABI have shown mixed efficacy. Behavioural Activation (BA) is a potentially promising intervention. Its premise is that individuals with low mood av...

Background: Acquired brain injury (ABI) affects approximately 79.3 million individuals annually and is linked with elevated rates of depression and low mood. Existing methods for treating depression in ABI have shown mixed efficacy. Behavioural Activation (BA) is a potentially promising intervention. Its premise is that individuals with low mood av...

Background: Acquired brain injury (ABI) affects approximately 79.3 million individuals annually and is linked with elevated rates of depression and low mood. Existing methods for treating depression in ABI have shown mixed efficacy. Behavioural Activation (BA) is a potentially promising intervention. Its premise is that individuals with low mood av...

Temper outbursts are a severe problem for people with Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS). Previous reports indicate that vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) may reduce maladaptive behaviour in neurodevelopmental disorders, including PWS. We systematically investigated the effectiveness of transcutaneous VNS (t-VNS) in PWS. Using a non-blind single case repeat m...

Introduction: People with Down's syndrome (DS) have a high prevalence of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Early markers of Alzheimer's disease pathology identifiable before clinical change are needed for the evaluation of preventative treatments. The retina, an extension of the brain, may provide a noninvasive imaging site. Methods: Forty-nine a...

A subtype of the posttraumatic stress disorder diagnosis for children 6 years and younger (PTSD-6Y) was introduced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). This study utilized confirmatory factor analytic techniques to evaluate the proposed DSM-5 PTSD-6Y factor structure and criterion and convergent validity against competin...

Successful navigation within the autobiographical memory store is integral to daily cognition. Impairment in the flexibility of memory retrieval can thereby have a detrimental impact on mental health. This randomised controlled phase II exploratory trial (N = 60) evaluated the potential of a novel intervention drawn from basic science - an autobiog...

Introduction: Anxiety, mood and trauma-related disorders are common, affecting up to 20% of adults. Many of these individuals will experience symptoms of more than one disorder as diagnostically defined. However, most psychological treatments focus on individual disorders and are less effective for those who experience comorbid disorders. The HARMO...

Autobiographical accounts and a limited research literature suggest that adults with autism spectrum disorders can experience difficulties with decision-making. We examined whether some of the difficulties they describe correspond to quantifiable differences in decision-making when compared to adults in the general population. The participants (38...

Background & Objective: Patients with brain injury are at high risk for infections. Although infection and cognitive deterioration are established for people with dementia, this has not been shown for patients with a prolonged disorder of consciousness (PDOC). This study determines whether regular Wessex Head Injury Matrix (WHIM) assessments can id...

Introduction: Anxiety, mood and trauma-related disorders are common, affecting up to 20% of adults. Many of these individuals will experience symptoms of more than one disorder as diagnostically defined. However, most psychological treatments focus on individual disorders and are less effective for those who experience comorbid disorders. The HARMO...

Objective. A subtype of the posttraumatic stress disorder diagnosis for children 6 years and younger (PTSD-6Y) was introduced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). However, the latent structure of PTSD symptoms in this age group has not been previously investigated. The present study therefore utilized confirmatory factor...

Successful navigation within the autobiographical memory store is integral to daily cognition. Impairment in the flexibility of memory retrieval processes can thereby have a detrimental impact on mental health. This randomised controlled phase II trial (N=60) evaluated the potential of a novel, autobiographical memory-based intervention drawn from...

Impaired ability to recall specific autobiographical memories is characteristic of depression, which when reversed, may have therapeutic benefits. This cluster-randomized controlled pilot trial investigated efficacy and aspects of acceptability, and feasibility of MEmory Specificity Training (MEST) relative to Psychoeducation and Supportive Counsel...

Impaired ability to recall specific autobiographical memories is characteristic of depression, which when reversed, may have therapeutic benefits. This cluster-randomized controlled pilot trial investigated efficacy and aspects of acceptability, and feasibility of MEmory Specificity Training (MEST) relative to Psychoeducation and Supportive Counsel...

After psychological trauma, recurrent intrusive visual memories may be distressing and disruptive. Preventive interventions post trauma are lacking. Here we test a behavioural intervention after real-life trauma derived from cognitive neuroscience. We hypothesized that intrusive memories would be significantly reduced in number by an intervention i...

