We are the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, or ACAMH for short. And this is ACAMH learn. Welcome to mind the kids. I'm Doctor Jane Gilmour, honorary consultant, clinical psychologist, and child development programme director at UCL. And I'm Omotoyossi, professor of psychology at the University of York, focusing on children and young people's mental health, and special educational needs. In each episode, we select a topic from the research literature, and in conversation with invited authors, sift through the data, dilemmas, and debates to leave you with our takeaways for academics and practitioners. Today we'll be discussing the relationship between adversity effect and internalising psychopathology. This episode is called Protecting Mental Health, The Power of Positive. So, often, on this podcast we talk about negative experiences. So I think lots of when we talk about mental health and the related things, it's mental health difficulties or bullying. And I think that is somewhat representative of the field in general, because we seem to focus on when stuff goes wrong. But it does paint childhood and adolescence in a negative picture that lots of things do go wrong, but then lots of things do go right, and then lots of things go wrong. And then you can do some stuff that's positive afterwards. So I think it's nice that we're going to be talking about positive experiences as well today, as well as adverse experiences. I mean, good old negativity bias isn't it? So, we always attend more to things that are anxiety provoking, because it keeps us alive. But I think also it's interesting what you're talking about in terms of academia, because certainly in theory we're standing on the shoulders of giants. So we need to use existing data to write a paper or apply for a grant or whatever. So if the existing literature has a particular bias, then it's harder to take a different position. But the interesting thing about this paper that we're going to talk about today is that it does take a different position, although it does it in a very data informed way. So, I'm really looking forward to this idea. And I think going back to that point about representative of the field, I was at a conference; I think it was like last year or the year before. And it was on child and adolescent psychopathology. And I remember talking to some people there after the second day of the conference, and I was like, oh, this is exhausting because my whole work is around the negative things of mental health-- mental health difficulties-- and the problems that children experience. And you come to a conference and that's all everyone's talking about as well. And I was like, over the years, I think I genuinely got to a point where I was just like, oh, maybe I should focus on something a bit more positive, but maybe it was just because I was just in a different part of the world. It was really hot, and I was just like, oh, I can't do this. But I think it was a moment of realisation. I was like, maybe I should just do more positive stuff. And I don't think I've managed it. But it did occur to me that we were just looking at lots of negative things. And there was an interesting editorial, I think it was in the JCP on this very topic, as in the fact that the field of Child Adolescent Development is focused so much on psychopathology, and there needs to be more of a focus on the positive aspects of child development. So there's a nice editorial in the JCP from 2024 called Salutogenic Mental Health Science, a Phoenix rising from pathogenic ashes of psychiatry. And that's by Professor Helen Fisher, who argues that we do need to focus on factors that promote positive outcomes following adversity. And that's exactly what we're going to be talking about today. So, I set this up very nicely. I'm really interested in the idea of positivity, positive effect and its relationship to optimism. And obviously those are two separate constructs. But there is a fair literature indicating that if you're optimistic, you're more likely to construe something positively, and therefore have a positive effect. And there's a really nice meta analysis, actually. Alacron and colleagues looked at this concept across lots of different settings and demographics and so on. But the reason in particular that I find this interesting is that, of course, optimism to some degree is a stable trait across the lifespan, but it's also a teachable skill. So in other words, there are some strategies that one can use to develop one's optimism, and therefore, one's positive effect. The other thing that's interesting about optimism is that it can act as a buffer in stressful circumstances. And there's an emerging literature suggesting that optimism in parents will predict a better outcome for children who are living in adversity. So, in other words, the parents are construing, we hypothesise. Meaning in their environment in a more positive way, so that might mute those negative effects. So this is particularly pertinent for our paper today because we're going to think about the outcome of young people who've had early experiences that are aversive. And think about those individual children and those groups of children who may have a vulnerability in that area. I think it's a really important topic, as you see, that is underrepresented in fields of study in general. Shall we bring the guest in? I think we should. We've got some questions to ask. So many. Today we're joined by Doctor Jeremy Hansen, associate professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh in the US. Jeremy is the lead author of the paper, positive affect as a developmental mediator of early adversity and internalising psychopathology, published in the JCPP. Welcome, Jeremy. