DrDavid John Hallford

David’s research interests span clinical and cognitive psychology, with particular expertise in autobiographical memory, episodic future thinking and psychopathology. Specific areas of interest include:

• autobiographical memory, including overgeneral memory, phenomenological details, emotional responses, narratives, schema etc;
• episodic future thinking, mental simulation and prospection;
• anticipatory pleasure, anhedonia and motivation;
• coping and disclosure/communication of suicidal thoughts and behaviours;
• cognitive processes in depression, anxiety, psychotic disorders and trauma-related psychopathology;
• transdiagnostic approaches to understanding mental health; and
• psychological interventions targeting autobiographical memory and future thinking.

His research has produced several major syntheses of these areas, including meta-analytic work establishing autobiographical memory impairment as a transdiagnostic feature of mental illness and, more recently, evidence for disrupted positive future thinking across multiple forms of psychopathology. Other work has examined how the vividness, specificity and emotional qualities of imagined future experiences influence anticipated and anticipatory pleasure, motivation and behaviour.

A further strand of David’s research focuses on translating these findings into psychological interventions. This includes clinical research examining whether changing how people remember and imagine personal experiences can improve anhedonia, depressive symptoms and other clinically meaningful outcomes, and development and evaluation of specific treatments including online Memory Specificity Training, Future Event Specificity Training, Cognitive-Reminisence Therapy, and Positive Events Training.