About Our Research

At least one in three people suffer from an anxiety or depressive disorder at some point in their life. The most effective treatment for these conditions is cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), but courses are long and cost-intensive, access to treatment is difficult, and there is a subgroup of patients who do not get better at all. Our work combines cognitive neuroscience, applied clinical psychology and pharmacology to investigate the basic mechanisms of CBT and psychopharmacological treatments, that is, to find out what exactly it is that makes patients get better. Such knowledge will ultimately help us to improve and develop novel treatment strategies, by combining psychological and pharmacological interventions logically based on their fundamental effects. Our research approaches include experimental-behavioural designs that allow us to indirectly measure patients' information processing, and magnet resonance imaging approaches that more directly assess brain activity (functional magnet resonance imaging) or brain levels of certain neurochemicals (magnet resonance spectroscopy).

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