DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY
We study the brain systems involved in human emotional experience and associated cognition, including how such relationships are affected in people with mood and anxiety disorders. On a practical level, our goal is to develop better brain-based models of these common mental health disorders that may have future utility in optimising their treatment. More fundamentally, we seek to understand how the activity of large-scale brain systems contributes to individual differences in emotional experience – questions that are uniquely addressed in human functional brain imaging (‘fMRI’) research. Leveraging this technology, our projects integrate psychological experimentation with measurements of emotional behaviour and self-report, as well as peripheral physiological monitoring. We have successfully integrated our research platform in clinical studies of help-seeking populations, including NHMRC-funded randomised clinical trials.
MEMBERS:
A/Prof Christopher Davey (Co-Investigator; Orygen)
Lisa Incerti (Project Coordinator)
Laura Finlayson (PhD Candidate)
Micah Cearns (RA)
Hannah Savage (PhD Candidate)
Patrick Laing (PhD Candidate)
Alec Jamieson (PhD Candidate)
Rachel Brodie (RA)
Rebekah Delahoy (RA)
Davey CG, Harrison BJ. (2018) The brain’s center of gravity: how the default mode network helps us to understand the self. World Psychiatry 17(3):278–279.
Via E et al. (2018) Ventromedial prefrontal cortex activity and pathological worry in generalised anxiety disorder. British Journal of Psychiatry 213(1):437-443.
Fullana MA et al. (2018) Fear extinction in the human brain: a meta-analysis of fMRI studies in healthy participants. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 88: 16-25.
Harrison BJ et al. (2017) Human ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the positive affective processing of safety signals. Neuroimage 152:12–18.
Stephanou K et al. (2017) Hard to look on the bright side: neural correlates of impaired emotion regulation in depressed youth. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 12(7):1138–1148.
Davey CG et al. (2017) A Brain Model of Disturbed Self-Appraisal in Depression. American Journal of Psychiatry 174(9):895–903.
Fullana MA et al. (2016) Neural signatures of human fear conditioning: an updated and extended meta-analysis of fMRI studies. Molecular Psychiatry 21(4):500–508.
Davey CG et al. (2016) Mapping the self in the brain’s default mode network. Neuroimage 132:390–397.
Stephanou K et al. (2016) Brain functional correlates of emotion regulation across adolescence and young adulthood. Human Brain Mapping 37(1):7–19.