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

• Effect of the NMDA receptor partial agonist, d-cycloserine, on emotional processing and autobiographical memory, 2020-04-01
• Resting state functional connectivity patterns as biomarkers of treatment response to escitalopram in patients with major depressive disorder, 2021-09-01
• Subchronic treatment with St John’s wort produces a positive shift in emotional processing in healthy volunteers, 2018-11-28
• Lithium modulates striatal reward anticipation and prediction error coding in healthy volunteers, 2020-10-01
• Predicting Treatment Response to Antidepressant Medication Using Early Changes in Emotional Processing., 2019-01-01
• No antidepressant-like acute effects of bright light on emotional information processing in healthy volunteers, 2021-11-01
• Statins in depression: a repurposed medical treatment can provide novel insights in mental health, 2022-08-01
• How representative are neuroimaging samples? Large-scale evidence for trait anxiety differences between MRI and behaviour-only research participants., 2020-04-01
• A Dissociation of the Acute Effects of Bupropion on Positive Emotional Processing and Reward Processing in Healthy Volunteers, 2018-10-01
• A single dose of fluoxetine reduces neural limbic responses to anger in depressed adolescents, 2019-01-21