RESEARCH
My current DPsych research concerns the use of smartphone apps for mental health purposes. I am part of the team developing mood tracking app MoodPrism, and I will be investigating the mental health outcomes of using this app over a 30 day period. Outcome areas include anxiety and depression symptomatology, emotional self-awareness, coping self-efficacy, mental health literacy, and other measures related to mental health and well-being.
I am currently developing another app, MoodMission, which aims to use CBT-based techniques to help users learn more effective ways to deal with low moods and anxious feelings. Public release of MoodMission on the iOS App Store is scheduled for April 2016.
My honours research focussed on music and emotion, using event-related potentials (ERPs) derived from electroencephalography recordings to quantify facilitation of emotional processing. One of the two experiments conducted as part of my honours thesis was published in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience (see below).
Publications
First Author
Bakker, D., & Rickard, N. (2017). Engagement in mobile phone app for self-monitoring of emotional wellbeing predicts changes in mental health: MoodPrism. Journal of Affective Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2017.11.016
Bakker, D. R., & Martin, F. H. (2015). Musical chords and emotion: Major and minor triads are processed for emotion. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 15, 15-31. http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13415-014-0309-4
Supporting Author
My ORCID: 0000-0002-0343-1100