Our mood affects how we experience the world around us. It colours our thinking and can make us more or less likely to behave in certain ways. Imagine waking up in the morning feeling content and calm. You plan out your day and happily leave the house, but then you just miss your bus. This will make you late for an important meeting unless you successfully plan an alternative travel route. Planning an alternative route quickly requires a lot of mental effort and will require you to regulate your emotional response to missing the bus (e.g., maybe feeling anxious about the meeting or angry at the driver for not opening the doors).

This capacity to regulate our emotions is very useful in everyday life and we do it constantly, often without noticing. We think that differences in this capacity to regulate emotional responses may contribute to peoples vulnerability to mental health problems.

By using our app, you can help us better understand the association between mood and our capacity to regulate our emotions!

Our brains use many different strategies to help us regulate our emotions. Our ability to regulate our emotions is related to our cognitive capacity, otherwise known as cognitive control. This is our ability to focus our attention on information that will help us achieve our goals, and ignore information that will distract us from our goals. From studies in our lab, as well as by researchers across the world, we know that the parts of the brain involved in cognitive control are also involved in emotion regulation. This means that when we engage in cognitive control or emotion regulation, the same parts of the brain are activated.

It is possible to improve cognitive control over emotional information through brain training games. Some research shows that these types of social memory training tasks improve our emotion regulation ability. This led us to think that if we can train and improve emotion regulation abilities with social memory training, this may help us when we interact with others. We are testing this idea with the Social Brain Train app.

It is possible to train the parts of the brain involved in emotion regulation through a mobile app. We know this from studies conducted in our lab, as well as by researchers across the world. We, as well as others, have shown that training our brain’s ability to attend and respond to emotional information can help our brains learn to better regulation our emotions – and this can all be done via a mobile app!

But we also know that this kind of training is quite hard – the training is tricky and fast-paced. This is why we have created the Social Brain Train app!

The Social Brain Train app combines the tricky brain training games with fun social puzzles – as you complete these games and puzzles, you will unlock amazing facts about your brain and mind! We hope that your journey on the Social Brain Train will help your brain learn to better regulate your emotions, help you to think more positively, and help you to better understand your feelings and behaviours.