Centre for Clinical and Experimental Psychopharmacology focuses on investigation of cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in emotion processing and emotional disorders with emphasis on the anxiety disorders. In addition our research aims to improve clinical outcomes in patients with mood and anxiety disorders.
Centre for Clinical and Experimental Psychopharmacology focuses on improving clinical outcomes in patients with mood and anxiety disorders. This involves investigating the role of neurobiological and psychological factors in causing and maintaining illness; through improving trial design when evaluating efficacy and tolerability of treatment interventions; by assessing the effectiveness and acceptability of treatment interventions in wider clinical practice; through identifying more accurately those patient groups at particular risk of poor outcomes; and by offering a specialist clinical service to patients with chronic and treatment-resistant conditions.
Our work also aims to investigate cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in emotion processing and emotional disorders with emphasis on the anxiety disorders. This work integrates methods from a range of perspectives including experimental cognitive psychology (e.g. computerized behavioural tasks, eye-tracking methods), psychophysiology (e.g. fear-potentiated eye-blink startle), cognitive neuroscience (event related brain potentials, functional imaging) and psychopharmacology (pharmacological challenge).
In recent years there have been many advances in the areas of genetics, temperament research, neuropsychology and neuroimaging, and these provide some understanding of the origin and maintenance of anxiety in healthy volunteers and clinical samples.