Projects
What is the most effective strategy to reduce fears in exposure therapy? An experimental study of devaluation and extinction learning in anxiety disorder patients and the neurobiological basis KU Leuven
Anxiety disorders are very common mental health disorders. They are characterised by excessive anxiety that interfere with daily life functioning. These disorders can be treated with psychological therapy: exposure therapy is the gold standard. Many patients however show an insufficient response to exposure therapy or relapse afterwards (up to 50%). There is a pressing need to improve the efficacy of the therapy. It is therefore necessary to ...
From Pavlov to visceroception? The role of interoceptive fear conditioning in the development of gastrointestinal symptom-specific anxiety, and its impact on visceroption. KU Leuven
As a cardinal symptom of most functional gastrointestinal disorders, visceral pain and discomfort are very common and disabling. Unfortunately, such symptoms remain poorly understood and are hard to treat. There is a general consensus that fear towards gastrointestinal sensations may play an important role, but the mechanisms underlying such fear as well as its impact on visceral symptom perception are unclear. The project aims to elucidate ...
Research on relapse and reconsolidation of contextual conditioning: implications for the treatment of generalized anxiety. KU Leuven
Anxiety as gatekeeper in the access to negative affect during early error detection: an experimental approach Ghent University
Error detection is an utmost important cognitive control function, enabling us to learn new contingencies, as well as adjust our behavior appropriately. Whereas this process is seen as rather fast and automatic, it is also substantially influenced by core affective factors, including anxiety. Typically, this internalizing disorder boosts early error monitoring brain effects, even though the functional meaning of these overactive error ...
In-depth study towards the role of neuromedine U in the stress response and in stress-related CNS disorders Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Taking neuromodulation for psychiatric disorders to the next level: optimal stimulation guided by electrophysiological biomarkers KU Leuven
About 1 in 6 people are pathologically anxious, and for some of them, it is even impossible to have a job or normal daily-life interactions. For these anxiety patients, in particular those that cannot be helped with psychotherapy or medication, deep brain stimulation (DBS) can be a last-resort treatment option. For DBS, electrodes are implanted in the brain to deliver small electrical pulses (similar to a pacemaker) to a specific part of the ...
The role of attentional flexibility during emotion processing in resilience and emotional disorders Ghent University
The ability to flexible deploy attention during emotion processing is thought to play a crucial role in resilience to stress and healthy emotion regulation. Relatedly, according to cognitive models of anxiety and depression, impairments at this level may play an important role in mood disorders, where there often is exacerbated attention for (negative) emotional information. The present project aims to examine these ideas
using ...