Sarah GarfinkelGroup Leader |
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Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Research
Our research investigates how emotion is expressed in body and brain, with a particular focus on the heart, heart-brain interactions and interoception. We aim to understand how aberrant physiological mechanisms in brain and body can underlie altered emotion processing in a variety of clinical conditions including anxiety, PTSD, autism and psychosis.
Emotion has an impact on cognition, and we investigate emotion’s influence on memory, attention and decision making, particularly in regard to specific alterations in clinical groups. Interoception, the sensing of internal bodily signals, can change how stimuli are processed and remembered, and our work investigates how bodily signals shape a range of different cognitive processes, such as intuitive decision making and memory.
We use a number of experimental methods including psychophysiology, fMRI and EEG to investigate these questions in both patient groups and in control participants.
Honorary Research Fellow
Laura Crucianelli
l.crucianelli@ucl.ac.uk
Laura's research focuses on the relationship between somatosensation (in particular touch and temperature), interoception, and multisensory integration in both healthy and clinical populations. Laura recently completed a Marie Curie fellowship at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm. Previously, she was a PhD student at the Department of Psychology, University of Hertfordshire and a research associate at the Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London.
Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow
Mahinda Yogarajah
m.yogarajah@ucl.ac.uk
Dr Mahinda Yogarajah is an MRC CARP fellow with Prof Sarah Garfinkel. He is a consultant neurologist based at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and Epilepsy Society. HIs research focuses on the affective and clinical neuroscience of functional seizures, and functional neurological disorders.
Post-Doctoral Research Associate on the Em-body Study
Hannah Savage
hannah.savage@ucl.ac.uk
Hannah Savage's (she/her) main interest is the neural, psychophysiological and subjective processes involved when we feel anxious and how variable these are within and between individuals. During her PhD at the University of Melbourne she examined the neural correlates of threat and safety learning in patients with social anxiety and unaffected controls. She then moved to the Netherlands where she completed a postdoc at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, using big data to look at variability in brain activation and link this heterogeneity to mental health symptoms. She is now employed on a Wellcome Trust grant awarded to Professor Sarah Garfinkel and Assistant Professor Camilla Nord (Cambridge), where she works on the Em-Body study; a project that aims to determine how our body signals, and our understanding of them (a process called interoception) links to the emotions we experience and symptoms of anxiety and depression.
PhD Students
Benedict Greenwood
benedict.greenwood.20@ucl.ac.uk
When we face emotional challenges, our autonomic nervous system responds by altering the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. This in turn shapes our emotional response. My research focusses on characterising these autonomic responses and understanding how they contribute to emotional symptoms, especially emotional features of ADHD. Using behavioural tasks, I am also seeking to determine how different autonomic profiles contribute to other cognitive features of ADHD, including inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity.
Oliwia Stecko
oliwia.stecko.23@ucl.ac.uk
Our brains and bodies constantly communicate, with heartbeats influencing cognition, emotions, and perception. In schizophrenia, this connection may be altered, contributing to symptoms like hallucinations and false memories. My research explores how heart signals affect the brain’s interpretation of information, particularly in relation to hallucinations and memory distortions.
By studying both healthy individuals and clinical populations, I aim to understand how changes in heart-brain interactions influence our cognition and perception of reality. My work involves measuring heart activity and its impact on cognitive processes, using behavioral experiments and neuroimaging. Findings from this research could provide insights into how physiological signals shape mental health, potentially leading to innovative therapeutic approaches that bridge physical and psychological well-being.
Rohan Kandasamy
r.kandasamy@ucl.ac.uk
Rohan is a clinical neurophysiology trainee at the National Hospital of Neurology and Neurosurgery and Clinical Academic Fellow at the UCL Institute of Neurology's Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy and is based in the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience laboratory. He is interested in translational research involving seizures and functional neurology, and computational analysis of electrophysiological signals. His current research examines interoceptive processing in the context of patients with functional seizures.
Rania Iman Virjee
rania-iman.virjee.18@ucl.ac.uk
Rania Imān Virjee is a PhD student at UCL and King's College London on the London Interdisciplinary Doctoral programme (LIDo). Her project aims to develop a more optimised approach for deriving the Heartbeat Evoked Potential (HEP) - an electrophysiological marker reflecting the cortical processing of heartbeats - and to investigate the HEP in different clinical populations. This research involves professors and collaborators from UCL and King's College London, along with clinicians from the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and the UCL & Barts Heart Centre.
Sascha Woelk
s.wolk.16@ucl.ac.uk
Sascha is a PhD student on the Leverhulme Ecological Brain DTP, exploring how interoceptive signals, particularly from the heart, interact with cognitive and affective processes. His research focuses on interoceptive dysregulation in dissociation and improving methods for measuring heart-brain interactions. He investigates these questions using cognitive tasks, neural recordings (optically-pumped magnetometry), and psychophysiological measures.
Wilson Lim
wilson.lim.17@ucl.ac.uk
My research examines individual differences in physiological reactivity and autonomic responses in shaping emotional states and judgements, and brain-heart interactions. I am also looking to investigate the life course bidirectional relationship between autonomic activity and emotional symptoms, particularly depression and anxiety. By analysing cross-sectional and longitudinal data, I aim to understand how autonomic responses contribute to emotional states and the development and persistence of emotional symptoms.
Research Assistant
Beth Longley
beth.longley.22@ucl.ac.uk
Beth Longley is a Research Assistant in the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience group at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Beth previously completed the MRes Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL where she investigated how types of sensory processing, such as interoception or olfaction, relate to transdiagnostic mental health symptoms. Beth now works alongside Dr Hannah Savage and Prof Sarah Garfinkel on the Em-Body Study, a Wellcome Trust funded project investigating how cardiac, respiratory, and gastric interoception might relate to emotion and mental health symptoms.
