Dr Philip Jean-Richard Dit Bressel

My research seeks to uncover the psychology and biology behind how we learn associations between cues in our environment, our behaviour, and outcomes to adaptively change our behaviour.

My main area of interest concerns how we learn which of our actions leads to bad outcomes (punishment learning). Understanding how we stop (or fail to stop) doing things that are bad for us is important for understanding and improving the choices we make in our everyday lives. It is also relevant for a number of conditions characterised by dysfunctions in punishment learning, such as substance and behavioural addictions (e.g. drug addiction, gambling disorder), psychopathy (e.g. antisocial personality disorder) and depression.