Beyond Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: Yubing Zhang’s fresh approach to treating adolescent anxiety

Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health disorders globally, particularly affecting adolescents. Young people are especially vulnerable to the emergence and worsening of anxiety, as they juggle academic, social and personal changes while still undergoing crucial cognitive and neurobiological development. Despite the prevalence of these disorders, current treatments (including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or CBT) are ineffective for 50% of patients.

Yubing Zhang, a PhD candidate at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences’ Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, is working to understand why existing treatments fall short and to create more successful interventions.

Rethinking safety decisions

Yubing proposes that the ineffectiveness of current treatments stems from a misunderstanding of adolescent patients’ neural processes for safety and behaviour.

“While existing therapies focus on reducing overreactions to threats, many patients actually have typical responses to threats (as targeted by psychotherapies) but experience difficulty in identifying self-oriented protection cues,” argues Yubing.

Her PhD project involves conducting a series of behavioural and neuroimaging studies to investigate how safety processing develops in adolescence and how it may go awry in anxiety.

“Through understanding these processes,” she explains, “I’m aiming to inspire more effective interventions and make a meaningful impact on adolescents with anxiety.”

Yubing’s research investigates how adolescents determine the safety of a situation. She evaluates how their safety decisions are influenced by external threats (for example, potential physical attacks) and self-oriented protective factors (like the strength of the self). By combining behavioural tasks and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), she is able to track the neurobiological underpinnings of adolescent safety signal processing.

The advanced neuroimaging facilities at the Melbourne Brain Centre Imaging Unit have been crucial to her research which has yielded preliminary results suggesting that adolescents not only behave differently from adults, but also rely on different neural networks for safety decisions.

“This finding aligns with the idea that the adolescent brain is still developing, which could result in vulnerabilities in the detection of safety.”

The collaborative and supportive environment at MSPS has been a significant factor in Yubing’s choice to pursue her research here. She values the opportunities to work alongside leading researchers and participate in a community with enriching activities. Yubing particularly appreciates her supervisors, Dr Sarah Tashjian and Professor Marta Garrido.

“They are both incredibly encouraging, and all my fellow lab members are supportive and passionate about their research.”

“It’s exciting to be at the forefront of such a meaningful research area,” Yubing enthuses, her dedication to her work evident. “I believe my work could contribute to the field and potentially help someone struggling with mental health challenges, which is highly motivating.”