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
- 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
- A co-produced online cultural experience compared to a typical museum website for mental health in people aged 16-24: A proof-of-principle randomised controlled trial, 2022-09-01
- Pro-dopaminergic pharmacological interventions for anhedonia in depression: protocol for a living systematic review of human and non-human studies, 2023-10-01
- Cognitive Remediation in Bipolar (CRiB2): study protocol for a randomised controlled trial assessing efficacy and mechanisms of cognitive remediation therapy compared to treatment as usual, 2023-11-01
- 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
- An Experimental Medicine Investigation of the Effects of Subacute Pramipexole Treatment on Emotional Information Processing in Healthy Volunteers, 2021-08-01
- The knowns and unknowns of SSRI treatment in young people with depression and anxiety: efficacy, predictors, and mechanisms of action, 2021-08-01