Introduction Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a chronic condition. Although current treatment approaches are effective in reducing acute depressive symptoms, rates of relapse are high. Chronic and inflexible retrieval of autobiographical memories, and in particular a bias towards negative and overgeneral memories, is a reliable predictor of relap...

INTRODUCTION: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a chronic condition. Although current treatment approaches are effective in reducing acute depressive symptoms, rates of relapse are high. Chronic and inflexible retrieval of autobiographical memories, and in particular a bias towards negative and overgeneral memories, is a reliable predictor of rela...

Preventative psychological interventions to aid women after traumatic childbirth are needed. This proof-of-principle randomized controlled study evaluated whether the number of intrusive traumatic memories mothers experience after emergency caesarean section (ECS) could be reduced by a brief cognitive intervention. 56 women after ECS were randomize...

Background: Depression and anxiety are common complications following stroke. Symptoms could be treatable with psychological therapy, but there is little research on its efficacy. Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate (1) the acceptability and feasibility of computerized cognitive behavioral therapy (cCBT) to treat symptoms of dep...

\textbf{Background:}$ Depression and anxiety are common complications following stroke. Symptoms could be treatable with psychological therapy, but there is little research on its efficacy. $\textbf{Objectives:}$ The aim of this study was to investigate (1) the acceptability and feasibility of computerized cognitive behavioral therapy (cCBT) to tre...

Preventative psychological interventions to aid women after traumatic childbirth are needed. This proof-of-principle randomized controlled study evaluated whether the number of intrusive traumatic memories mothers experience after emergency caesarean section (ECS) could be reduced by a brief cognitive intervention. 56 women after ECS were randomize...

After psychological trauma, recurrent intrusive visual memories may be distressing and disruptive. Preventive interventions post trauma are lacking. Here we test a behavioural intervention after real-life trauma derived from cognitive neuroscience. We hypothesized that intrusive memories would be significantly reduced in number by an intervention i...

Background: Few efficacious early treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children and adolescents exist. Previous trials have intervened within the first month post-trauma and focused on secondary prevention of later post-traumatic stress; however, considerable natural recovery may still occur up to 6-months post-trauma. No trials...

Objectives Mental imagery abnormalities occur across psychopathologies and are hypothesized to drive emotional difficulties in bipolar disorder (BD). A comprehensive assessment of mental imagery in BD is lacking. We aimed to test whether (i) mental imagery abnormalities (abnormalities in cognitive stages and subjective domains) occur in BD relative...

Table S1. Confirmatory Factor Analytic studies examining the structure of Acute Stress Disorder symptoms in adults. Table S2. Performance of different symptom requirements per 3‐ and 5‐factor models to predict concurrent ratings of impairment (N = 594).

Background and aim: Modafinil is best known as a sleep regulator among healthy individuals, but studies suggest that it reduces excessive daytime sleepiness in patients with brain injury. This retrospective pilot study evaluated the effectiveness of Modafinil for people with a prolonged disorder of consciousness and whether those with a traumatic...

Background. The revision of Acute Stress Disorder (ASD) in the DSM-5 (DSM-5, 2013) proposes a cluster-free model of ASD symptoms in both adults and youth. Published evaluations of competing models of ASD clustering in youth have rarely been examined. Methods We used Confirmatory Factor Analysis (combined with multi-group invariance tests) to explo...

Treatment innovation for bipolar disorder has been hampered by a lack of techniques to capture a hallmark symptom: ongoing mood instability. Mood swings persist during remission from acute mood episodes and impair daily functioning. The last significant treatment advance remains Lithium (in the 1970s), which aids only the minority of patients. Ther...

Background Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with chronic biases in the allocation of attention and recollection of personal memories. Impaired flexibility in attention and autobiographical memory retrieval is seen to both maintain current symptoms and predict future depression. Development of innovative interventions to reduce maladapt...

Objectives: Precipitants of seizures are often reported by patients and carers, but the accuracy of these claims remains unknown. Focusing on epilepsy in people with intellectual disability (ID), the aims of this work were to (1) identify a set of methods for assessing the validity of reported seizure triggers in individual patients; and (2) under...