Summary of the October 15th seminar — talks by Ioanna Zioga and Dr Fiona McEwen

On the 15th of October, we had two speakers to talk through their recent findings in their research.

Ioanna Zioga was one of the speakers on Tuesday the 15th October. Zioga’s talk addressed, “the relationship between learning and creativity, and what are their neural correlates”. Ioanna Zioga is a postdoctoral researcher at Queen Mary University of London. From her research, she wanted to bridge the gap between learning and creativity by understanding how people learn from the environment and how this relates to their creativity. Creativity, meaning being able to override the automated way we solve similar or well-known problems from our previous experiences using the prefrontal cortex and in this context, producing a composition accurate to the music grammar of what the participants were taught. [1]

Ioanna Zioga carried out her research by taking a sample 24 females and 16 males. This entailed simulating real-life music, by training non-musicians in a lab using instruments for 4 days. Non-musicians also learnt the musical grammar of a non-common music scale. Ioanna Zioga used EEG and tDCS to measure the brain signals. The results showed that the high-level learners, were better in ignoring distractions, which were the incorrect notes as they practiced more during the experiment. The high learners have higher creativity compared to low learners as they showed higher accuracy in the composition they produced. Thus, it was concluded that as learning increased, the percentage of creativity also increased, showing a positive correlation between these two variables.

Fiona McEwen, a postdoctoral researcher in developmental psychology at Queen Mary University of London hosted the second talk of the afternoon. Fiona McEwen started her academic journey with a Bachelors in Neuroscience, then a Masters in Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry followed by a Psychology PhD. [2].

Her talk was based on, “the mental health assessment of Syrian refugee in Lebanon” focusing on the ethical issues and complications of carrying out developmental psychology research in a country where psychological disorders such as Depression are highly stigmatized and not diagnosed.

She introduced her research by explaining that the 2 main factors, that affect mental health are the effect of living there and the lack of resources. Emotional, cognitive, physical, social, behavioral states and post-traumatic experiences were assessed, through clinical structured assessments, such as screening questionnaires and clinical interviews by a clinical psychologist. These assessments were carried out at children aged from 8 to 16-year-old. A case study that she spoke about was about this 9 year old girl, who saw someone being shot at the age of 6, she developed PTSD and Depression, which were treated using CBT; fortunately she responded very well, and she was cured through the help of her family. Moreover, what I found interesting were some of the challenges she faced, such as talking about some culturally-sensitive topics and anxious and phobic symptoms with the participants, and also misinterpreting suicidal thoughts; as for example, the participants said a lot “I wished to be dead” however, this was a cultural phrase, meant to get out of the miserable situation.

References:

[1] Ioanna Zioga — School of Biological and Chemical Sciences. (2019). Retrieved 18 October 2019, from https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sbcs/staff/ioannazioga.html

[2] Dr Fiona McEwen — Battle of Ideas 2019. (2019). Retrieved 18 October 2019, from https://www.battleofideas.org.uk/speaker/dr-fiona-mcewen/