Vasileia Kotoula

Institute of Psychiatry Psychology and Neuroscience KCL · Department of Neuroimaging

Numerous studies have investigated when and in which regions the human brain distinguishes visual emotional stimuli. However, results have been mixed due to variations in time windows, brain regions, emotion categories, measurement techniques, and individual differences across neuroimaging studies. This review will evaluate the existing literature...

Computational approaches examine momentary changes in mood in relation to the environment. These studies have shown that various factors including participants’ past and previous experiences as well as contingencies between mood and the environment, could determine mood’s future responses to stimuli. However, several factors and their influence on...

According to influential theories about mood, exposure to environments characterized by specific patterns of punishments and rewards could shape mood response to future stimuli. This raises the intriguing possibility that mood could be trained by exposure to controlled environments. The aim of the present study is to investigate experimental settin...

Introduction The fast, intuitive and autonomous system 1 along with the slow, analytical and more logical system 2 constitute the dual system processing model of decision making. Whether acting independently or influencing each other both systems would, to an extent, rely on randomness in order to reach a decision. The role of randomness, however,...

Background: Resting state connectivity studies link ketamine's antidepressant effects with normalisation of the brain connectivity changes that are observed in depression. These changes, however, usually co-occur with improvement in depressive symptoms, making it difficult to attribute these changes to ketamine's effects per se. Aims: Our aim is...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a non-invasive technique that can be used to examine neural responses with and without the use of a functional task. Indeed, fMRI has been used in clinical trials and pharmacological research studies. In mental health, it has been used to identify brain areas linked to specific symptoms but also has t...

Imaging studies of treatment-resistant depression (TRD) have examined brain activity, structure, and metabolite concentrations to identify critical areas of investigation in TRD as well as potential targets for treatment interventions. This chapter provides an overview of the main findings of studies using three imaging modalities: structural magne...

Background Altered cerebral blood flow (CBF) has been found in people at risk for psychosis, with first-episode psychosis (FEP) and with chronic schizophrenia (SCZ). Studies using arterial spin labelling (ASL) have shown reduction of cortical CBF and increased subcortical CBF in SCZ. Previous studies have investigated CBF using ASL in FEP, reportin...

Background Several theories in autism posit that common aspects of the autism phenotype may be manifestations of an underlying differentiation in predictive abilities. The present study investigates this hypothesis in the context of strategic decision making in autistic participants compared to a control group. Method Autistic individuals (43 adul...

Mood is a key factor that determines our well-being and a lot of effort goes into taming and regulating it. The role of positive and negative environmental stimuli on mood and whether they can promote mood resilience or susceptibility, remains relatively unexplored. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether mood could be trained to bec...

Introduction: The fast, intuitive and autonomous system 1 along with the slow, analytical and more logical system 2 constitute the dual system processing model of decision making. Whether acting independently or influencing each other both systems would, to an extent, rely on randomness in order to reach a decision. The role of randomness however,...

The Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) is one of the most popular concepts amongst the scientific literature. The task is used in order to study different types of social interactions by giving participants the choice to defect or cooperate in a specific social setting/dilemma. This review focuses on the technical characteristics of the PD task as it is used...

Acute ketamine administration has been widely used in neuroimaging research to mimic psychosis-like symptoms. Within the last two decades, ketamine has also emerged as a potent, fast-acting antidepressant. The delayed effects of the drug, observed 2–48 h after a single infusion, are associated with marked improvements in depressive symptoms. At the...

Prisoner’s dilemma (PD) is one of the most popular concepts among scientific literature. The task is used in order to study different social interactions by giving participants the choice of defection or cooperation in a specific social setting/dilemma. This review concerns the technical characteristics of PD use in medical literature involving hum...

Background Considering the rapid antidepressant action of ketamine, we aimed to investigate its anti-inflammatory effect. Methods As part of a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled study plasma samples from 31 healthy remitted depressed were collected before and 1.5 hours after ketamine (0.5 mg/kg) and saline (placebo) administration in a two...

Background Ketamine as an antidepressant improves anhedonia as early as 2h post-infusion. These drug effects are thought to be exerted via actions on reward-related brain areas—yet, these actions remain largely unknown. Our study investigates ketamine’s effects during the anticipation and receipt of an expected reward, after the psychotomimetic eff...

A leading hypothesis for schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders proposes that cortical brain disruption leads to subcortical dopaminergic dysfunction, which underlies psychosis in the majority of patients who respond to treatment. Although supported by preclinical findings that prefrontal cortical lesions lead to striatal dopamine dysregulat...

Ketamine as an antidepressant improves anhedonia, a pernicious symptom of depression as early as 2h post-infusion. The effects of ketamine on anhedonia are thought to be exerted via actions on reward-related brain areas—yet, these actions remain largely unknown. This study examines ketamine’s effects during the anticipation and receipt of an expect...

Background Abnormal Cerebral Blood Flow (CBF) has been found in patients with chronic schizophrenia (SCZ), first-episode psychosis patients (FEP) and individuals at clinical high-risk (CHR). In particular, previous studies using Arterial Spin Labelling (ASL) found that SCZ have a global reduction of CBF in the cortex and increased CBF in the basal...

Background: Aberrant glutamate neurotransmission, and in particular dysfunction of the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR), has been implicated in psychiatric disorders and represents a novel therapeutic target. Low-dose administration of the NMDA antagonist ketamine in healthy volunteers elicits a strong blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD)...

Significance Anesthesia-resistant memory (ARM) has been puzzling because unlike long-term memory (LTM), it is translation independent in Drosophila . Although the two forms of consolidated memory are housed within the mushroom body neurons, they seem to employ distinct molecular pathways, with those that underlie ARM largely unknown. Elucidation of...

Ketamine produces effects in healthy humans that resemble the positive, negative and cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia. We investigated the effect of ketamine administration on brain activity as indexed by blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal change response, and its relationship to ketamine-induced subjective changes, including perceptual...