Cross-cultural Perspectives on Young People’s Decision-making, Adversity and Mental Health (funded by BRC Pump Priming)

A young person in rural South Africa completes a computer-based decision-making game that reveals how their history of hardship shapes choices linked to depression and anxiety. This matters because most research on how childhood adversity affects mental health has been done in wealthy Western countries. The decision-making patterns that predict depression in London or New York may not hold in a South African village, where poverty, family structure, and daily risks are fundamentally different. Without cross-cultural data, mental health interventions designed in one context may fail—or even harm—young people in another. The research is a small, observational study: it tests a computational task measuring how young people weigh rewards and punishments, and links those patterns to subclinical symptoms of anhedonia, depression, and anxiety. It is not an intervention or a treatment trial. If the findings show that adversity shapes decision-making differently across cultures, this could reshape how mental health screening tools are designed and validated globally. It could also guide future interventions that account for local context—for example, tailoring cognitive-behavioural approaches to the specific ways adversity alters reward processing in non-Western settings. The work is fundamental science, but it addresses a gap with direct implications for global mental health equity.