Our group focusses on improving our understanding of how emotions and memories are associated to the healthy and disturbed functioning of the human brain. In emotions, we’re interested in flexibility of emotional processing and regulation in different contexts. In memory, the question how we form and stabilize memories and why a particular memory is better preserved than another is examined in our group.
We mainly investigate healthy subjects using mainly fMRI to gain new insights into the emotion and memory system. We like to investigate our subject in different emotional or motivational states, such as hunger, sleep deprivation or stress. Particularly, our research interests encompass emotion processing, emotion regulation, memory formation, consolidation and retrieval as well as functional interactions between this emotion system and other domains, like memory, language and control.
Our research is fundamental in nature, but we aim to utilize our insight also in clinical care and education. In clinical care, we perform clinical trials probing the role fMRI can play in stratifying individual patients with depression or anxiety disorders for the best treatment option. In education, we aim to improve personalized higher education by taking the individual emotional and cognitive needs into account.