Dr Ben Grafton is based at The University of Western Australia’s School of Psychological Science, where he is Co-Director of the Rutherford Memorial Centre for the Advancement of Research on Emotion (CARE).

It is well recognised that individuals with elevated emotional vulnerability typically report distinct patterns of negative thought, which plausibly could contribute to the onset and maintenance of such vulnerability. For example, highly anxious individuals tend to be overly preoccupied with the possibility of upcoming calamities, whereas depressed individuals tend to focus more on the negative aspects of the self, the world, and the future. The genesis of this negative thought content is often attributed to biases in information processing (e.g. attentional, interpretive, and memorial), which operate at a low level within the cognitive system, and may not themselves be accessible to introspective awareness.

The major objectives of Dr Grafton’s research are to: i. delineate the patterns of biased information processing that underpin individual differences in emotional vulnerability; and ii. determine the causal nature of observed associations between each such processing bias and emotional vulnerability.