PhD Studentship: Stress Reactivity and Mental Health in Young People: How Do We Measure it, and Can We Fix it when it Goes Wrong?

How a person reacts to stressful things in everyday life is known as ‘stress reactivity’. This includes how a person reacts in their body, and also in their thoughts and feelings. Young people who have experienced difficult life events often have problems with how they react to everyday stress events as they grow up, which makes them more vulnerable to developing mental health difficulties in adolescence and early adulthood.  This project will focus on ways to help young people with their stress reactivity as a preventative strategy to protect against the future development of mental health difficulties.

There is no universally accepted ‘gold standard’ of how to measure stress reactivity, with many existing tools and methods subject to severe limitations in their utility.  Our research group has recently pioneered and piloted novel technology which allow for ambulatory blood-free measurement of cortisol and other biomarkers using microdialysis delivered via a wearable device. This allows people to go about their normal daily activities whilst wearing the device. Using the U-RHYTHM device alongside other stress reactivity measures, using Experience Sampling Methods, will allow us to more accurately model the relationship between stress responses captured at the physiological, psychological and behavioural levels.  The first part of the PhD will focus on addressing measurement issues in the field to progress consensus on the most robust and reliable measures to use, leading in the second part to focussed, small-scale piloting of interventions which could potentially modify dysregulated stress responses in At-Risk youth.

The key aims of the studentship are:-

1. To investigate novel ways of measuring stress reactivity in At-Risk young people (16-25) by assessing the feasibility of using the U-RHYTHM device to measure ambulatory cortisol in this population
2. To investigate the degree to which different ways of measuring stress reactivity converge or diverge with each other to help better inform how we measure stress reactivity in studies with young people
3. To determine if specific psychological or behavioural interventions could be credibly used to modify dysregulated stress reactivity e.g. exercise, mindfulness

The supervisory team will include Professor Pamela Jacobsen, Professor Sarah Halligan, and Professor James Betts at the University of  Bath and Dr. Thomas Upton at the University of Bristol.

The successful candidate would be based within the NIHR Mental Health Research Group at the University of Bath (but with strong links with Exeter and Bristol), and therefore part of a wider team investigating how to improve outcomes for young people who have been exposed to adversity in childhood. For more information about the Bath Mental Health Research Group and the study team, please see: https://bathmhrg.org/