What’s your name?
Bethany Teachman
What’s your Department?
Psychology. I’ve been a faculty member since 2002.
What’s your hometown?
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
How are you connected to TYDE?
I have the honor to co-direct TYDE with Nancy Deutsch and get to work with an amazing team!
What is your research about? What parts of it are the most exciting to you?
Our Program for Anxiety, Cognition, and Treatment (PACT) lab studies cognitive processes that contribute to the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders and other forms of emotion dysregulation. We are especially interested in how we can change threat-focused thinking styles to improve emotional health. We use digital technologies, such as mobile apps and web-based cognitive bias modification programs, to shift anxious thinking. Our goal with these technologies is to increase access to evidence-based interventions and to more dynamically track emotions in daily life so we can deliver care to people when and where they need it most.
The most exciting parts are being able to deliver supports to help reduce anxiety to thousands of people around the world, and to work with an amazingly talented, interdisciplinary team of students and collaborators!
In your opinion, what are some of the benefits and opportunities offered to young people by the world of digital technology and/or social media?
While there are of course problematic parts of technologies and social media, the opportunities to build connections, find community, develop different parts of one’s identities, and engage in activism can provide important opportunities for growth and support, especially for people with marginalized identities who may not find a lot of local community.
What do you wish people knew about youth mental health and digital technology?
I think it’s really important that we partner with youth in determining how to best support, and when and how to limit, their use of digital technologies. I also wish that the media told more nuanced stories about the current state of the science, so that we could be more sophisticated in the ways we talk about and regulate technologies, recognizing both the real risks and the valuable opportunities, and the unresolved questions that urgently require better data.