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about the work. Yeah, fantastic. Now, I'm going to kick off with a question just about definition, because for those new to this literature, it's important to get our context clearly defined. So could you differentiate between the early life adversity event and how that might relate to ACEs, or Adverse Childhood Events? So, early life adversity are sometimes in the paper we say, ELA, is a much larger umbrella term that encompasses these adverse childhood experiences that many people may know. Adverse childhood experiences like child abuse, child neglect, being exposed to violence. But early life adversity kind of has a bit of a bigger flavour, a bigger umbrella that it kind of captures. So there's a little bit of things like household dysfunction, neighbourhood safety, the family environment, parental monitoring. And the idea is that you may have these cumulative challenges, and how we defined it in the paper in this early life adversity space. Things may cluster together, but they may keep continuing to add to your risk. And so, that's what we looked at. Lots of people may be familiar with the ACEs, or the Adverse Childhood Experiences, from some work in California initially, but that has gone kind of around the globe at this point. Those tend to be about 10 different experiences that again, are child abuse, child neglect, emotional abuse, emotional neglect. But this is a bit of a wider frame because we think that multiple different kinds of experiences in kids' lives that may be difficult, or challenging, or stressful, may convey an increased risk for different kinds of mental health and different kinds of developmental challenges. Yeah, I mean, that's really useful because it's encompassing these kind of societal and community ideas as well, and perhaps more diffuse ideas in terms of an experience, but nonetheless one that is impactful, as we will see as we go through your paper. That's really helpful. And I just want to dive in with some terminology here. So, your paper, part of the paper, focuses on positive affect. I just want you to start off by telling us what positive affect is. And would I be naive to assume that positive affect is just the lack of negative affect? So, this is a really interesting and good question, and relates to how you kicked off this chat and some of your remarks early on. So we're really trying to look at these. I would call them approach emotions. Things like joy, enthusiasm, excitement, hope, contentment, when you're really kind of energised and engaged with the world around you. And it isn't just the absence or the lack of negative affect. The field, I think, has really historically looked at negative affect and negative emotions, things like fear and anger and how maybe these are impacted by adversity, but we're trying to take a different kind of tack and a different spin here, because we think that these things like joy and happiness, being excited about what's going to happen at school, or what's happening in your family, are really important and might be a really under focused, underexplored space of research, and that we need to think about more. But to your question, we can think about having mixed emotions. We could both be quite joyous and quite angry or concerned about something. And so we can have both of these things at the same time, or only one of them. And so, they are unique and independent. And so you can think about at any moment in your day, you might be really excited about something that's ongoing, but also a little bit nervous about it. I could be nervous about this podcast, but be excited to do it. Or, I've done these kinds of things before, given talks, and so, I'm just kind of excited to do it and not that fearful. And so negative and positive affect can be quite independent and they are unique from one another. But interestingly. Interestingly and notably, we haven't really focused that much on these kind of joy happiness. Reward related positive emotions as much when we've started to focus on adversity and mental health. Do you have ideas about why that neglect has happened? I mean, we hypothesise a bit at the beginning, but is there a reason? A theoretical reason, or in terms of objectively measuring? Or do you think that's just a reflection of our negativity bias? I think it's really. I think at a starting place for two reasons. First, a lot of different challenges in mental health forms of psychopathology have negative emotions. Negative affect at their core. I think about depression and anxiety. Everybody thinks about, well, you have a sad or blue mood, or you're keyed up and worried about something in the environment, in the case of depression and anxiety. And that kind of sensuality made it something that was just very intuitive to focus on. And notably, however, I would push and say depression still has a component we would call anhedonia or the lack of positive affect. Things don't make you feel as happy when you're sad and blue. So part of it is, I think the problems we've focused on have this negative affect, negative component to it very intuitively. The other thing is a measurement problem. So when we bring people into the lab, it's really easy to make people feel negative. We can show them nasty pictures, show them shocking or difficult movies