Executive Summary
In 2025, Alphablocks Research Lab continued its mission to advance the science of child development and mental health.
This year, the lab focused on how early environments influence learning and mental health throughout development, from childhood to adolescence. Using large-scale data from population cohorts, longitudinal surveys, and neuroimaging scans, our work examined how social safety, parenting, inequality, cognition, and digital environments influence children’s development.
Below we summarise this year’s research by theme.
2025 in Review
- Celebrating 10 Years!
- New site in Hadley Wood – now in its 2nd year.
- Twice Rated “Outstanding” by Ofsted (2018, 2024).
- BBC-Pearson Early Years Team of the Year (2025).
- New Projects by Alphablocks Research Lab.
Social safety vs threat across development
A major focus of our 2025 work was understanding how children and adolescents develop expectations about whether the social world is safe and supportive, or threatening — and how these expectations link with their mental health.
Several of our studies showed that early experiences of threat and unpredictability become embedded in maladaptive ‘social safety schemas‘, which entail interpersonal distrust, altered brain connectivity, and adverse mental health outcomes.
- The role of social safety schemas in the persistence of mental health difficulties during adolescence
- Childhood maternal warmth, social safety schemas, and adolescent mental and physical health
- Social threat, neural connectivity, and adolescent mental health: a population-based longitudinal study
- Early-life family relationships, children’s mental health trajectories, and their prospective associations with adolescent distrust and social isolation (in press, to appear in 2026).
Parenting, adversity, and neurocognitive development
Another strand of research investigated how early home environments influence neurocognitive systems linked to emotion regulation, motivation, and learning.
This work highlights that early parenting influences mental health not only through social-emotional support, but also through its role in calibrating reward-processing and stress-sensitive systems during child and adolescent development.
- Early home environments and reward-processing in adolescence: the unique role of harsh parenting
- Childhood maternal warmth, social safety schemas, and adolescent mental and physical health
- Social threat, neural connectivity, and adolescent mental health: a population-based longitudinal study
Structural inequality and the developing brain
Extending beyond family-level influences, the Lab also helped investigate how macroeconomic inequality shapes brain development and mental health at the population level.
This work shows that social and economic structures become biologically embedded, contributing to differences in neural development and psychiatric risk.
- Macroeconomic income inequality, brain structure and function, and mental health
- See coverage of this work in this article in the Guardian.
Digital environments and adolescent mental health
In response to ongoing concerns about smartphones, screentime, digital engagement and youth mental health, our Lab examined whether social media use may be associated with later psychiatric outcomes.
Using longitudinal mediation analyses, this work provided evidence that small but significant associations between social media use and subsequent mental health outcomes operate through delayed sleep, negative self-image, and interpersonal distrust.
- Adolescent social media use and psychiatric outcomes: a longitudinal mediation analysis via interpersonal distrust, sleep, and self-image
- For a summary of the Lab’s findings in this study, see this News item by University College London and an article in Newsweek.
Cognitive development, embodied cognition, and social competence across childhood and adolescence
A final set of studies focused on how embodied cognition supports childhood learning and later social behaviour and personality development.
These findings highlight that social and emotional functioning is deeply connected to basic cognitive and motor processes established early in life.
- From spatial to social competence: the association between spatial ability and prosocial behaviour in childhood
- Embodied cognition and the structure of personality: an exploratory study of longitudinal pathways from early psychomotor function – see this Blog Post from our Lab about the key findings of this research project.
Looking ahead
Across all projects, a common theme emerges: both cognitive development and early learning as well as mental health, develop through layered systems, spanning early motor and cognitive skills, family relationships, digital environments, and broader social inequality.
In 2026, the Lab will continue to integrate developmental science, neuroscience, and population research to inform early prevention, intervention, and policy-relevant insights.
