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Cognitive and Behavioural Approaches to Mental Health in Young People
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Improving the Measurement and Understanding of Loss of Pleasure in Young People

 

Our research focuses on loss of pleasure, or ‘anhedonia’ and we are looking for schools to help us develop better ways to understand and measure this in young people.

 

Overview of the Project

A light orange poster with information for schools

What is anhedonia?

  • Anhedonia means experiencing less pleasure, enjoyment or motivation from things that would usually feel rewarding.
  • It is a common feature of depression and anxiety.
  • It interferes with day-to-day life, and is linked to poor mental health and worse treatment outcomes.
  • We don't have good treatments for anhedonia in young people yet. 

We want to understand loss of pleasure in young people so we can improve treatment for depression and anxiety and help young people not only feel less bad, but also feel more positive and able to enjoy their lives. 

What is our study trying to do?

A major challenge in understanding and treating loss of pleasure in young people is that we do not have effective ways of measuring it.

Our study aims to:

  • Develop a better measure of anhedonia.
  • Develop a deeper understanding of anhedonia by exploring how it changes over time and how it relates to other aspects of young people’s mental health.

Why should schools take part?

  • Students will have an opportunity to see psychological research in action and contribute to mental health research.
  • As a thank you we can offer mental health/psychology, Oxbridge workshops/presentations for students, with topics tailored to your school's community.
  • Schools will receive book vouchers in recognition of students’ participation.

What would we ask of your school?  

  • To share information about the study with your students and parents.
  • Facilitate 3 data collection sessions, during which students would be asked to complete questionnaires. Each session would be about 1 month apart. We are happy to lead these sessions. 
  • These sessions will be a maximum of 50 minutes long.

If this might be of interest, please contact happy@psy.ox.ac.uk for more information.

Thank you!