that are just like difficult to watch, aversive to watch. It's a little bit harder to come into the lab and get someone to feel joy. Real, authentic joy. We didn't do that in this study. We measured just people's self-reported positive affect. But we're doing some future work-- ongoing work-- that's trying to get at inducing positive emotions in people. And I think that's this place that the measurement operationalizations and moving those things around, manipulating them in the lab have just been more difficult. And so that's again, been a place where that wasn't our first target of investigation when we were doing this kind of work. It was very negative and focused. But I think we've started to realise that these things are independent, negative and positive emotions, and we need to continually focus on them because you could be both high on a negative affect, have fear, some anxiety, or concern about something. But you could also be low on positive affect, not have any excitement or joy. And those things still matter and may uniquely and independently contribute to your problems in mental health. Can I ask. And you may not be able to share it yet, but how are you going to induce joy in the lab? So, one of the easy and starting points that we're doing is first, just watching kind of films and lots of interesting, engaging movie clips. We've been going through and scouring kind of Pixar, and different kinds of adolescent appropriate, like video libraries. I spend a little bit too much time on YouTube looking for what I think would be interesting and notable to a 13-year-old, and also ask pulling my daughter to get her assessment of whether she thinks something is of interesting and of notable and joyous. But you can think about clips you may have seen on social media or YouTube that cause you to just brim up with some excitement and happiness. And so I think we've been trying to do that, and we're trying to do that in the MRI scanner. And so that's been a kind of novel wrinkle that we've been doing. People have been doing more neuroimaging in an fMRI environment. It's a little messier, a little harder, but I think that's a big piece of it. And then we're trying to give people unexpected rewards. We're actually doing a big grant right now where people will get text messages throughout their day, and sometimes the text messages will be, you've won some extra money. And so you could think about if you were going off to a meeting, or going off to school, or going off somewhere, and you got a random message that said, oh, here's an extra $15. That might at least put a little bit more spring in your step and be an unexpected kind of moment of oh, that's great, I can use that for something. And so I think we're trying to think creatively in this space to think about inducing it and manipulating it, changing it in small and sometimes bigger ways. It's an intervention right there. TV and surprises. Yes, yes. That's great. And pick up on theory here. So, when you were talking about positive and negative affect, what came to my mind was the two continuum model of mental health. So these two things exist on a continuum and they're potentially two perpendicular continua. And is that the theoretical framework that you would use to conceptualise positive and negative affect, or is there a different one that's similar that's more specific to affect? I think in terms of positive emotion, especially in these positive affect, I like to think of them as both their own strength, and also buffering against some deficits. And so some theoretical models have started to pull this in. But I think about happiness and joy as just something that leads to positive mental health and positive outcomes, in general. If you're more engaged and excited just in your everyday kind of day to day events, it makes you're just kind of jumping out there and doing more. You might be a little bit more excited and people are more excited to engage with you. I'll try not to get too excited or too enthusiastic. But I tend to be brimming with excitement and joy a lot of times, and motivation. I think of those things as being their own unique, almost direct effects where those things matter and are useful. But then the other thing is I think about these kinds of positive emotions also buffering and being a kind of a backstop when you're having some stress in different ways. So if I have a big grant deadline or a big report is due, doing something positive for myself is also a way I get through it and move through it. So it's not just the kind of excitement and something I'm looking forward to on the horizon. It also can be something that buffers against and helps me push against the difficult thing in my environment. And so there's been some more recent work and theory that kind of says, positive emotions are maybe great on their own, but they also may be resiliency inducing and inoculative from some of the stress and slings and arrows of life, in general. And so, if there's something to hold against those negative experiences, also that can be useful. And so I think that's the space where we're really trying to think more and more. So, I think you've answered my next question, but I'm going to ask it anyway because I think that-- just in case you want to expand. So my next question was about causal pathways between early adversity and subsequent psychopathology. And you're testing the mediating effect of positive affect on the relationship between early adversity and subsequent psychopathology. Now, my question was going to