My main concerns are: Literature, emotion and personal thinking. Literary thinking as compared with more oridinary ways of thinking about existence. The value of serious reading and its relation to health and mental health agendas. What thinking with and about books might be like in the twenty-first century. I work in close collaboration with The Reader Organization in bringing literature to a wide variety of groups and persons outside the University.
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I specialise in Victorian literature and in research on reading and health. I have published extensively on the power of literary reading to influence mental health and well-being, particularly in the areas of depression and dementia. I am currently engaged in interdisciplinary research projects related to reading in prisons, chronic pain, reading with children and families, and the psychology of reading, with colleagues in Medicine, Health and Psychological Sciences, and with national charity The Reader Organisation.
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My main research interests lie in the psychological study of mental health difficulties. My background in neuropsychology enables me to explore the fundamental cognitive and affective mechanisms underlying psychopathological constructs using converging methods. I adopt transdiagnostic, dimensional and symptom -based approaches to my biopsychosocial research into social cognition, decision-making / reasoning and stimulus independent thought. I am particularly interested in the interaction between the environment, communities and the mechanisms of mental health and wellbeing.
