Philip Jean-Richard Dit Bressel

I lead the Brain•Mind•Behaviour Lab at UNSW School of Psychology. My lab's research seeks to understand the psychobiology of motivated learning, decision-making, and behaviour, with a special focus on how we learn and make decisions around actions with negative consequences. Our research explores mechanisms for adaptive and maladaptive behaviour by combining complex experimental tasks across species, precision neuroscience techniques (e.g., in vivo pharmacology, optical and genetic approaches to measure and manipulate neural processes in real-time, circuit tracing, etc), and advanced analysis methods. My research investigates the psychology and biology of motivated learning, decision-making, and behaviour. My main area of interest is how we learn and make decisions about actions with negative consequences ("punishment learning"). Understanding why we stop vs. fail to stop doing things that are bad for us is key to understanding and improving the choices we make in our everyday lives. It also has relevance for a number of conditions characterised by dysfunctions in punishment learning, like addictions (e.g. drug addiction, gambling disorder), psychopathy (e.g. conduct disorder), and depression. Keywords: behavioural neuroscience, decision-making processes, associative learning, avoidance learning, individual differences. Fields of Research (FoR): Behavioural neuroscience, Biological psychology, Central nervous system, Learning, motivation and emotion, Decision making