BAP 2025 round up!

The PaL Lab made a strong showing at this year’s BAP meeting in Manchester, with an eclectic mix of posters and talks spanning computational psychiatry, neurochemistry, and development.

• Friederike Hedley presented Transdiagnostic symptomatology amidst global uncertainty, using longitudinal network analyses to show how intolerance of uncertainty acts as a bridge linking anxiety, depression, and anhedonia when the world feels unpredictable.

• Nazia Jassim shared new 7T MRS findings in Region-specific Glx predicts volatility beliefs, demonstrating that excitatory neurochemistry in distinct cortical regions relates to how people infer environmental change in a hierarchical learning task.

• Milly Lowther discussed Computational insights into pessimistic interpretation of ambiguity, combining reinforcement learning and drift-diffusion modelling to reveal that anxiety biases decision starting points toward negative interpretations, rather than altering how outcomes are learned.

• Bowen Xiao presented Uncertainty promotes hypervigilance, showing that when uncertainty rises, attention becomes more diffuse and sampling intensifies — a mechanistic account of anxious scanning behaviour.

• Calum Guinea shared Anxiety and depression interact with learning and effort-based choice, demonstrating that people are generally more motivated to work for reward than to avoid loss, but that this balance shifts systematically with symptom load.

• Tim Sandhu presented Baseline-dependent atomoxetine effects in aversive learning, showing that noradrenergic modulation through atomoxetine alters uncertainty estimates in a baseline-dependent way — helping to explain why pharmacological effects vary across individuals.

• Tom Murray wrapped things up with Induced affective biases arise from perceptual shifts, showing through clever adaptation paradigms that negative affect biases emotional perception at a low, perceptual level rather than through later decision-making.

  
  

Altogether, a rich and lively set of contributions - from molecules to maths to mood - capturing what the PaL Lab does best: using computational and neurobiological approaches to understand how the brain navigates an uncertain world.