Mood, Anxiety and Trauma

Our research focuses on investigating the neural mechanisms of emotional disorders to facilitate developing new treatments. For this purpose, we use an integrative approach in healthy, subclinical and clinical populations. We employ various neuroimaging methods to determine brain structure, activity and connectivity and combine these with other methods such as brain stimulation or studying people’s feelings and experiences in daily life.

Unique contributions and highlights

One of our recent achievements is the successful completion of a large longitudinal project (SMARTSCAN), in which we examined the mechanisms of person-environment interaction, functional and structural brain changes after therapy and the risk to develop more severe psychopathology in youth with mild anxiety, depressive and psychotic symptoms. A new project aims to optimize target selection for Deep Brain Stimulation surgery, based on brain connectivity patterns and the outcome of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in the individual patient. We also pursue the integration of neuroimaging with new treatments through the development of neurofeedback protocols for the treatment of mood and anxiety disorders. This work is a collaboration with the neuro-modulation group and the Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre/ Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience.