Search

Up to one-third of young people live with chronic physical conditions (eg, diabetes, asthma, and autoimmune disease) that frequently involve recurrent pain, fatigue, activity limitations, stigma, and isolation.

This project uses longitudinal population data provided through the Developmental Pathways in WA Children Project (Developmental Pathways Project).

We know that place, location, and geography can all influence health, wellbeing, and disease, and thus are important factors in policy development and service planning.

Climate change is both an environmental crisis and a growing source of psychological distress for young people, calling for responses that nurture emotional resilience and collective engagement. The emerging response to climate distress has mainly focused on formal psychological and individual-level interventions. 

Social anxiety, peer victimisation, and social support are key issues during mid-childhood that provide important influence in the later adolescent years. While extensive research has evaluated these constructs in isolation and during adolescence, almost no longitudinal studies have evaluated relationships between them during mid-childhood.

Early intervention offers the potential to mitigate adult mental illness; however, trials spanning decades present significant challenges, necessitating predictive early markers useable in trial settings. We hypothesised that parent evaluation using the child behaviour checklist (CBCL) total problem score at age two years predicted adult depressive and anxious symptoms and explored other potential parent ratings.

Harmonizing the scores obtained by different instruments that measure the same construct enable researchers to combine them in one analysis. An important step in harmonization is checking whether there is measurement invariance across populations.

Psychological prevention programmes delivered in schools may reduce symptoms of depression. However, high-quality, large-scale trials are lacking.

Cognitive theories contend that attentional bias to negative information contributes to elevated trait anxiety. However, research in this area has been hindered by the lack of a standardized assessment task that demonstrates the required qualities, including strong internal consistency and ecological validity. The present study aimed to develop and validate the Talking Heads Attentional Bias Assessment Task, an easy-to-implement measure that overcomes the limitations of previous attentional bias assessment tasks.

Parental severe mental illnesses (SMIs), including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder (MDD), can impact children's well-being, yet existing meta-analyses are limited in scope and methodology and do not comprehensively assess cognitive and academic performance in offspring across SMIs.