Despina Antypa

• PhD
• MSCA Postoctoral Fellow at University of Geneva

We investigated neural correlates of Emotion Recognition Accuracy (ERA) using the Assessment of Contextualized Emotions (ACE). ACE infuses context by presenting emotion expressions in a naturalistic group setting and distinguishes between accurately perceiving intended emotions (signal), and bias due to perceiving additional, secondary emotions (no...

Visual display of preliminary results of our research topic concerning fear processing in adolescents.

Purpose This study aims to identify common and distinct hemodynamic and functional connectivity (FC) features for self-rated fatigue and depression symptoms in patients with clinically isolated syndrome (CIS) and relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis (RR-MS). Methods Twenty-four CIS, 29 RR-MS patients, and 39 healthy volunteers were examined usin...

There is growing evidence that high basal cortisol levels and systemic inflammation independently contribute to cognitive decline among older people without dementia. The present cross-sectional study examined (a) the potential synergistic effect of cortisol levels and systemic inflammation on executive function and (b) whether this effect is more...

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a frequently occurring condition and approximately 90% of TBI cases are classified as mild (mTBI). However, conventional MRI has limited diagnostic and prognostic value, thus warranting the utilization of additional imaging modalities and analysis procedures. The functional connectomic approach using resting-state fu...

Purpose Τhe study examined changes in hemodynamics and functional connectivity in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) with or without neuropsychiatric manifestations. Methods Participants were 44 patients with neuropsychiatric SLE (NPSLE), 20 SLE patients without such manifestations (non-NPSLE), and 35 healthy controls. Resting-state...

Laboratory studies have consistently shown that stress impairs memory retrieval of individual parts (items) of a memory. The stress-hormone cortisol has been particularly linked to this impairment. However, it is unclear whether cortisol similarly affects the binding of items to associative context information in memory, i.e. the constituents of ep...

Background Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is frequent in elderly and a risk factor for dementia. Both insomnia and increased cortisol levels are risk factors for MCI. Objective We examined cross-sectionally whether increased cortisol levels are associated with short sleep duration (SSD) and/or the insomnia short sleep duration (ISS) phenotype, in...

Elevated basal cortisol levels in elderly may indicate dysregulation of the internal stress-related system, as well as dysfunction and structural alterations in brain structures necessary for cognition, such as hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Because of the close relation of executive functions and episodic memory processing, in this study we ex...

General Linear Modeling (GLM) is the most commonly used method for signal detection in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) experiments, despite its main limitation of not taking into consideration common spatial dependencies between voxels. Multivariate analysis methods, such as Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis (gCCA), have been...

Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) is a commonly-used MR imaging technique in studying brain function. The BOLD signal can be strongly affected by specific sequence parameters, especially in small field strengths. Previous small-scale studies have investigated the effect of TE on BOLD contrast. This study evaluates the dependence of fMRI results o...

Evidence from animal and human research shows that established memories can undergo changes after reactivation through a process called reconsolidation. Alterations of the level of the stress hormone cortisol may provide a way to manipulate reconsolidation in humans. Here, in a double-blind, within-subject design, we reactivated a 3-day-old memory...

Episodes with an emotional component preoccupy memory formation and this advantage facilitates their preservation and mitigates the impact of interfering episodes. The present study examined the relation of the emotional dimensions of original and interfering episodes to the memory outcome, using a reconsolidation paradigm. In a between-subjects de...

Objective To examine the hypothesis that perfusion and functional connectivity disturbances in brain areas implicated in emotional processing are linked to emotion-related symptoms in neuropsychiatric SLE (NPSLE). Methods Resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) was performed and anxiety and/or depression symptoms were assessed in 32 patients with NPSLE and 1...

Evidence from animal and human research shows that established memories can undergo changes after reactivation through a process called reconsolidation. Alterations of the level of the stress hormone cortisol may be one way of manipulating reconsolidation. Here, in a double-blind, within-subject design, we reactivated a 3-day-old memory at 3:55 a.m...

Experiencing stressful or traumatic events can result in disabling clinical symptoms of maladaptive emotional memory retrieval, which are only partly addressed by the currently proposed treatments. Cortisol modulation has been shown to affect emotional memory retrieval and potentially reconsolidation, offering an opportunity for developing more eff...

Emotional memories are commonly recalled with an increased subjective sense of recollection but not necessarily with more accurate context recollection, depending on the type of context. Response-focused emotion regulation techniques, such as suppressing and intensifying emotion expression, can alter subjective arousal and later memory and confiden...

The stress hormone cortisol, released when encountering an emotional event, contributes to form a strong emotional memory. Such emotionally arousing memories are recalled with an enhanced subjective sense of recollection, i.e. experienced in memory as more vivid and richer in details. We examined here whether cortisol plays a role in this emotional...