Regulating Emotions – Strengthening Adolescent Resilience

RE-STAR is a four-year, interdisciplinary programme being led by Professor Edmund Sonuga-Barke of the Experimental Psychopathology and Neurodevelopment (ExPAND) Research Group at King’s College London.

Many neurodivergent young people such as those with ADHD or autism traits develop depression during adolescence – but we currently don’t know which individuals are at risk, what underlying processes increase that risk or, perhaps most importantly, the best way to intervene to increase resilience to reduce that risk.

RE-STAR will address these gaps by exploring the interplay between  autism and/or ADHD traits, exposure to environmental stressors, and emotional responding in neurodivergent young people (NYP), in driving developmental pathways to depression.

RE-STAR's Objectives

Working across disciplines, we have three main objectives:

1. Explore emotional responses to everyday stressors from the young people's point of view and develop new, more authentic ways to measure them
2. Use these new measurement approaches to identify potentially modifiable intervention targets by studying the cognitive/neurophysiological underpinnings of emotional responding in neurodivergent young people and examining why they lead to later depression in some individuals but not others
3. Develop new strategies to arrest the negative progression from early adolescent neurodivergence to later depression, considering environmental adaptations as well as ways to support young people to manage challenging situations.

Watch the video below for an overview of RE-STAR from our Principal Investigator, Prof Edmund Sonuga-Barke

Meet the team

Sylvan Baker, Central School of Speech and Drama | Jane Hurry, UCL Institute of Education | Amy Lock, ADHD Foundation | Daniel Stahl, KCL | Angus Roberts, KCL | Graham Moore, Cardiff University | Ned Redmore, Autistica

Johhny Downs, KCL | Nikki Cooper, Place2Be | Georgia Pavlopoulou, Anna Freud Centre | Dennis Ougrin, QMUL | Andrea Danese, KCL | Emily Simonoff, KCL

For Work Package 1 (My Emotions and Me), our Research Associate is Steve Lukito, and our Research Assistant is Myrto (Myrofora) Kakoulidou.

For Work Package 2 (Be Me!), Steve Lukito is our Research Associate and our Research Assistant is Eloise Funnell.

For Work Package 3 (My Emotions and Me Over Time), our Research Associate is Kirsty Griffiths and our Research Assistant is Anna Wyatt.

For Work Packages 4 and 5 (The Emotional Lives of Young People in School) our Research Associate is Myrto (Myrofora) Kakoulidou and Lauren Low is our Research Assistant.

Jane Offerman is our administrator and Susie Chandler is our project manager.

Edmund Sonuga-Barke is our principal investigator.

Youth Researcher and Advisory Panel (Y-RAP)

We have recruited and are working alongside our Y-RAP, who will play an integral role in the planning and delivery of RE-STAR. 

Click here to view our duty of care protocol for the Y-RAP 

News & Events 

Read our Newsletters for updates on our research activity:

• Newsletter October 2023
• Newsletter September 2023
• RE-STAR Newsletters Year 2
• RE-STAR Newsletters Year 1 

Podcasts

• We are working with Lucinda Powell to document RE-STAR through a series of episodes on her podcast, Psychology in the Classroom. Click here to listen to listen to all of the RE-STAR episodes so far! 
• Edmund was a guest on 'Extraordinary Brains Podcast', in which he spoke about his own experiences growing up with ADHD. Listen to the episode here
• Edmund was also a guest on BBC R3's Arts & Ideas Podcast. Listen to the episode here

Funding

RE-STAR is funded by UKRI Medical Research Council - click here to find out more