Liliana Capitão, researcher at the Laboratory of Psychological Neuroscience at CIPsi, represents CIPsi on an international team. She completed her clinical psychology training at the School of Psychology at the University of Minho in 2008, followed by a Master's degree in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford in 2010 and a PhD in Neuroscience from the same university in 2015.
Throughout her academic training, her main interest has been to understand the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying risk and resilience to psychological disorders, as well as the mechanisms associated with pharmacological and psychological treatments. To address these issues, Liliana uses various interdisciplinary methodologies, including cognitive neuroscience, psychology, brain imaging, and psychopharmacology, in a variety of healthy and clinical populations.
With a keen interest in research that has the potential to transform the treatment and care of patients with psychological disorders, the researcher represents CIPsi on an international team, which includes researchers from the University of Oxford, Bristol, and University College London, and is led by Catherine Harmer from the University of Oxford. The project "How does the SSRI fluoxetine work in adolescent depression?", recently funded by the Wellcome Trust in the UK, builds on her doctoral work, supervised by Professors Catherine Harmer and Susannah Murphy.
The project evaluated the neuropsychological mechanisms associated with the use of antidepressants in depressed adolescents, using methods such as functional neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, behavioral assessment, and neurophysiological recordings. One of the most important findings was the observation that fluoxetine (Prozac) influences emotional and brain processing of anger immediately after the start of treatment, even before subjective effects are felt.
Antidepressants are used by many adolescents worldwide and represent an important treatment option; however, our understanding of how these medications work when administered to adolescents is still very limited. The project team will build on previous doctoral work on the importance of anger/irritability in this age group, develop measures of emotional and cognitive processing assessment, and evaluate the mechanisms underlying clinical efficacy responses in depressed adolescents.
To do so, and adopting a developmental and interdisciplinary approach, the team will develop measures of emotional and cognitive processing assessment with a focus on emotional processing of anger, in collaboration with adolescents with previous experience of depression. In a later phase, the project will encompass studies with healthy adolescents, depressed adolescents, and animal models, to characterize the mechanisms underlying clinical efficacy responses. It is expected that these results will help optimize pharmacological treatments for depression in adolescence.
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O projeto “Anger in the mind and body: from unconscious cognitive mechanisms to psychophysiological and neural substrates”, da investigadora Liliana Capitão, foi recomendado para financiamento pelo Programa de Apoios de Investigação Científica da Fundação Bial - 2022.