Domain: Experimental Cognitive Psychopathology; Affective Neuroscience; Cognitive Architecture of Emotional Information-processing
Short Research Bio:
I received both my Master degree (2007) and my PhD (2012, under the supervision of Prof. P. Philippot) in Psychological sciences at the Universite catholique de Louvain (Belgium). In 2010, I also obtained a Complementary Master degree in evidence-based psychotherapy (from a conjoint program from both Universite catholique de Louvain and University of Geneva) and a post-graduate certification in CBT (Universite catholique de Louvain/Universite de Liege, Belgium). Alongside my PhD, I worked for three and a half years as an internship at the Psychology Department Emotional Consulting Center of the Universite catholique de Louvain.
My main interests are in the involvement of biased and disrupted information-processing (e.g., attentional bias, autobiographical memory, executive processes) in the maintenance of emotional disorders. During my PhD, I mainly focused on the involvement of attentional biases toward threat in the maintenance of clinical social phobia. This knowledge is currently a very hot-topic in the field of experimental psychopathology and remains critical for understanding how biased information-processing for disorder-related stimuli may causally lead to the maintenance of the disorder. As a consequence, this work bares important implications for the development of new interventions.
Since October 2012, I started a post-doctoral fellowship granted by the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research. I now turned to the issue of the neuro-cognitive processes (brain and basic cognitive processes) underlying the plasticity of biased information-processing for emotional cues. My main host lab is the Laboratory for Experimental Psychopathology (under the supervision of Pierre Philippot) at the Universite catholique de Louvain (Belgium).
For several years, alongside formal research, I also participated to the development and dissemination of several therapists' tools for clinical assessment (with a particular interest for the psychometrics) and intervention (e.g., development of a free-access software for cognitive rehabilitation in the clinical setting of social anxiety disorder).