CU Anschutz and NIH team up with goal of providing better therapy and training options for kids
"Oh my God, he's bored!"
Simone Haller, PhD, jokingly recalled seeing a colleague's neutral facial expression during a recent presentation. The situation was a unique moment for Haller, who studies bias and emotional reactions alongside Joel Stoddard, MD, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
"A lot of social interactions are ambiguous," said Haller, director of research and analytics in the Neuroscience and Novel Therapeutics Unit at the National Institute of Mental Health. "There's a lot of room for interpreting what's going on, what somebody's thinking."
Those calculations can create a negative feedback loop, especially in kids with emotional challenges such as irritability, anxiety or depression. The pair recently published a study examining how youth can differentiate between subtle emotions and how to improve those reactions - marking a step forward for a quickly growing area of research.
'It's an exciting time," said Stoddard. "We've gotten into understanding social interpretations more broadly. The interest has only increased across the field. This might be an inroad to understanding how kids are doing in social perception and social intelligence."
In the following Q&A, Haller and Stoddard detail the specifics of their work, what surprised them most about their findings and what comes next in the field.
