PhD defence Laurens Tristan Kemp

Keywords: Associative learning, Mental disorders, Impulsivity, Avoidance

"The Good, the Bad, and the Networks: Appetitive and Aversive Learning in the Balance of Mental Health"

This research is on how sensitive people are to learning positive and negative information, and how individual differences in learning affect their behavior and mental health. Existing research primarily focuses on studying sensitivity to learning of either positive information or negative information, but in this research these traits are combined into a relative measure of sensitivity to positive and negative learning, to determine whether it plays a role in developing mental disorders. The results show that the personality trait impulsivity is involved: more impulsive people are relatively less sensitive to negative information. In addition, people who experience problems with their mental health show another effect: they are relatively less sensitive to positive information. These findings show that this integrated approach is valuable to the study of individual differences in learning, and provides more insight into how their effects on behavior influence mental health.

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