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 young people with neuroatypicalities such as ADHD and ASD 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 testing the specific role of emotion regulation (ER) difficulties, commonly observed in young people with neuroatypicalities (YPN), in driving developmental pathways to depression.

RE-STAR's Objectives

Working across disciplines, we have three main objectives:

1. Explore emotion regulation difficulties 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 emotion regulation problems in young people with neuroatypicalities 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 neuroatypicality to later depression.

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, our Research Associate is Steve Lukito, and our Research Assistant is Myrto (Myrofora) Kakoulidou.

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

Edmund Sonuga-Barke is our principal investigator.

Who are our Partners?

RE-STAR is a collaboration between the following universities and organisations:

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 February 2023
• Newsletter January 2023
• Newsletter December 2022
• Newsletter November 2022
• Newsletter October 2022
• Newsletter September 2022
• 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