The research of Professor Sarah Garfinkel centres on body-brain interactions underlying emotion and cognition. For example, she investigates how individual differences in interoception (detection of internal bodily sensations) can influence emotion and memory. Based in Psychiatry, she also determines how aberrant bodily and neural mechanisms can contribute to symptom maintenance in psychiatric conditions such as Anxiety, PTSD, Autism and Schizophrenia. She has a particular interest in the heart, such as heart-brain interactions underlying the gating of fear responses.
In each stage of her career Sarah has received extensive training in a number of diverse techniques, including memory and pharmacology (PhD, University of Sussex), psychiatry and neuroimaging (University of Michigan) and autonomic affective neuroscience (BSMS with Hugo Critchley). Together, these techniques provide her with the tools to pursue an integrative approach combining functional imaging (fMRI) with cardiovascular monitoring/manipulation to investigate body-brain interactions in emotion and cognition.
Interoception – a summary of two papers
My aim here is to introduce you to two papers on Interoception, written in 2014 and 2017, to give you a broad overview of the topic. I have touched on what each paper covers, with the links so that you can explore these more yourself in the Member’s Area. The first one is by Robert…