Dr Annemieke Apergis-Schoute

Annemieke Apergis-Schoute

Lecturer in Psychology
Psychology Ethics Committee Member & 2nd Year Tutor for Psychology

School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
www.qmul.ac.uk/sbbs/staff/dr-annemieke-apergis-schoute.html
Centre for Brain and Behaviour
ORCID Google Scholar X

Research

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Preoccupied Thinking, Procrastination, Student Mental Health, Prefrontal Mechanisms, Cognitive Flexibility

Interests

My research and science career started with my undergraduate research project at the Center for Neural Science at New York University where I studied how rats learn about threat using behavioural paradigms, electrophysiology and anatomy in the lab of Prof. Joseph LeDoux. Subsequently, during my PhD at NYU I developed auditory threat learning paradigms in humans using functional brain imaging (fMRI) to enable a direct translation from the rat work in the lab of Prof. Elizabeth Phelps. As a research associate at the University of Cambridge, in the labs of Prof. Trevor Robbins and Prof. Barbara Sahakian, I then enabled the use of these paradigms at the Wolfson Brain Imaging centre to study how patients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) flexibly learn when stimuli are threatening or safe. This led to a specific interest in prefrontal control and flexible learning in adolescents and adults with OCD for which I developed novel cognitive paradigms. Based on my expertise in cognitive flexibility I was asked to collaborate on the first deep brain stimulation (DBS) trial for OCD patients at UCL where we tested how bilaterally stimulating 2 separate areas in the basal ganglia impacts on cognitive flexibility, mood and the urge to perform compulsions. My main current research interest concerns the relationship between preoccupied thinking across mental health disorders (OCD, eating and anxiety disorders, health obsessions) and combining cognitive paradigms, computational modeling of (in)flexible learning with a specific focus on adolescent/young adult mental health and testing novel behavioural treatment strategies. Furthermore, I think it is the right time to invest in studying the link between brain and body and its importance in daily decisions, behaviour, social interactions and mental state through measuring biometric signals and interoception.