Fellow

Mark Williams is Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry in Oxford. His research has been a major influence on the field of cognition and emotion and the book he and his colleagues wrote entitled Cognitive Psychology & Emotional Disorders has become a classic text. In particular, the work of his group on the application of experimental methods to study attention, memory and judgement processes, has been of enormous influence. His work in the field of autobiographical memory is particularly well known. He found that a particular type of retrieval failure can have large impact on the way people solve problems and generate images of the future and this has had an impact on the field of affective disorders in general, and understanding of suicidal behaviour in particular. His research has led to new approaches to relapse prevention in recurrent depression.