Chloe Wigg

I am a research assistant within the Psychopharmacology and Emotion Research Lab (PERL), supervised by Dr Susannah Murphy and Professor Catherine Harmer. 

Currently involved in eight experimental medicine/mental health studies (populations include healthy volunteers, patients with treatment-resistant depression, Parkinson’s disease, adolescent participants; interventions include ketamine, fenfluramine, 5HT4 agonist, cultural intervention).

I have developed a specific interest in understanding and investigating novel strategies to effectively target anhedonia, a complex cardinal symptom in depression. I find anhedonia particularly fascinating as it does not represent a unitary construct, the definition has expanded to add a motivation component, the clinical manifestation of anhedonia overlaps with symptoms such as apathy, fatigue, anergia or avolition, and these separate aspects of anhedonia have multiple distinct mechanism, which may be affected in different patients and may require different treatments. Anhedonia is of great clinical urgency as it particularly prevalent in treatment resistant depression (TRD), with established interventions failing to target it.

I have an MRes in Cognitive Neuroscience – my master's thesis was exploring the effects of escitalopram on memory encoding in adaptive anxiety. This was achieved using MRI and the threat of shock paradigm. Prior to this, I completed a BSc in Psychology.