Congratulations to Dr Dylan Moloney-Gibb, whose PhD was conferred on 19 June 2026. His thesis, The application of compassion focused therapy principles to alleviate difficulties with emotion regulation in adolescents (School of Psychology), took on a hard measurement problem. Emotion is fast-moving and personal, especially in young people, and difficult to capture in a way that is accurate and easy to use.
His answer was the Three Circles, a new digital scale that lets people show the activity of the three emotion systems central to Compassion Focused Therapy: the threat, drive and soothing systems.Across a series of studies, Dylan showed the tool works. He first validated it with 311 young adults, then adapted and tested it with 203 adolescents in school settings. A further study showed it could track moment-to-moment change in emotion and physiology, using heart rate variability as 88 participants moved through a rest, reactivity and recovery sequence and a compassion exercise. Dylan also piloted a compassion-based approach with adolescents and interviewed young people about their own experiences of compassion, including the fears and blocks that can get in the way, to help co-design future programs. Together, the studies support compassion focused therapy as a workable framework for helping young people build social and emotional skills.
Dylan's PhD was supervised by Associate Professor James Kirby, with Dr Chase Sherwell and Dr Sasha Lynn, and he has been a familiar face at the Lab's Annual Symposia, presenting his Three Circles work year after year. Findings from the thesis are already reaching the field, with studies published in Scientific Reports, the Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, and Behaviour Research and Therapy.
Congratulations, Dylan, on an original contribution to compassion research. We can't wait to see where it goes next.
Read the research
- Testing a digital and interactive scale (the Three Circles) to assess emotion regulation — Scientific Reports (2025)
- Preliminary validation of a novel digital measure of emotion regulation (the Three Circles) in adolescents — Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal (2026)
- The three circle model of compassion focused therapy: an experimental paradigm to assess dynamic psychophysiological changes of emotion regulation systems — Behaviour Research and Therapy (2026)
