Question: what have you found out so far?

Alice Jones Bartoli answered on 13 Jun 2011:

We’ve managed to find out quite a lot – I’ll tell you about some of the most exciting things.

One of the first studies I published was about how young offenders weren’t very good at telling where someone is looking. This was interesting because it suggested that these teenagers who were clearly getting into serious trouble weren’t very good at getting information from other people’s eyes. These young offenders were also less good than other teenagers their age at recognising angry faces. We suggested that this might mean that these teenagers weren’t able to make the right decisions about other people’s feelings, and might be behaving ‘badly’ because they weren’t able to judge responses to their behaviour.

Later on, we did some brain imaging with MRI to look at differences in brain structure (size of some brain regions) and function (how much certain brain regions respond to fear faces) in children with behavioural difficulties and those who didn’t. We found that some brain areas that we know are really important for emotion processing (like amygdala) reacted less in these children with behaviour problems to fearful faces, this might mean that they are less ‘excited’ by other people’s fear. We also found structural differences in other brain areas that we know are involved in understanding emotions and feelings. This doesn’t mean that these brain differences will always be here – it might be that interventions can lessen there differences – but we don’t know that yet (it’s my hypothesis though).

There’s still a lot that we don’t know the answer to, and so we’ll carry on, using what we do know to help us to ask new and interesting questions.