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

• Pramipexole Enhances Reward Learning by Preserving Value Estimates, 2022-01-01
• Effects of ulotaront on brain circuits of reward, working memory, and emotion processing in healthy volunteers with high or low schizotypy, 2023-08-01
• Neural effects of a single dose of fluoxetine on resting-state functional connectivity in adolescent depression, 2020-11-01
• Effect of acute citalopram on self-referential emotional processing and social cognition in healthy volunteers, 2020-10-01
• Déjà-vu? Neural and behavioural effects of the 5-HT 4 receptor agonist, prucalopride, in a hippocampal-dependent memory task, 2021-10-01
• Characterizing Affective Variability in Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder, and the Effects of Lithium, Using a Generative Model of Affect, 2022-02-01
• Acute neural effects of fluoxetine on emotional regulation in depressed adolescents, 2022-05-01
• The Oxford study of Calcium channel Antagonism, Cognition, Mood instability and Sleep (OxCaMS): study protocol for a randomised controlled, experimental medicine study, 2019-02-01
• Translating the promise of 5HT4 receptor agonists for the treatment of depression, 2020-02-01