Title: Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience

Department: University Department of Psychiatry

Location: Oxford

Email: catherine.harmer@psych.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests: I am the director of the Psychopharmacology and Emotional Research Lab (PERL) based at the University Department of Psychiatry in Oxford. This forms a multi-disciplinary team and includes graduate research assistants, DPhil students, post-doctoral researchers, Psychiatrists and Pharmacologists. The research of the group focuses on the psychological mechanisms of antidepressant drug action by exploring drug effects on human models of emotional processing. A range of methodologies are used, including neuropsychological testing, transcranial magnetic stimulation and functional neuroimaging with fMRI and PET in healthy volunteers and patient samples. This research has the potential to integrate psychological and pharmacological views of depression and treatment and has challenged the way in which we typically consider drug treatment for depression to work (see Harmer et al 2009). In addition this research has led to the development of human experimental models to explore the effects of established and novel drugs for the treatment of depression and anxiety. Such results therefore have implications both for how we understand antidepressants to work but also in the identification and development of new treatments for depression and anxiety.

Author's Works

• Subclinical anxiety and depression are associated with deficits in attentional target facilitation, not distractor inhibition, 2019-06-01
• How women with and without eating disorders perceive their own and others’ bodies: a case-control study, University of Bristol, 2020-03-01
• Does repeatedly viewing overweight versus underweight images change perception of and satisfaction with own body size?, 2020-04-01
• Glucocorticoid ultradian rhythmicity differentially regulates mood and resting state networks in the human brain: A randomised controlled clinical trial, 2021-02-01
• Over-the-counter analgesics use is associated with pain and psychological distress among adolescents: a mixed effects approach in cross-sectional survey data from Norway, 2021-11-01
• The effect of sertraline on emotional processing: secondary analyses of the PANDA randomised controlled trial, 2021-01-01
• Variation in recognition of happy and sad facial expressions and self-reported depressive symptom severity: A prospective cohort study, 2019-06-01
• Use of Over-The-Counter Analgesics for Pain and Psychological Distress Among Adolescents: A Mixed Effects Approach in Cross-Sectional Survey Data From Norway, 2020-10-01
• Symptom Dynamics and Attention in Depression: Fatigue and Low Positive Affect are Associated With Reduced Orienting Efficiency, 2022-02-01
• Attentional bias modification is associated with fMRI response toward negative stimuli in individuals with residual depression: a randomized controlled trial, 2019-08-01