Merethe Blandhol

I am a research assistant working on different projects within the PERL lab at the Department of Psychiatry. One of the projects I am currently working on is investigating the effects of a 5-HT4 partial agonist on emotional and cognitive processing in unmedicated patients with depression, and in patients with treatment-resistant depression. I am also involved in a project looking at the cognitive effects of behavioural activation therapy in combination with SSRI treatment compared to drug treatment alone.

For these projects I am involved in recruiting and screening participants, running psychological testing sessions, and assisting with data analysis of fMRI data and psychological tasks. Recently I have also helped set up a new study looking at the effect of Prucalopride on cognitive outcomes in patients with recovered depression.

My research interests center on the relationship between the mind and the body. In particular, I am interested in how cognitive and affective factors interact with somatic symptoms and neurophysiology in depression and other conditions such as fatigue and chronic pain. 

In September 2021 I completed my MSc in Psychological Research here in Oxford at the Brain and Cognition Lab. My MSc thesis, supervised by Prof Kia Nobre, Dr. Méadhbh Brosnan, and Dr. Lauren Atkinson, looked at sustained attention and fatigue across the lifespan using an online task. Before this, I finished my BSc in Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University College Groningen in the Netherlands.