Depression and Anxiety Neuroscience

• 
  Professor of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience
  Ben Harrison

  habj@unimelb.edu.au

  View researcher's webpage

  +613 8344 1959

Research Overview

Our research group is devoted to the neuroscience of cognitive and affective processes and their role in mood and anxiety disorders – the most common form of mental illness.

We conduct experimental functional brain imaging research in healthy and clinical populations targeting core psychological domains of interest (e.g., self-related cognition, emotion/affect regulation, interoception). Clinically, we seek to develop treatment-oriented imaging biomarkers, and have sucessfully integrated our work into large-scale clinical trials.

Staff

• Prof Chris Davey, Head of Department
• Dr Trevor Steward, NHMRC post-doctoral fellow
• Lisa Incerti, Project co-ordinator
• Rachel Brodie, Research assistant
• Micah Cearns, Research assistant
• Laura Finlayson-Short, PhD student
• Hannah Savage, PhD student
• Alec Jamieson, PhD student
• Patrick Laing, PhD student
• Christine Leonards, PhD student
• Rebekah Truman, Honours student

Funding

PI Harrison, NHMRC project grant: "A neural systems model of fear dysregulation in anxiety disorders"
PI Harrison, NHMRC project grant: "A brain-based model of anxiety senstivity in panic disorder"
PI Davey, NHMRC project grant: "A randomised controlled trial of low-dose ketamine in youth with severe depression and elevated suicide risk".
PI Harrison, NHMRC fellowship: "Depression and anxiety neuroscience"

Research Publications

TOP 5 publications

Savage H, Davey CG, Fullana MA, Harrison BJ (2020). Clarifying the neural substrates of threat and safety reversal learning in humans. NeuroImage 207: 116427. PubMed

Harrison BJ, Fullana MA, Via E, et al. (2017). Human ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the positive affective processing of safety signals. Neuroimage 152:12–18. PubMed

Davey CG, Breakspear M, Pujol J, Harrison BJ (2017) A brain model of disturbed self-appraisal in depression. American Journal of Psychiatry 174(9):895–903. PubMed

Davey CG, Pujol J, Harrison BJ (2016) Mapping the self in the brain’s default mode network. Neuroimage 132:390–397. PubMed

Fullana MA, Harrison BJ, Soriano-Mas C, et al. (2016) Neural signatures of human fear conditioning: an updated and extended meta-analysis of fMRI studies. Molecular Psychiatry 21(4):500–508. PubMed