Friederike Hedley talks about her research into the impact of uncertainty on cognitive and neural processing, with a focus on the mental health impact on adolescents.
We know intolerance of uncertainty is a risk factor for anxiety, but it is not clear which type of uncertainty has to combine with other environmental, social and genetic factors to be most harmful.
Friederike Hedley
Friederike Hedley [2024] is researching the impact of uncertainty on cognitive and neural processing, with a focus on mental health problems and the developing brain. She recently published two journal articles on her research and organised a multidisciplinary conference on the subject of uncertainty at Newnham College.
The two papers are based on her work in Hong Kong on anxiety and emotion processing. One involves computational modelling to better understand social anxiety. It puts forward a novel approach to formalise conceptual models by combining cognitive-behavioural theory (CBT) with active inference modelling, an innovative computational approach that explains human cognition and action.
The other paper is an experimental study of emotion ensemble processing in anxiety. One finding from an experiment involving people looking at faces displaying different emotions was that people with anxiety avoid looking at the faces of those expressing fearful emotions. However, even though they avoid these particular faces, they still generally perceive the bank of faces as more threatening than others. “This suggests that, to those with anxiety, threat avoidance appears to be helpful as a strategy when interacting with groups of people, but may be more harmful in the longer term,” says Friederike.
The conference Friederike organised saw an all-female line-up of Cambridge PhD and MPhil students from the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences share their research on uncertainty from a host of different perspectives, from historical and philosophical to scientific. “It was a day when women from all sorts of disciplines could present and share and it was so well received,” says Friederike. “There was a real exchange of ideas. Newnham is a very empowering place for women and it is important that we can view pressing and complex topics, such as uncertainty, through a female perspective.”
She hopes the conference can be repeated next year. She is also keen that her research reaches outside of academia and can influence policy and practice.
Childhood and undergraduate studies
Friederike was born and raised in a small harbour town in Germany’s marshland area next to the North Sea, a relative haven of stability and safety in a turbulent world. Although it was a relatively rural and protected place, its proximity to the sea and its history of international trade made it feel connected to the world. Her father worked in port logistics for a family business. Her mother – also with a background in business – was very involved in the community, running an arts school and cultural activities in the area. Friederike has three younger siblings.
Although she took Maths, Physics and Chemistry A Levels, Friederike also enjoyed social sciences and humanities subjects. She was in the school orchestra, on the school council and loved to sail, a hobby she continues to this day. “Exploring the world from the sea is very different from doing so from the land,” she says.
After secondary school, she took a gap year to travel to South America, learn Spanish and was a sailing instructor. She began her undergraduate studies with a focus on Management and Economics as she was interested in understanding how individuals, organisations and nations manage and utilise resources. Through those studies she came into contact with behavioural science, which showed her how economic theory has to take account of the irrational nature of human behaviour. She became more and more interested in human decision-making and cognition and a year and a half into her course she began a second degree in Psychology. “The degrees were complementary and helped me to develop a real passion for understanding the human mind and emotions. I have always been interested in the human brain and the complexity of cognitive and emotional processes,” says Friederike.
She finished her first degree in 2018 and the same year, she came to Newnham College in Cambridge on a one-year visiting student programme, sparked by reading about the work of the psychologist Professor Claire Hughes. There she sat the Psychological and Behavioural Science Tripos and did some research work collecting data for Professor Hughes.
Hong Kong
During that year in England she met her future husband. In 2019, with both degrees under her belt, Friederike and her partner decided to do something different and embrace a new culture. They headed to Hong Kong. Friederike describes it as “letting go of the safety net”. Her partner had a job as an English teacher, but she had to start a job search on arrival. Within three months she had a job as a research trainee at the European Chamber of Commerce. She then moved to a tech start-up which was focused on workplace psychology. That experience in Hong Kong, which she describes as ‘formative’, extended her perspective on attitudes to mental health and work life balance in a very different culture.
After two years, she missed academia and the quest for new knowledge, so she took up a research position at the University of Hong Kong. Soon after, she began an MPhil under the supervision of Professor Jingwen Frances Jin, with a focus on anxiety and depressive disorders, trying to understand the cognitive and perceptual processes involved. “We are all continuously negotiating a whole hosts of emotions throughout our lives,” she says. “It’s interesting, then, to understand when things go awry – when people develop clinically significant distress. And it’s not just the individual who suffers. There are huge costs for families, employers and society generally.”
The cognitive mechanism she is particularly interested in is the role played in mental health by the different types of uncertainty that many are living with these days, from economic to climate change and conflict-related uncertainty.
PhD
Friederike realised she wanted to stay in academia, so she looked for a specialist in the area of anxiety and uncertainty processing and found Professor Rebecca Lawson at Cambridge. She applied to do her PhD at Cambridge and began her studies in 2024. She was also keen for her PhD to focus on adolescents, given that many mental health disorders often first arise in adolescence, when the brain undergoes heightened plasticity.
To this end, she has both a supervisor, Professor Lawson, who specialises in computational psychiatry, and an adviser, Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, an expert in in developmental cognitive neuroscience.
Friederike is working at the Prediction and Learning Lab to assess the impact of different types of uncertainty, from uncertainty that is predictable or probable to that which is more volatile. “We know intolerance of uncertainty is a risk factor for anxiety,” she says. “But it is not clear which type of uncertainty has to combine with other environmental, social and genetic factors to be most harmful.” She adds: “Emotions are complex and the brain is a wonder; I have found my passion in researching both and hope that my work will help others.”
