Academic Background

Dr Lau is currently University Lecturer in Experimental Psychology. She read Psychology as an undergraduate at University College London, University of London. After a year as a research assistant at the Behavioural and Brain Sciences Unit, Institute of Child Health, she moved to the Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, where she completed a Ph.D. in the area of Genetic Risk Mechanisms and Child and Adolescent Anxiety and Depression. During this time, she was awarded the Thompson Award for best student paper at the annual Behavioural Genetics Association meeting. Following a brief visiting fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, USA, she became a lecturer at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. She has been in Oxford since October 2007.

Undergraduate Teaching

Part 1 paper in Psychological Disorders; Part 2 paper in Mood and Anxiety Disorders; Block Practical in Cognitive Traits and Emotional Symptoms. Dr Lau also supervises a range of final year research projects and library dissertations that assess alterations in emotion processing among high and low anxious/depressed individuals.

Research Interests

Dr Lau’s current work focuses broadly on identifying risk mechanisms that contribute to child and adolescent emotional problems. The goals of her research team REDD (Researching Emotional Disorders in Development) are two-fold: first, to understand how genetic risk factors may alter aspects of brain function and associated information-processing, which then increases vulnerability towards social stress, and second, to explore how these interrelationships may unfold across development. Funding for Dr Lau’s research has come from the British Academy, the John Fell OUP Research Fund, and more recently, a Young Investigator Award from NARSAD.

Selected Publications

Lau J.Y. & Eley T.C. (2006). Changes in genetic and environmental influences on depressive symptoms across adolescence and young adulthood. British Journal of Psychiatry, 189, 422-7.

Lau J.Y. & Eley T.C. (2008). Attributional style as a risk marker of genetic effects for adolescent depressive symptoms. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 117(4), 849-59.

Lau J.Y., Goldman D., Buzas B., Fromm S.J., Guyer A.E., Hodgkinson C., Monk C.S., Nelson E.E., Shen P.H., Pine D.S. & Ernst M. (2009). Amygdala Function and 5-HTT Gene Variants in Adolescent Anxiety and Major Depressive Disorder. Biological Psychiatry, 65(4), 349-55.

Lau J.Y., Gregory A.M., Goldwin M.A., Pine D.S. & Eley T.C. (2007). Assessing gene-environment interactions on anxiety symptom subtypes across childhood and adolescence. Developmental Psychopathology, 19(4), 1129-46.

Lau J.Y., Lissek S., Nelson E.E., Lee Y., Roberson-Nay R., Poeth K., Jenness J., Ernst M., Grillon C. & Pine D.S. (2008). Fear conditioning in adolescents with anxiety disorders: results from a novel experimental paradigm. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 47(1), 94-102.

Lau J.Y. & Pine D.S (2008): Elucidating risk mechanisms of gene-environment interactions on pediatric anxiety: integrating findings from neuroscience. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 258(2), 97-106.

Lau J.Y., Rijsdijk F., Gregory A.M., McGuffin P. & Eley T.C. (2007): Pathways to childhood depressive symptoms: the role of social, cognitive, and genetic risk factors. Developmental Psychology, 43(6), 1402-14.