Calm Program

We are dedicated to conducting research on mental health problems. One line of our work focuses on understanding the factors that promote better outcomes in bipolar disorder, and how to use those to develop new interventions. Our latest work on that front is focused on healthy lifestyles, and involves healthy eating and improving sleep. Over the past 20 years, research by Dr. Johnson and her team members have shown that mania is often triggered by processes related to reward and goals. In a series of papers, we showed that bipolar disorder was related to specific problems with controlling impulses when people were feeling highly emotional—a problem that has been called emotion-related impulsivity. From there, we began to study emotion-related impulsivity more broadly across mental health domains. We have shown that this type of impulsivity is related to many mental health syndromes and to many of the behavioral problems, such as aggression, suicidality, and self-harm, that occur within those syndromes. You can read more about emotion-related impulsivity here. The team is led by Sheri L. Johnson, PhD, Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, with support from the National Institute of Mental Health and Wellcome Trust. Our team on this project includes Lance Kriegsfeld at UC Berkeley, Greg Murray at Swinburne University, Satchidananda Panda and Emily Manoogian at Salk Institute, Liam Mason at UCL, and a panel of lived experience experts.