Ella W Tuominen
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ellatuominen.bsky.social
Ella W Tuominen
@ellatuominen.bsky.social
UCL Wellcome Trust PhD Student in Mental Health Science @ UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience

|| interested in avoidance, psychotherapy mechanisms, reinforcement learning, behaviour change, psychedelics, mindfulness ||
Diving into how #CBT tackles a wide range of mental health conditions in my new blog, reviewing @pimcuijpers.bsky.social and co new meta-analysis. If you care about evidence-based therapy and when to explore options beyond the basics, check it out on @thementalelf.bsky.social ➡️ buff.ly/DbNCq8k ☀️
The strengths and limitations of CBT across mental health conditions
CBT is a cornerstone of mental health care, but how well does it work across disorders? New meta-analysis offers some answers and raises new questions.
www.nationalelfservice.net
July 30, 2025 at 10:32 AM
My new blog covering @pimcuijpers.bsky.social and collegues paper on CBT's effectiveness across a wide range of mental disorders is out now on the @thementalelf.bsky.social ! Take a look below 👇
Is CBT equally effective across all mental disorders?

This unified meta-analysis looked at 375 RCTs & nearly 33,000 people with 11 different diagnoses.

Spoiler: it’s not a one-size-fits-all therapy. 🧠

#CBT #MentalHealth #Psychotherapy

🧵THREAD
July 30, 2025 at 10:26 AM
Got to share some exciting recent and upcoming work at #CPConf2025 this week. Such a fun conference - talks at a cinema in recliner seats with a tub of popcorn was a first, but I could get used to it. Also thrilled to have won a travel award, thank you and see you next time!
July 17, 2025 at 5:24 PM
Thank you so much for a brilliant conference! Looking forwards to the next one already
Congratulations to all the Travel Award Winners at #CPConf2025 - we were very fortunate to have so many fantastic young scientists at our conference!
July 17, 2025 at 5:16 PM
Reposted by Ella W Tuominen
#CPConf2025 is exploring multidimensional reward functions #RufusTempleOrchestra
July 15, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Reposted by Ella W Tuominen
In our preprint "Limited evidence for reduced learning rate adaptation in anxious-depression, before or after treatment", led by @stephsuddell.bsky.social and Lili Zhang, we fail to find a robust association between anxious-depression and learning rate adaptation
osf.io/preprints/ps...
June 18, 2025 at 1:16 PM
Reposted by Ella W Tuominen
Check our latest work ‘Linking Subjective Experience of Anxiety to Brain Function using Natural Language Processing’. Our analyses link movie-evoked brain activity and subsequent interview recordings in a pediatric sample with and without anxiety disorders (doi.org/10.31234/osf...).
May 2, 2025 at 5:29 PM
Reposted by Ella W Tuominen
Published today in Nature Medicine. In one of the world’s largest RCTs of its kind (n=3,936), a smartphone app teaching 5 key cognitive-behavioral therapy skills improved subthreshold depression—and the effects lasted 6 months.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Cognitive behavioral therapy skills via a smartphone app for subthreshold depression among adults in the community: the RESiLIENT randomized controlled trial - Nature Medicine
A trial that used a master randomized design found that the skills commonly found in smartphone-based cognitive behavioral therapy, when tested alone or in combination with behavioral activation, were...
www.nature.com
April 23, 2025 at 10:01 AM
Reposted by Ella W Tuominen
New systematic review and meta‐analysis looks at

