25th - 26th June, 2026

The conference will be held at Campus GIH (the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences) in collaboration with Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.

Invited Speakers:

James J. Gross, PhD

James J. Gross is the Ernest R. Hilgard Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Center for Affective Science and the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory. James’s research focuses on emotion regulation, and he has received a number of teaching and mentoring awards, including the Stanford Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching (Stanford’s highest award for teaching), the Stanford Postdoctoral Mentoring Award (twice), the Society for Affective Science Inaugural Mentorship Award, and the APS Mentor Award from the Association for Psychological Science. James also has received research awards from the American Psychological Association, the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society, as well as the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology, and Honorary Doctorates from UC Louvain in Belgium, Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and the Education University of Hong Kong in China. James has more than 650 publications, which have been cited more than 250,000 times. James is co-founding President for the Society for Affective Science, Founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of Affective Science, and a Fellow in the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jennifer L. Hughes, PhD, MPH

Jennifer L. Hughes is a Psychologist and Clinical Scholar in Behavioral Health at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, College of Medicine, and the Division of Health Behavior and Health Promotion, College of Public Health, at The Ohio State University. Dr. Hughes is part of the Methods Core and multi-PI on two projects in the NIMH P50 Center for Accelerating Suicide Prevention in Real-world Settings (ASPIRES: PIs Jeff Bridge and Cynthia Fontanella), which aims to accelerate the development and use of effective interventions to reduce suicide in children and adolescents. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in Psychiatry at the UT Southwestern Center for Depression Research and Clinical Care, supporting dissemination and implementation of the Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM) program through the CDRC Training Academy, and the Texas Youth Depression and Suicide Research Network, an initiative of the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium. Dr. Hughes received her Ph.D. from UT Southwestern Medical Center and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. Dr. Hughes is a co-developer of two evidence-based treatments, one for relapse prevention of depression in children and adolescents (Relapse Prevention CBT; Kennard, Hughes, & Foxwell, 2016) and one utilizing family-based CBT for suicidal youth and their parents (SAFETY; Asarnow et al., 2015, 2017, 2021; Hughes & Asarnow, 2022).  Dr. Hughes’s work has also focused on universal suicide prevention in youth through a school-based mental health promotion and suicide prevention program called Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM).  She is an international trainer for YAM, working with the intervention developers to disseminate this program in the United States (Texas and Montana), Australia, and India.  Dr. Hughes is a past Chair (2017-2018) of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) Child and Adolescent Depression Special Interest Group (SIG) and has served as the Newsletter Editor (2017-2021), APA Convention Program Chair (2013-2015), and Member-at-Large for Science and Practice (2023-2026) for the American Psychological Association (APA) Division 53, Society for Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. Broadly, Dr. Hughes’s research explores the efficacy and effectiveness of psychosocial treatments for building resilience, the prevention and treatment of youth depression, and addressing suicide in youth.