Starting a New Fellowship
In our last update, we announced that Amy and the team have been awarded a £2 Million "Future Leaders Fellowship" from UK Research and Innovation. The funding scheme has now started and will last for 4 years, allowing us to study the mechanisms by which social media affects adolescent mental health. The flexibility and stability of this support will enable us to continue delivering cutting-edge and impactful research about some of society's most time-critical research questions here at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit @ University of Cambridge.
New Team Members
We’re very excited to welcome our new research assistants, Matt Richards and Valerie Yap. Matt and Valerie will be working across several projects within the team. Welcome onboard, we’re thrilled to have you!
New Paper Alert!
A new paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences offers our Bayesian account of being left on read. We suggest that affordances of social media increase social uncertainty about what others are thinking and feeling, but decrease uncertainty about social status and group structure, relative to the offline world.
Authors: Amanda Ferguson, Georgia Turner, Amy Orben.
Lab Away Day
We had a great time celebrating the team at our recent lab away day. The day involved some mildly competitive go-karting and lots of team building. It was exciting to reflect on our research vision and think about the many ways in which we can continue to deliver cutting-edge research working at the intersection of social media and adolescent mental health.
PhD Research Visits
Finally, two of our PhD students are embarking on exciting research visits. Georgia is in Paris visiting the Human Reinforcement Learning lab. Luisa will visit the Lifespan Cognitive Dynamics Lab at the Donders Institute in Nijmegen, where she will analyse intensive longitudinal data on the relationship between social media use and mental health. We wish you all the best!
That’s all for now, thanks for reading and we’ll see you next time.