-harm reporting
-risk of bias
-action mechanism specification
-incremental therapeutic effect size

in psilocybin-for-depression RCT literature. I'll briefly summarize below. 🧵

🧪 #psychscisky #episky #medsky #psychiatry
April 25, 2025 at 7:52 AM
Thank you Alex for chairing a brilliant session - so happy to have got to be a part of it!
#SoBP2025 #FearAnxiety #MiceMonkeysHumans - Join us for what promises to be a really excellent symposium on Thursday afternoon!
April 25, 2025 at 5:51 PM
At #2025SOBP this week! I was thrilled to present yesterday on bridging the translational gap between animal and human models in anxiety research with computational modeling. Introduced the RL task developed by @ymyymmr.bsky.social and the anxiolytic/anxiogenic manipulations we've been working on.
April 25, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Got to present the work by Dr Yumeya Yamamori that I'm currently continuing concerning the impact of anxiety increasing (threat of shock) and reducing (benzodiazepine) study manipulations on avoidance at the @uclpals.bsky.social postgraduate group's weekly seminar this week🙌 next up SOBP in Toronto!
March 19, 2025 at 10:03 AM
🧵 Wrote another blog for @thementalelf.bsky.social covering an interesting 5-year study comparing psychoanalytic and cognitive-behavioral therapies for chronic depression in those with experiences of childhood adversity 🧠💡

www.nationalelfservice.net/treatment/ps...
Childhood adversity and adult depression: Psychoanalysis vs CBT
Ella Tuominen considers a study on childhood trauma and response to long-term psychoanalytic vs CBT therapy for chronic depression in adults.
www.nationalelfservice.net
March 5, 2025 at 11:38 AM
Another blog I wrote for the Mental Elf just published:
Childhood adversity & adult depression: Psychoanalysis vs CBT www.nationalelfservice.net?p=214188

@ellatuominen.bsky.social on a study of childhood trauma & ‘treatment resistant depression’

Can long-term psychoanalytic therapy provide deeper healing for chronic depression than CBT?

🧵 THREAD
Childhood adversity and adult depression: Psychoanalysis vs CBT
Ella Tuominen considers a study on childhood trauma and response to long-term psychoanalytic vs CBT therapy for chronic depression in adults.
www.nationalelfservice.net
March 5, 2025 at 11:35 AM
A jolly time with our PhD programme at Cumberland Lodge in January - read about it below ⬇️
Time to reflect on our retreat! In January the students of the UCL-Wellcome PhD programme in Mental Health Science were lucky to be able to get together again to share wisdom, relax and reconnect with each other. We wrote about our experience on our blog: www.mentalhealthscience.org/blogs/ucl-we...
UCL-Wellcome Mental Health Science PhD Retreat 2025 — Mental Health Science
The students on the programme share their experience on our 3rd annual retreat!
www.mentalhealthscience.org
March 4, 2025 at 6:02 PM
Reposted by Ella W Tuominen
🚨New postdoc job alert!🚨 www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
...we are looking for someone with an interest in computational psychiatry and/or naturalistic neuroimaging to work on a new ERC Advanced grant "The Neurocomputational
Mechanisms of Anxiety Treatment Response (MECHANX)". (1/3)
UCL – University College London
UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).
www.ucl.ac.uk
February 5, 2025 at 3:34 PM
Trying to make more of a habit of using Bluesky (we all know why)... So hey all! 👋🦋 Glad to see things here have picked up in the last few months!
December 12, 2024 at 7:02 PM
Reposted by Ella W Tuominen
I posted nearly identical threads on here & X/Twitter about why it's not bad to leave X/Twitter; check out the differences in engagement in the first ~24h. I expected this but not to this degree!
December 3, 2024 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Ella W Tuominen
Is it Bad to leave Twitter? No. Here are 7+ years of insights from my lab’s research that explain why.

Featuring work w/ @williambrady.bsky.social @killianmcloughlin.bsky.social

🧵
December 1, 2024 at 10:48 PM
Reposted by Ella W Tuominen
🚨 Clinicians have noted for decades how planning & anxiety are linked. Yet, computational psychiatry thus far failed to show how. Here, I explain that we need to broaden how we model planning to reveal its *biases* in chronic anxiety. A 🧵 on the framework 1/n

authors.elsevier.com/a/1kAJC4sIRv...
November 27, 2024 at 2:27 PM