Dr Gina Grimshaw
Dr Gina Grimshaw is a senior lecturer at the School of Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington.
Depression is a debilitating mental illness with high emotional, physical, and financial costs to patients, their families, and society. Some individuals are predisposed to developing depression, and can be identified through recordings of the brain’s electrical activity. Most people have greater activity over the left than the right frontal areas of the brain; those who are vulnerable to depression have a reversed pattern. One area of Dr Gina Grimshaw’s insightful research work includes delving into the mechanisms of this vulnerability. This lecture will outline findings from her recent work: the thought processes that are affected by this pattern of asymmetry, and the insights provided that reveal neural activity may give rise to depression.