Selected Publications

• Platt B, Cohen Kadosh K, and Lau J YF (in press) The role of peer rejection in adolescent depression Depression and Anxiety.

• Lau Jennifer, Guyer Amanda, Tone Erin, Jenness Jessica, Parrish Jessica, Pine Daniel, and Nelson Eric (2012) Neural responses to peer rejection in anxious adolescents Contributions from the amygdala-hippocampal complex International Journal of Behavioral Development, 36(1):36-44.

• Eley T C, Napolitano M, Lau J Y, and Gregory A M (2010) Does childhood anxiety evoke maternal control? A genetically informed study. J Child Psychol Psychiatry.

• Haddad Anneke DM, Lissek Shmuel, Pine Daniel, and Lau Jennifer YF (2010) How do social fears in adolescence develop? Fear conditioning shapes attention orienting to social threat cues. Cognition & Emotion.

• Lau Jennifer YF and Eley Thalia C (2010) The genetics of mood disorders. Annu Rev Clin Psychol, 6:313-37.

Dr Jennifer Lau

I am the head of the REDD lab and also Director of the Calleva Research Centre for Evolution and Human Science. My research investigates the interplay between genetic and environmental factors on intermediate neurocognitive mechanisms contributing to the development of anxiety and depression in childhood and adolescence. I am especially interested in how the relationships between risk variables and symptoms change across developmentally-sensitive periods, and in how targeting specific neurocognitive factors through such external manipulations such as cognitive training can change long-term developmental trajectories. My work uses genetically-informative designs to identify inherited neuro-cognitive markers for anxiety and depression; functional neuroimaging techniques paired with experimental tasks, developed to probe specific social-emotional information processing relevant to anxiety and depression; and cognitive bias modification training paradigms to assess the plasticity of neurocognitive vulnerability and associated changes in symptoms.  

I read Psychology at University College London, University of London. After a year as a research assistant at the Behavioural and Brain Sciences Unit at the Institute of Child Health, I moved to the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, where I completed my PhD under the supervision of Dr Thalia Eley and Professor Peter McGuffin. Following a brief visiting fellowship at the Mood and Anxiety Program at the National Institute of Mental Health, I became a lecturer at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. I have been based at Oxford since October 2007.