be, is positive affect on the causal pathway between adversity and psychopathology? Based on what you've said, I think the answer is yes. You would expect it to be on the causal path. Now, are there people for whom it won't be on the causal path between early adversity and psychopathology? And even in that case, positive affect would still be helpful. And I think that comes from a place of I think I read somewhere I think it was the editorial, and somebody was making the case that, just because something causal leads to a negative outcome to get out of that negative outcome, you don't have to follow the same path out. You could follow a different path out. Yes. And so, there's a lot to unpack there. But the biggest thing that is really, I think, special, and I just wanted to highlight for a moment in the paper is this focus on heterogeneity. And so I think about decomposing, breaking down groups, which we don't often do. One of the things that happens in the paper is we look at trajectories of positive affect development, or just levels of positive affect in terms of their trajectories over time. So this is a couple year study that uses a really big, very kind of well-known cohort in the US called the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development, or ABCD cohort, which many folks likely know about. But we tried to look at experiences of positive affect, not just are you high or are you low, but looking at them over time. So there were some people who were constantly high, and some people who were constantly low. There were some people who started high and then dropped off. Some people who kind of bounced around and were volatile over time. So I think that that's a really kind of big piece that more and more we need to do in mental health and just broader research, psychological research, developmental research, is to think about not these main effects and everything being one homogeneous group, but breaking these groups down. This is, I think, one first step. So the strongest place of mediational or of explanatory evidence was the individuals who suffered adversity were more likely to be in this low positive affect group, chronically low. And then that low positive affect explains some relationships with depression and anxiety, this internalising psychopathology. But as we move forward in the next series of projects we're doing, we'll try to think about, well, can we think about multiple forms of affects? So negative affect and positive affect. And there might be different kind of again clusters of people, trajectories of people. You and I could both be high positive affect. But maybe one of us has high levels of negative affect pretty consistently. And one of us has low levels of negative affect. And that could be particularly useful to think about, are there subtypes or subgroups that are present here? And might we want to triage or spend energy to really intervene with certain groups versus others? And can we identify constellations of risk factors that might be working in some synchrony to really put people at risk or have challenges? And so the next kind of element of this work is do some similar kinds of breaking down negative affect trajectory and change over time, and then look at what trajectories people are in terms of these positive and negative affect. These different emotional groups, and whether people have different kind of mixed emotions, whether they're just high like high positive and high negative, and they just feel and are very reactive in terms of emotion. Or they might be low, low and be very blunted. And again, risk may come from different places and in different ways. And we also as we continue this work, may figure out that interventions are more profound and more powerful for certain groups. So you could think about if someone was high negative affect and high positive affect, we might actually want to decrease the reactivity. But if someone was high negative affect and low positive affect, we might want to do something where we teach them to anticipate the positive. Do bucket fillers, focus on optimism, savour positive events that are happening in their environment, and that would be different than just reducing reactivity to emotional stimuli and environmental events more broadly. And so you can start to think about these clusters. And these heterogeneous groups that are present in all of our psychology and so many mechanisms and processes we care about. But we really tried to delve a little bit deeper and break these down a little bit. So we think that positive emotion is this kind of critical piece. And we found the strongest evidence for this low positive affect piece. And we had some suggestive evidence about adversity also leading to differences in this kind of variable positive affect. So going up and down, and your positive affect. And those individuals who suffered adversity there may actually have some different challenges that aren't internalising depression, anxiety. But we may want to go back and think about, do those individuals have some specific challenges because of that group of affect, that positive emotional experience trajectory that they're kind of falling into? So lots more work to do. But I think we want to keep moving towards thinking about this, almost like precision psychology, precision psychiatry. Could we do treatments for certain individuals based on these subgroups that they might fall into? And that's really interesting because what you're talking about is that reactivity potentially within the