Gerly Tamm

In my research, I focus on basic mechanisms of mental well-being and health behavior. I am interested in affective perception and memory biases, and the top-down influences of affect on cognition, especially in depression and anxiety. I am also interested in the mechanisms of resilience in mental well-being. For example, it is known that approximately 70% of the human population experiences some traumatic event during their lifetime (WHO), but only about a third of them develop mental health problems (depression, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder) - the mechanisms that lead to one (well-being) or the other (mental health disorder) outcome are not fully understood. I use an interdisciplinary approach, combining behavioral genetics (Tamm et al., 2016), behavioral experiments (see Tamm et al., 2017), computational methods (network analysis, machine learning, see Tamm et al., 2024), and experience sampling to uncover the mechanisms of mental well-being.