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Psychologist Colin MacLeod's early research was considered ‘subversive' and his work part of a ‘revolution'.

But the Professorial Fellow in the School of Psychology and Founder and Director of the Elizabeth Rutherford Memorial Centre for the Advancement of Research on Emotion (CARE) is now one of Australia's most highly cited academics. Thomson Reuters, the company which keeps global professional statistics, has recently awarded Winthrop Professor MacLeod a Citation Award for his spot among the country's top 12 researchers.

These researchers, ranging across the sciences to the social sciences and humanities, have had the highest impact in their field. Professor MacLeod's field is emotion, in which he is a world leader.

His work has helped to bring together the two fields of cognitive psychology, which involves the study of how the brain processes information, and clinical psychology, which seeks to explain and remediate psychological disorders such as anxiety and depression.

"As a young scientist completing my PhD at Oxford University I was privileged to work with the late Donald Broadbent, a very influential experimental psychologist who is widely regarded as the father of cognitive psychology," he said. "This approach conceives of the brain as a biological computer and attempts to explain normal mental capability and experience in terms of how the brain takes in information, transforms it into different codes, stores it and retrieves it.

"This was very different from the approach taken at the time by clinical psychology researchers, who attributed emotional and behavioural problems to simple learning or ‘conditioning' mechanisms, and considered unusual patterns of thinking to represent only the symptoms of psychological disorders. So in the late 70s and early 80s these fields could not have been further apart.

"Then, in what has since become known by clinical psychologists as the ‘cognitive revolution', the radical idea arose that the negative thinking styles commonly observed in people with clinical anxiety and depression might instead actually cause these disorders. This realisation that dysfunctional emotion may result from dysfunctional thinking led me and others to ask what patterns of underlying information processing gave rise to these negative styles of thinking."

At the time, Professor MacLeod was completing his training in clinical psychology at London University's Institute of Psychiatry, then run by the late Hans Eysenck, a world-renowned advocate of conditioning explanations of psychological dysfunction. So in that context his early efforts to explain emotional disorders in terms of biased information processing were considered somewhat subversive in nature.

"But it was clear to me that the huge continents of cognitive and clinical psychology were on a collision course. Perhaps my early work may have made some contribution to this, but really my good fortune was to stake out my research career at the intersection where these two areas of the discipline would shortly come together at speed. When the resulting collision threw up mountains, those of us working at this juncture found ourselves in their peaks," he said.

"These mountains have since become well populated, giving rise to the huge contemporary field of cognition and emotion research. Because we were here right at the start, mapping out the key phenomena and establishing many of the major methodologies still in common use, our work had a significant early influence that has endured as we have continued to break new ground across the ensuing years."

Most recently, Professor MacLeod has gained international recognition for developing and pioneering a new approach to treating anxiety and depression, known as cognitive-bias modification (CBM). The treatment can be effective after only a few 15-minute sessions, and does not involve drug or counselling therapy. All it requires is sitting in front of a computer and using a program that subtly alters the patterns of information processing that give rise to harmful thought patterns.

Published in UWA News , 25 June 2012