subgroup, which would include positive emotions. So I'm interested in the idea of let's say a disorganised attachment, and how that might mean that even positive emotions would be overwhelming to a young person. In your data set or in the wider literature, is there any discussion of those links? Yeah. So one of the things that we talk about in the paper, and we just kind of proffer is an idea that we want to delve more into. And one of my students wrote a kind of nice theoretical review about is thinking about attachment, just to delve into that a little bit more. There's really rich data from Van Ijzendoorn and colleagues in the Netherlands kind of looking at attachment after difficult experiences like maltreatment. And it's pretty clear to your point that many times after you've had these kinds of really difficult child abuse, child neglect, or severe economic marginalisation, you often engage in or have a disorganised attachment style and just kind of are not using your caregiver as a secure base. And we think about that, then may cascade to then maybe less exploration in your environment, maybe a bit more fear. But you can think about if you're exploring your environment less, that may mean that you generate, and connect with positive experiences, interesting things in your environment a little bit differently or a little bit less. And so again, even from that kind of attachment space, there may be different ways that we need to break down what happens after that. So you have some disrupted attachment processes. But some of those kids may be particularly just fearful of things. And some may, may not be incredibly fearful, but they aren't striking out and going through a new environment and doing novel things. And that could then lead to different kinds of cascades and experiences and trajectories over time that I think we're going to keep looking at and keep carrying through, because that can start to help us explain why some kids may have problems, some kids may have certain problems, why certain kids may be resilient. And we need to delve into this kind of heterogeneity a lot deeper. So I think attachment is one place that we really think about because it might set the stage for later ways that you engage with your environment, are kind of looking to and seeking out rewarding experiences, and maybe novel and interesting and surprising things, which are ways that we often generate positive affect. So, you found that positive affect was associated with internalising problems but not externalising problems, if I've understood that correctly. Why might it be that the impact or the association between positive affect is different for internalising and externalising problems? It's a really good question. And I think we're starting to try to figure this out a lot more. So one of the easiest versions of this is many internalising psychopathologies have this idea of anhedonia and a lack of positive emotions at their core. So in many ways they're very connected phenomenon. And we tried to deal with this and doing some supplemental analyses to show it's not just that you don't have-- we ask about positive affect, and then you're a little bit reporting less positive affect from a psychopathology well-being space. And so we tried to really show that it's unique to depression and anxiety. Unique to all of the different facets of these kinds of forms of challenging mental health. But with externalising, it may be that it starts a little bit earlier developmentally. And positive affect is still kind of ramping up and goes through some interesting changes during the kind of late childhood and early adolescent years versus some of the conduct problems, rule breaking may already be present there. One thing that I'll also note is that both internalising and externalising have lots of heterogeneity with inside them. We talk about these things and they are big labels. Internalising feels very clear to do, depression and anxiety. But externalising you can think about that spans the ADHD, to rule breaking, to conduct disorder space. And I might think that there could be differences with rule breaking and conduct disorders issues. But I don't think inherently that there might be ADHD, attentional symptoms linked to positive affect, or that they would be more modest in form. So I think one of the challenges is these different forms of psychopathology. They themselves are heterogeneous. And we might need to think in a more nuanced way. If we drilled a little bit deeper, it might be that certain kinds of externalising problems have links to positive affect, but we didn't see them in the way that we analyse them. But at their core, many of the internalising issues have this element of something being inside of you. That is the way that you engage with and connect with others. And so you're not engaging with maybe with peers as much. And that kind of relates to your positive affect. If you're not as excited and you look kind of a little bit more upset, your peers may not be as excited to connect with you. You then may feel like less self-esteem and have more challenges in how your internal milieu is kind of going forward versus if you're positive or negative, those rule breaking issues may not pop up as much. So it's something we're still investigating. And it was a little bit of a surprising finding, because I did think that we might see some connections with externalising, but we did not. It's interesting. You've got a very clear way of articulating the theoretical and how it applies to the classroom