Research Highlights

In this talk I share some insight from our research on how pain shifts decisions involving effortful, delayed rewards and also ways we can cope with that. I also provide a crash course on pain science. 

By understanding how pain creates "over-protective" decision-making, we can design novel behavioural interventions to better support long-term healing.

Exercise significantly improves pain severity, physical function, and quality of life for those with chronic pain, yet staying active remains a massive struggle. In this webinar, together with colleagues from the Persistent Pain Research Group I explore the neurobiological and psychological barriers behind this difficulty and share practical strategies to overcome them.

Emotions are complex and many people find it difficult to talk about or describe their own emotions. This may be particularly difficult in respect to emotions related to complex global phenomena such as climate change or COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we used a novel approach to takle this issue. Listen to my talk or take a look at the paper to find out more!

Uncertainty shapes our lives. This study explores how bodily arousal and interoception drive our choices under risk and ambiguity. We found that how we make decisions depends on how our bodies generate and how we perceive subtle changes in physical arousal.

Can the phase of your cardiac cycle alter how you gather data? This study tested whether sampling information during the systolic (hen the heart contracts) or diastolic (when the heart relaxes) phase changes our processing speed, revealing a direct link between heart timing and cognitive intake.

In this paper we show that higher incidence of binge drinking is associated with compensatory activation in attentional brain areas during successful response inhibition. This effect is attenuated in the fearful context, suggesting facilitation of inhibitory control in presence of fearful stimuli.

Why do people with fibromyalgia experience pain without a clear physical cause? This study reveals that their brains over-amplify and misinterpret vague bodily sensations as painful. Mapping these communication errors opens the door for new treatments designed to retrain how the brain perceives the body.

People often act on impulse especially when experiencing strong emotions.  But does this emotional impulsivity also affect our tendencies to drink alcohol?  In this review paper, Dora Duka and I analyse research to entangle how emotional impulsive may drive alcohol use and how alcohol use may lead to impulsive behaviours.