Dealing with stress and those everyday distractions

We all know that after a poor night of sleep we feel more emotionally delicate. We snap at our loved ones or work colleagues more easily or generally, we might just feel more highly stung. Research shows sleep affects how we process and make sense of our emotions. In this talk I will discuss how sleep affects our emotional processing. For example, how we remember memories that are emotional, and how we regulate our emotions day-to-day. I will then discuss what areas of the brain might be involved in this emotional processing. Finally, I will end with what we can do to better our sleep.

My work focuses on speech-perception-in-noise (SPiN). SPiN refers to situations in which listeners are trying to understand a speaker while ignoring distracting background sounds. Most of us are familiar with the challenges of SPiN (such as chatting in a busy pub!). Importantly, SPiN is more than background noise simply “drowning out” a voice: distraction and interfering linguistic processes are key. In this talk, I’ll explore the various aspects of SPiN and how they might affect different listeners in different situations – including in the pub!

We might find our eyes drifting away from an important email if we are thinking about something else. Is there something in our environment that makes our eyes drift away from that email? Why do some individuals have more difficulties visually attending to some stimuli than others? In this talk, Dr Priscilla Martinez-Cedillo will highlight the scientific research of where, when and how the eyes move under cognitive load and distractor processing. Furthermore, she will be talking about how traits of ADHD and ASD in typical individuals influence information processing from the environment.