Computational Psychotherapy Lab

How do interventions for affective disorders lead to change, how can they be improved, and how can we determine which intervention a specific individual will benefit from?

These are the key questions addressed by the Computational Psychotherapy Lab at UCL. We are an interdisciplinary lab led by Dr Isabel Berwian.

Research

To address these questions, we model psychological interventions as processes of learning and memory. We formalise these processes using computational frameworks such as reinforcement learning and Bayesian inference, allowing us to derive precise, testable hypotheses about how interventions operate and how they can be improved.

We then develop behavioural tasks and computational models that capture learning, memory, and decision-making processes, and apply them in longitudinal clinical intervention studies to evaluate these hypotheses. This approach enables us to identify mechanisms of change and develop predictors of treatment response that can inform the selection of interventions.

Our work spans the full pipeline, from task and model development to clinical trials. In the long term, we aim to establish a mechanistic, learning-based framework for understanding how interventions produce lasting change and how they can be optimally combined and sequenced.

Learn more about our Research

Join the Lab

Interested in joining the lab?

We are currently recruiting a research assistant and a postdoctoral research fellow. Find out more about these positions and other ways to join the lab.

Join our lab

Affiliations

The Computational Psychotherapy Lab is based within the Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at University College London and is affiliated with the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research.

Contact

Dr Isabel Berwian

i.berwian [@] ucl.ac.uk

University College London
Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology

1–19 Torrington Place
London
WC1E 7HB