Antidepressants, emotion and personality

Investigating neural responses to emotional facial expressions with functional magnetic resonance after 4 weeks administration of the SSRI antidepressant, citalopram, in subjects with high neuroticism traits.

This study investigates the effects of 4 weeks SSRI vs. placebo administration in subjects with high and low risk personality profiles using a number of emotion processing tasks and investigation techniques, including: fMRI combined with eye movement tracking during covert processing of emotional facial expressions, fMRI during reward processing (with Dr Ciara McCabe, University of Oxford), emotion regulation combined with ECG recording and heart-rate variability measurement (with Prof Peter Taggart, University College London), non-verbal communication assessment (with Prof Alfonso Troisi, University of Roma Tor Vergata) and daily mood sampling (with Dr Eric Ruhe, University of Groeningen).

PERL Researchers: Martina di Simplicio, Anna Tuenter