Sarah Garfinkel

My work centres on the way emotion processing is altered in a range of clinical conditions including anxiety, autism, PTSD and psychosis. In addition, I am interested in how aberrant emotional processing can shape cognition to augment fear memory and alter attention.

The brain and the body are intrinsically and dynamically coupled, and my work investigates how signals from the body, with a particular focus on the heart, can interact with the brain to guide how we think and feel. I investigate emotion-cognition interactions in a variety of different ways, measuring both peripheral signals (using psychophysiology, such ECG) and centrally (e.g. fMRI).

I collaborate with psychiatrists and neurologists to understand the interoceptive mechanisms underlying aberrant emotion processing in clinical and neurological conditions. My research is fully translational, mapping out basic mechanisms with a view to informing evidence based novel treatments.