Diana Ferreira de Sá

Diana Ferreira de Sá
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Diana verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Saarland University | UKS

Dr. rer. nat.

About

27
Publications
3,584
Reads
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351
Citations
Introduction
Areas of interest: Fear Conditioning; Trauma research; Affective and cognitive effects of Intranasal insulin; Affective modulation of startle; Cortisol effects in behavior, cognitive processing and memory; Interaction of insulin and cortisol; Neuropsychological patterns of psychological disorders Cognitive Processing of Visual Food Cues;
Additional affiliations
Saarland University
Position
  • PostDoc Position
April 2015 - present
Saarland University
Position
  • Lecturer
September 2008 - February 2015
Trier University
Position
  • PhD Student
Education
September 2002 - October 2007
University of Coimbra
Field of study
  • Psychology

Publications

Publications (27)
Preprint
Full-text available
Environmental and genetic risk factors contribute to the development of borderline personality disorder (BPD). We conducted the largest GWAS of BPD to date, meta-analyzing data from 12,339 cases and 1,041,717 controls of European ancestry, and identified six independent associated genomic loci. Gene-based analysis identified nine risk genes. We obs...
Preprint
Full-text available
Tetris has been suggested to reduce intrusive memories and is being explored as a clinical intervention. However, the literature on the ‘Tetris effect’ has several shortcomings, which we aimed to address. We conducted a multi-site independent replication in healthy participants with a large sample size and detailed pre-registration. Experiment 1 (N...
Article
Full-text available
Previous studies showed that glucose has beneficial effects on memory function and can enhance contextual fear learning. To derive potential therapeutic interventions, further research is needed regarding the effects of glucose on fear extinction. In two experimental studies with healthy participants (Study 1: N=68, 39 females; Study 2: N=89, 67 fe...
Article
Full-text available
Background Research suggests that exposure therapy delivered in the morning is more successful than delivered in the evening, which is often explained by higher diurnal endogenous cortisol levels. However, this “morning exposure effect” might also be explained by other factors such as sleep or vigilance. Methods The current study aimed to disentan...
Article
Full-text available
Equine-assisted therapies are becoming increasingly popular for addressing physical and psychological disabilities in clients. The role of the horse’s welfare in equine-assisted service receives increasing attention in research. Several studies have shown that horses are able to perceive human emotions and respond to human stress responses. However...
Preprint
Full-text available
Previous studies showed that glucose has beneficial effects on memory function and can enhance contextual fear learning. To derive potential therapeutic interventions, further research is needed regarding the effects of glucose on fear extinction. In two experimental studies with healthy participants (Study 1: N=68, 39 females; Study 2: N=89, 67 fe...
Article
Full-text available
Childhood gender nonconformity (CGNC) seems to be associated with more mental health problems in adulthood. Previous research has suggested that this link might be mediated via the increased risk for aversive childhood experiences (ACEs) as a negative social reaction to CGNC. However, no study yet examined the role of resilience factors in this rel...
Article
The COVID-19 pandemic greatly disrupted our daily lives. Worldwide, people were confronted with health, financial, and existential fears or trauma-like experiences. Recent studies have identified an increase in stress, anxiety, and fear symptoms in connection with the pandemic. Furthermore, fear learning processes are central mechanisms in the deve...
Article
Full-text available
Extinction learning is considered an important underlying process of successful treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, sleep disturbances may impede this learning process: Current accounts postulate that sleep facilitates encoding by promoting neural plasticity during slow wave sleep (SWS). Based on this hypothesis, we tested w...
Article
Full-text available
Fear-extinction based psychotherapy (exposure) is the most effective method for treating anxiety disorders. Notwithstanding, since some patients show impairments in the unlearning of fear and insufficient fear remission, there is a growing interest in using cognitive enhancers as adjuvants to exposure. As insulin plays a critical role in stress pro...
Article
Full-text available
Cortisol, the final product of human HPA axis activation, rapidly modulates the cortical processing of afferent signals originating from the cardiovascular system. While peripheral effects have been excluded, it remains unclear whether this effect is mediated by cortical or subcortical (e.g. brainstem) CNS mechanisms. Cardiac modulation of startle...
Article
Full-text available
Cortisol is a stress hormone and potent modulator of learning and memory processes. If administered after learning, cortisol can enhance memory consolidation. Yet it is unknown whether cortisol administration after fear extinction learning strengthens extinction memory. Extinction is a crucial mechanism underlying psychotherapy of posttraumatic str...
Article
Full-text available
Social threat detection is important in everyday life. Studies of cortical activity have shown that event-related potentials (ERPs) of motivated attention are modulated during fear conditioning. The time course of motivated attention in learning and extinction of fear is however still largely unknown. We aimed to study temporal dynamics of learning...
Article
Nutritional state (i.e., fasting or nonfasting) may affect the processing of interoceptive signals, but mechanisms underlying this effect remain unclear. We investigated 16 healthy women on two separate days: when satiated (standardized food intake) and after an 18-h food deprivation period. On both days, heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs) and card...
Article
Stress glucocorticoids and insulin are important endocrine regulators of energy homeostasis, but little is known about their central interaction on the reward-related processing of food cues. According to a balanced group design, healthy food deprived men received either 40IU intranasal insulin (n=13), 30mg oral cortisol (n=12), both (n=15), or pla...
Article
Full-text available
Insulin and cortisol play a key role in the regulation of energy homeostasis, appetite, and satiety. Little is known about the action and interaction of both hormones in brain structures controlling food intake and the processing of neurovisceral signals from the gastrointestinal tract. In this study, we assessed the impact of single and combined a...
Thesis
Full-text available
Every day we are exposed to a large set of appetitive food cues, mostly of high caloric, high carbohydrate content. Environmental factors like food cue exposition can impact eating behavior, by triggering anticipatory endocrinal responses and reinforcing the reward value of food. Additionally, it has been shown that eating behavior is largely influ...
Article
Previous research has shown that food deprivation enhances the acoustic startle reflex when it is elicited during presentation of visual food cues. Frustrative nonreward may explain this effect, since visual food cues are also rated to be more appetitive and arousing during food deprivation. However, the impact of menstrual cycle and sex on this ef...
Article
Stressful experiences are often well remembered, an effect that has been explained by beta-adrenergic influences on memory consolidation. Here, we studied the impact of stress induced heart rate (HR) responses on memory consolidation in a post-learning stress paradigm. 206 male and female participants saw 52 happy and angry faces immediately before...
Article
Little is known about the impact of stress and stress hormones on the processing of visceral-afferent signals. Clinical data suggest that cortisol may lower the threshold for interoceptive stimuli, while a pharmacological administration of cortisol decreases the sensitivity for physical symptoms. To clarify the role of cortisol for the processing o...
Article
Full-text available
Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) is one of the most common diagnoses in children’s psychopathology. This study aims: to characterize these children’s neuropsychological functioning in the attention, language and executive functions domains, using tests of Coimbra’s Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (BANC); to describe these children’s behavi...

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