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Overview

Dr Yan Birch

Assistant Professor


Affiliations
Affiliation
Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology

Biography

Academic Interests

My work to date has predominantly focussed on the investigation of evolutionary theories of low mood. Specifically, I am interested in how the process of rumination may be broken down and how the resulting sub-components may relate differentially to problem-solving ability in a multitude of domains. More recently I have become interested in how an individual's metacognitive beliefs about their own ruminative processes may moderate rumination's effect on problem-solving.

More broadly, I am interested in the emotions and emotional processing and have previously conducted work on the lateralisation, and hormonal regulation thereof, emotional face processing. 

Research interests

  • Cognitive Effects of Rumination
  • Contemporary Issues in Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Emotional Processing
  • Evolutionary Psychopathology
  • Rumination as a Transdiagnostic Process
  • State and Trait Differences in Rumination