Clinical and Health Research Group

Overview

The research activity of the Clinical and Health Psychology group, and almost all individual group members, has a dual focus:

1. The development of a theory-driven understanding of psychological processes relevant to a range of enduring clinical problems and health-related behaviours, and

2. The evaluation and refinement of interventions derived from this understanding.

The success of research in this group owes much to the fact that work on the psychological mechanisms underlying emotional and behavioural disorders and health behaviour has proceeded side by side with the development of interventions; new understandings from laboratory studies on cognition, emotion and behaviour have informed practice, and applied research in the clinical contexts has fed back to improve theory. The work of the group is concerned with a range of clinical and health psychology topics: healthy lifestyles, chronic disease, older adults, developmental disabilities, other childhood disorders, emotion, and addictions.

Please Note: if you are interested in learning about the North Wales Clinical Psychology Programme, the Programme has its own website. The Programme is an associated unit of Psychology and has no direct relationship to the Clinical & Health research group.

Clinical Psychology

Research projects cover a wide range of clinical problems and bring to bear upon them recent theoretical developments in our understanding of the role and interaction of behaviour, cognition, and emotion in the development and maintenance of these problems. In addiction research, our researchers have been working on cognitive and motivational factors with a focused application to an understanding of the onset and persistence of alcohol misuse. We have shown the importance of both the attentional salience of alcohol-related cues and explicit expectations of the positive and negative outcomes of consumption, effects that are especially critical for understanding drinking in those whose medical condition means that alcohol consumption might have serious consequences. Our results confirm that misusers of alcohol have: (a) attentional bias for alcohol-related stimuli, which fuels their motivational to drink, and (b) maladaptive motivational patterns for finding incentives in other life areas to replace the alcohol. We have also been working on an attentional re-training programme to help excessive drinkers overcome their distractions by alcohol, and motivational interventions to help alcohol abusers correct their maladaptive motivational patterns.

In developmental disorders, we have mainly been focusing on intellectual disabilities, autism, and ADHD. We have been involved in the first publicly funded UK intervention trial of intensive Applied Behaviour Analysis intervention for pre-school children with autism, and have shown that ABA intervention leads to clinically meaningful benefits in intellectual and adaptive functioning for children, whilst placing no additional strain on family functioning. Other research in the intellectual disabilities field is focused on family adaptation and behaviour problems. In ADHD, we have focused on intervention research through parent training for pre-school children, ADHD in adults, and behavioural interventions for children. Our researchers have also studied emotion and social cognition processes in clinical disorders such as neurological problems and autism. In adult clinical disorders, work focuses on the importance of emotion in decision-making, and primarily on the role of emotion in a range of unverified belief states (from dreaming to psychosis) - focusing especially on the neurobiology of false beliefs, by studying patients with focal neurological lesions.

Finally, in research focused on older adults, we have examined the impact of developing cognitive impairment on self and relationship, leading to a model of coping and adjustment in early-stage dementia and, related to this, a biopsychosocial model of awareness and anosognosia which accounts for the complex range of factors involved in determining level of awareness among people with dementia. We have also carried out pioneering work on individualised, goal-oriented cognitive rehabilitation for people with early-stage dementia, and have been involved with several major trials of interventions with people with dementia and their caregivers that have added significantly to the available evidence-base, and will influence guidelines for the NHS on the management of dementia.

Funding sources for clinical psychology research include the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Welsh Office of Research & Development (WORD), the Department of Health, Unilever plc, the US-based National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and various charitable sources.

Health Psychology

Research within the Health Psychology group comprises two main strands, one concerned with the psychology of prevention and health promotion, the other with the psychology of illness and disability. In the prevention and health promotion strand, we have been developing a functional model of health-related behaviour, in which individuals’ behaviour is to be understood in terms of their motives/goals. This entails developing new measures of motives, identifying the major determinants (e.g., personality and self-image) of motives, and elucidating the roles that motives play in behaviour change. Much of his research focuses on physical exercise, including collaboration with exercise physiologists on how activity can be measured objectively. In the illness and disability strand our research has addressed illness-related cognition, emotion, and behaviour focusing on how differences or discrepancies in these factors amongst patient-carer dyads influence clinical and psychosocial outcomes. This work challenges and extends current, somewhat individualistic, models of illness.