Psychopharmacology and Emotion Research Laboratory (PERL)

We explore how the brain processes emotional information and how this is influenced by brain chemicals and medicines. This helps us to understand disorders such as depression and anxiety and to understand and contribute to the development of drug and psychological treatments.

The Psychopharmacology and Emotion Research Laboratory explores the ways in which the brain processes emotional information and how this is affected by neurotransmitters such as serotonin, noradrenaline and dopamine. As well as telling us about normal brain function, this may help us understand emotional disorders such as depression and anxiety and how these may be helped by drug treatments that affect neurotransmitter function. We attempt to understand how conventional treatments may work, how mechanisms underlying treatment efficacy interact with psychological treatments, and also whether we can predict new candidate treatments for depression and anxiety using these experimental medicine models.

The group comprises a multidisciplinary team of psychiatrists, psychologists, pharmacologists and neuroscientists and aims to explore these questions using human models of cognitive and emotional processing. Our methodologies include psychopharmacological challenges, neuropsychological testing, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and functional neuroimaging with fMRI, MEG and PET in healthy volunteers, patient and at-risk groups.

A major output of the group has been the development of a human model of antidepressant drug action (the Cognitive Neuropsychological Model; Harmer et al., 2009, British Journal of Psychiatry), based on the results of a series of studies which showed that antidepressant drugs bias emotional processing towards positive information much earlier than antidepressant effects on mood can be detected. Such changes are believed to contribute to the recovery from depression with the delay in antidepressants’ clinical efficacy arising from the need to translate the changes in emotional processing into subjective improvement in mood through interactions with the environment and the gradual relearning of non-depressive, emotional associations.

Our team

Catherine Harmer

Associate Head of Department (People and Culture), Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience
Susannah Murphy

Director of Graduate Studies Associate Professor
Amy Gillespie

Senior Post-doctoral Researcher and BRC Project Manager
Marieke Martens

NIHR Oxford Health BRC Senior Postdoctoral researcher
Erdem Pulcu

Senior Researcher
Eva Periche Tomas

Researcher/Honorary Clinical Psyhologist
Riccardo De Giorgi

Clinical Lecturer (post-CCT)
Michael Colwell

Postdoctoral Researcher
Sara Costi

Wellcome Trust Doctoral Fellow
Angharad De Cates

Honorary Member
Brennan Delattre

DPhil Candidate
Anutra Guru

Research Assistant
Wendy Howard

Research Manager
Andreea Raslescu

DPhil Student
Alexander Smith

DPhil student
Chloe Wigg

DPhil Candidate | Lead of the Mental Wellbeing Working Group in Psychiatry
Sylvana Vilca-melendez

DPhil Student
Myrto Vlazaki
Grace Warner

Research Assistant
Ella Williams
Ye Wo

DPhil Student