or the individual life circumstances really. It really helps bring quite a complicated theoretical idea into discussion in such an accessible way. So thank you for that. I just wanted to come back, and I think you were starting to touch on this in terms of thinking about these subgroups, but also about the processes that might be happening during middle childhood, because I was really interested to read, I hope I've got this correct, or I'm seeing this correctly rather, that there was a subgroup who had a declining trajectory of positive affects. Now, we know that that's not because positive affect or negative affect are orthogonal. So it's not that they're getting more anxious or depressed. Something else was happening. What do you make of that? So, a couple of different notes here. So one of the things that's important to contextualise is some of this project was done in COVID. As the pandemic was really kind of crushing many. And so I think that the trajectories of positive affect, there may be some alternative or different explanations lurking there. It may be that some of the people, if the stress and challenge of COVID was not omnipresent for them, maybe they would have maintained on that high positive affect trajectory. So there's this kind of complex interplay of stress occurring while our emotions are developing. So that's one piece. The other thing I think that's really notable is we find this initially kind of high but then declining subgroup. And then we also see a variable subgroup. And one of the things that ecological momentary assessment in the wild outside the lab have really underscored, is that, as you move through middle and late childhood and into adolescence, you actually see this high variability in positive affect. So when we actually ping teenagers and preteens and get assessments of their positive affect, it starts to be a little bit more high and low and really kind of varies a great deal. And I think about also the kind of spaces and places that kids are engaging with and living in. And so, first and foremost, I think about the peer context. And sometimes friendships become number one, very centralised and very important as you get into late childhood and early adolescence. Peers take on this incredibly dominant or large role as kids are moving outside the house, spending more time without their parents and their kind of immediate family. And then, also, the complexity of those relationships, just the peer relationships being more nuanced and complicated as kids are moving through late childhood and adolescence. So you have this space of like a major source of positive affect is changing these peer interactions, but also it being a complicated space of development where sometimes, preteens and teens will be moving through relationships. Someone will be a best friend and then a frenemy, or an enemy very quickly. And there will be kind of complex social dynamics. The other thing I think about is the context of school, which is just school starts to pick up and be a lot more complicated. My eight-year-old can run rings around her math class at this point, but as she moves through, it will be more and more complicated. You get more substantive and often challenging feedback where you may not be able to succeed as well as you get into middle school and high school in the United States, where the content becomes a lot harder. But it's a place that kids are spending a lot of time. And so a place that was once really a space of fulfilment and positivity may actually be a place that becomes a lot more rocky or thornier, because you just can't succeed with great consistency. And so you have these kind of changing developmental contexts for kids in terms of peers and schools, as well as likely underlying neurobiology changing, where we know that reward related brain regions that are connected to positive affect, brain regions like the ventral striatum and portions of the medial prefrontal cortex are just developing and changing a lot during late childhood and adolescence. And it's so important to remember that positivity in the intensity of emotions in adolescence. And I do totally agree with you. I think it's forgotten both in the literature, but also in the way that we characterise young people. I observed a young person eating an apple recently, and they said, this is the best apple I have ever had. It is immense. The joy in that moment of sensation was as deep and intense as you know the rejection one might feel if you're not invited to a party, or you don't go to the sports team. So, those highs and lows are what young people are navigating because emotions help us learn about the world. And so they have to be intense in order for young people to learn about the world quickly. But I think you've really brought to life that variability, which is one of the things that they're having to navigate as well as social world and external world. Yeah, it's a really, really useful. I have a practical question. If I was a policymaker, whether in the UK or the US or anywhere, what do you want us to do with this information? What does this tell us about how we should support young people who have experienced early life adversity? So, maybe stitching together. Also a Jane's last comment I think about creating trading spaces and places for kids to really engage with their passion. So the kind of notable paediatrician, Ron Dahl, kind of talks about adolescence as this beautiful space of really being able to catalyse and catch kids in their excitement. It may be the best