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

• Attentional bias modification is associated with fMRI response toward negative stimuli in individuals with residual depression: a randomized controlled trial, 2019-08-01
• Cognition in Mood Disorders, 2020-01-01
• A single administration of ‘microbial’ D-alanine to healthy volunteers augments reaction to negative emotions: a comparison with D-serine, 2020-03-01
• Neurocognitive processes in d-cycloserine augmented single-session exposure therapy for anxiety: A randomized placebo-controlled trial, 2020-06-01
• Precision biomarkers for mood disorders based on brain imaging, 2020-10-01
• Effect of Prefrontal Cortex Stimulation on Regulation of Amygdala Response to Threat in Individuals With Trait Anxiety A Randomized Clinical Trial, 2019-01-01
• A continuum hypothesis of psychotomimetic rapid antidepressants, 2021-05-01
• Accuracy in recognising happy facial expressions is associated with antidepressant response to a NOP receptor antagonist but not placebo treatment, 2021-10-01
• No Association Between Amygdala Responses to Negative Faces and Depressive Symptoms: Cross-Sectional Data from 28,638 Individuals in the UK Biobank Cohort, 2022-07-01
• Value of monitoring negative emotional bias in primary care in England for personalised antidepressant treatment: a modelling study, 2019-11-01