Interests and Publications
My interest is in psychological and neurobiological mechanisms of anxiolysis.
While most research in the field of anxiolysis is about finding new drugs or understanding how drugs achieve their anxiolytic effects, my strategy is to investigate the neural basis of safety learning. Safety learning describes a process by which one learns that a feared stimulus is not as threatening as expected, resulting in an attenuation of anxiety responses. Safety learning often occurs in everyday life and is an essential component of adaptive behavior. In cognitive behavior therapy, safety learning is specifically promoted through extinction training and reappraisal (as well as some other strategies used for voluntary emotion regulation). My bet is that a better, notably neurobiological, understanding of these learning processes will open up new ways of improving anxiety therapy.
For example, if we knew the neurotransmitter systems involved, we might be able to enhance therapy pharmacologically, thus making therapy more effective and also perhaps shorter and cheaper. An interesting example of how this might possibly be done can be found in Ressler et al (2004) [Arch Gen Psychiatry 61:1136-44] who added an NMDA agonist, known to facilitate extinction in rats, to only two sessions of extinction therapy in height phobics, to achieve a lasting anxiety reduction which would normally require a larger number of sessions.
Another interesting question is whether knowing the genetic underpinnings of safety learning might allow us to better predict treatment response and thus facilitate an individual tailoring of therapy. For instance, patients might differ with respect to what safety learning procedures or which type of pharmacological enhancement may be most beneficial. Needless to say that individual differences in reacting to and coping with anxiogenic stimuli may also result from non-genetic factors which to identify and understand is another big, but not hopeless, challenge.
View my collection, "My Bibliography" from NCBI.
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