apple. It may be kind of making this doing something with the engineering and STEM team at your high school that you get so incredibly jazzed about. I think about all the fads that I had as an adolescent. I loved and still do love music, and part of that was because I feel like I really, caught on to music and develop that excitement when I was a preteen and teen. And I think about policymakers giving kids spaces and places to really engage with their passion. There can be ways in the United States that we could open up spaces that kids could just be able to use and build capacity and engage with the things that they care about. And many times, at least in the United States, we often shut kids out of things. We don't give them the spaces and places, especially in public or just in different kind of school contexts, to really engage with something they might be incredibly jazzed about and just so incredibly deeply interested in. So I think knowing that you can talk about adolescence as a place of storm and stress, but you can also just think about it as a place of great passion that could be used to push people forward into things they care about, that could make lifelong lovers of learning, or the arts or anything else like that. And so I think as we think about policy, can we invest and allow young people to have avenues to really engage in deep, meaningful and consistent ways with things that they really care about at the simplest form, and that feels like a place that especially if you can get kind of slightly older. I think about young adults in the college age range who could really show those kids that passion. That could be a really powerful space where you could really demonstrate what this kind of connection to a domain, to an art, to something else in society has the power to do and to unlock doors. And so I think thinking there at just a very broad level is really critical, because oftentimes I feel like young people are shut out. We're worried about storm and stress and risk, but can we use this excitement that adolescents and teens and preteens have to really engage and motivate them, and to let them unlock new potentials and new passions and new places of exploration. And that's something that again, sometimes we're more on the prohibitive, let's lock this down. Let's not let them into these spaces. That feels like a very big policy idea, but something we would be very implementable if we're thoughtful about. I mean, Jamie, it makes total sense that I mean, that's a very practical policy that could be delivered. But as you're talking, it makes absolute sense that you reference Rondel, because he is somebody that stands with you as well as somebody in academia who delights in or you can sense his delight in young people's passion and I remember him talking about heartfelt goals during adolescence. And that really helped me consider how to connect with young people who are struggling. It was such a important piece of conceptualization, if you like. This is just about finding what matters to you and making that a positive experience. And so I'm inspired by your paper and delighted that we've had this opportunity to talk about positivity and policy, and ways forward. It's been such a treat. Thank you so much for joining us. I think this is a good point to wrap up there, just because we've ended on such a positive note. Well, thank you both for taking the time and really appreciate you highlighting the work. Thank you. What a positive conversation about things. Yeah, I enjoyed that, because like I said at the beginning, we always talk about negative stuff. And that's fine because we need to. And also it's necessary. And, sometimes, a lot of the time, we learn a lot by talking about the negative experiences. And that is what the literature is about. But here it was good because it's not just, this is what happens when things go wrong in childhood. This is what can be done after things have gone wrong in childhood. And that was really nice. Exactly, it was life affirming. Wasn't to start to think about without avoiding the real and pressing concerns that one has about, for example, internalising psychopathology. Here is something that we can encourage. And I thought what was particularly important, theoretically we touched on it. There was such a lot to talk about, was the idea that it characterises the protective factors for internalising disorders, which implies that there is or uncovers, rather the mechanisms of change in strength-based programmes, because sometimes there's a bit of a black box, if you like, between strength based programmes and a positive outcome. But these data suggest that this might be the process by which outcomes are improved. And I think the policy that Jamie talked about was really interesting, the idea of having spaces and places to find your joy. I mean, that's a very easy thing to operationalize in so many ways because it's a simple thing to do. And I also wondered about other strength-based programmes like there's a classic one, the Penn resiliency programme. I'm sure you know of that one, Jean Guillaume and colleagues, which is grounded in cognitive, behavioural, and interpersonal therapy, as well as some social and emotional connectedness. And that idea sort of coming back to the sorts of ideas I was talking about right at the beginning about these trainable skills and optimism, really plays on the idea of exploring cognitive flexibility, thinking about. For example, cognitive restructuring. If you're using an ABC model, my adversity, my