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Postgraduate research: Emotion
Exploring the relationship between emotion, cognition and mental health
In the Emotion Group we use a variety of research approaches including neuroimaging, neuropsychology, cognitive, psychophysiological, computational and clinical trial methodologies. We specifically investigate:
- The representation, elicitation, maintenance and control of emotion in healthy individuals
- How emotion relates to attention, memory and executive function
- How these processes may be disturbed in disorders of emotion, such as Depression, Anxiety and PTSD
- The development and evaluation of translational and novel therapeutic interventions for disorders of emotion
Research in the Emotion Group is currently divided into two broad, yet interacting, streams:
- The Social and Affective Neuroscience Programme explores the organisation of emotional processes in the brain, directed by Andy Calder
- The Cognition, Emotion and Mental Health Programme attempts to bridge the divide between basic psychological theory and clinical psychology interventions to better understand emotional disturbances, directed by Tim Dalgleish.
Individual areas of research include:
Andy Calder
I am interested in all aspects of face perception, but particularly the neural mechanisms underlying the recognition of facial expressions and other social cues (e.g., eye gaze). A second aspect of my research addresses the neural basis of human emotions, including anger, disgust, and the role of brain reward systems in eating disorders. The research uses a variety of techniques, including patient-based studies, functional imaging, and investigations of healthy volunteers. I am particularly interested in how individual differences in personality dimensions and genetic variants affect the neural correlates of emotion.
More detailed information is available at http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~andyc/
Tim Dalgleish
The primary interests of my research group are: psychological aspects of traumatic stress responses, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); and clinical depression. This work involves both children and adults and focuses on mental regulation and control, autobiographical memory, and reasoning and thinking. We also carry out a programme of research on non-clinical volunteer participants investigating these same sets of psychological processes. The principal methodologies used are cognitive experimental, psychophysiological, neuropsychological and functional imaging. The research programme spans the range from basic science to the development of clinical interventions. We have numerous ongoing projects that potential PhD students could integrate with, so please get in touch if you are interested.
For more information please see my personal webpages or the pages of the Cognition, Emotion and Mental Health Programme
Barney Dunn
My research currently focuses on the consequences of different forms of emotion regulation in adult psychopathology, particularly looking at depression, post traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder. I am investigating whether different disorders are characterised by the adoption of different ways of controlling negative and positive emotional experience, what the short and long term consequences of these strategies are, and the extent to which these strategies are influenced by the beliefs people hold about emotions. I also work as clinical psychologist, so I am very interested in developing and evaluating emotion regulation training approaches as a possible adjunct to existing psychotherapy approaches (especially in cognitive behaviour therapy and cognitive analytic therapy models). Other aspects of my research explore the extent to which feedback from the body is involved in the maintenance of emotion and decision-making symptoms in psychological disorders and investigate the consequences of self-focused attention in psychopathology. I use primarily cognitive-experimental, psychophysiological, functional imaging, questionnaire and clinical interview methodologies, applied to both clinical and non-clinical populations, to address these questions. Much of my research is done in collaboration with Tim Dalgleish at the CBU and with clinical colleagues at University College London.
For more information please see my personal webpages or the pages of the Cognition, Emotion and Mental Health Programme