The BASS was designed to assess social skills in people with suspected or diagnosed dementia to enable individuals, their families, and clinicians to better understand how dementia has affected their cognition and behaviour. 

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With an ageing population in Australia, the challenge will be to ensure that people living with dementia can have their needs met. It’s being increasingly recognised that if people are allowed to ‘age-in-place’, in their own homes, in a familiar environment, they have better quality of life. However, family members are often the sole providers of care and face significant emotional and physical burden. How do we care for the carers?

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Keeping active in later life is important for maintaining social, cognitive and emotional well-being as well as delaying or preventing the onset of dementia. Creative arts activities offer a promising approach to engage thinking, emotions, creativity and imagination; and complement physical activity to promote well-being in older adulthood. This research is investigating the effects of art making and song writing on brain, cognitive and emotional processes in older adults. The aim is to identify the important ingredients of creative activity programs that drive benefits in well-being.

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Distress due to the effects of climate change is associated with feelings of demise and a perception that other people and governments are failing to respond with adequate behavioural and policy changes. Previous studies examining the psychological distress due to the effects of climate change have found affective, cognitive and behavioural aspects of associated distress. This distress is chronic in nature, resulting in long-lasting and significant negative impacts on mental health. Our research is examining how feelings and associated stress due to climate change, eco-anxiety, may be impacting people’s frequency of pro-environment behaviours. 

Recent media coverage has exposed the devastating impact that social media use can have on young people’s lives. Our research in this area aims to determine the influence of frequent social media use on empathy in adolescents and to characterise the contexts in which empathy is expressed in online communication. These aims will be achieved by adapting real-world social situations to the lab environment, and by measuring empathy using innovative, objective methods for tapping both the affective (feeling) and cognitive (thinking) components. Our projects will determine:

1.   Whether cognitive and affective empathy vary as a function of social media use in adolescents

2.   Which contextual factors influence how cognitive and affective empathy are expressed on social media

3.   Whether cognitive and/or affective empathy are expressed differently with familiar versus unfamiliar persons