belief and my consequence and playing with the perceived consequence of something, thinking about alternative general alternative beliefs and exploring cognitive flexibility because cognitive flexibility is a really important attribute for developing resilience. So there's so much that is immediately implied in terms of ways forward following the data. It was both positive and also implied interventions. So, I think around this time in 2024, there was a report from the Education Policy Institute who found that participating in sports and other hobbies at secondary school was associated with positive outcomes for pupils by the time they reached their early 20s. But not all pupils have equal access to these activities and their benefits. And I think the government is trying to do something about that. Whilst I think that what we've discussed today is on the same thing, it's kind of like, well, let kids do more of what they enjoy to cultivate that positive affect. I wasn't sure when that was announced or whatever that policy was. Whether it was evidence based, because I would have thought the kids to do more of what they enjoy are the kids who are probably in a more privileged position to be able to do that and come from more affluent families and those kinds of things. And I don't think we got to the bottom of that based on this conversation. But I do think that based on what Jamie said today, there is some value in encouraging more children to take part in those extracurricular activities outside of school, if it does induce positive affect. Positive affect may well be one of the outcomes. And I think that's as I understand, Jamie's data is one of the few papers to explore that. But I think what is established in the literature, particularly, for example, a protective factor for developing conduct disorder, is knowing and understanding that you have a skill. It can be anything. So that you do woodwork or football, or that you are good at something and having if you are not somebody who, for example, engages in the curriculum. Maybe these extracurricular activities allow you to have that sense of mastery on something. And that is very important for protecting against the development of conduct disorder. It probably also increases your network and your social connection and all of those things. There's probably lots of things within the extracurricular activity delivery that has a positive outcome. It's really interesting though. We're doing a trial where we're looking at Adventure learning based activities in schools. And whether that improves pupils self-esteem and resilience and positive functioning. And one of the mechanisms of change that we're hypothesising is if you're doing activities at school which involve group work and team work with other people at school and you enjoy them and benefit from them, then you increase that sense of belonging to school as a community that you're part of. And I think that is also linked to being. So I think that is another mechanism through which these kinds of activities might lead to positive outcomes. Were at the beginning of the trial. We haven't even started yet. We're recruiting schools. So like watch this space in two years time. Yeah well let's talk about that one. I'm so interested in that. I love the idea of adventure learning. Yeah, it's two different types in school adventure learning. And then also like going on a residential for three days adventure learning. So I imagine it's going to have a positive effect. But we'll find out. Wow, that sounds really interesting. So we'll come back to that one circle back two years from now. So what would your takeaway be from an academic point of view? From an academic point of view, I would like us as a field to shift the so as you were saying earlier, a lot of what we do builds on previous research, and there's a lot of research being focused on the negative aspects of children's functioning and development, but we need to shift that dial so that we have more and more research focusing on the positive aspects as well. And that can be done in many ways. And the paper that we've discussed today has done it in one way, where it's looking at how we can offset negative experiences by positive experiences to some extent, but there are other ways to do it as well. And I hope that we're in a situation in the future, in the near future, where there's more of a balanced literature on the positive and the negative aspects of children's development, and not so heavily skewed on the negative side. what about you? That's great. I mean, I want to talk about balance as well, funnily enough, because I've talked a little bit about some cognitive behavioural techniques, for example, that do help generate optimism, at least in the moment and sometimes in the longer term. But I don't want to give the message that one can logic your way out of trauma and its pernicious effects, because those social and emotional aspects are really important too. But I also think that these data suggest that there's a window of opportunity in middle childhood for prevention. And so a strength based programme, for example, could protect young people from developing psychopathology and also offer them some generalizable life skills. So I mean it's really important to think about that power of positivity Umar. Let's en it there. Again, we're ending every section of this episode with. We're ending on a positive. OK, join us again next week and we'll be speaking to Jean-francois Trani about psychosocial interventions in Afghanistan.