Keynote lecture: Mental Imagery and Mental Health Science

Emily Holmes, PhD, DClinPsych is a Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Sweden, and is affiliated with the Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Clinical Neuroscience. Professor Holmes obtained her degree in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford, UK. She is also a clinician and completed a clinical psychology training doctorate at the Royal Holloway University of London, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience at Cambridge, UK. She became Professor in 2010 at the University of Oxford. Professor Holmes is an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA). She is the recipient of several international awards, including those granted by the American Psychological Association and the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Professor Holmes serves on the Board of Trustees of the research charity "MQ; transforming mental health”. Professor Holmes’s work as a clinical psychologist has fueled her research questions. She is interested in psychological treatment innovation in mental health – both in creating new techniques and reaching more people. Under the wider umbrella of mental health science, her approach brings together psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, mathematics and more. Professor Holmes’s research has demonstrated that mental imagery has a more powerful impact on emotion than its verbal counterpart. Her group is particularly interested in understanding and reducing intrusive memories (‘flashbacks’) after traumatic events, such as a severe car accident, traumatic childbirth, war, or events like the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end her research team in Uppsala are creating a hub, which studies intrusive memories internationally, with current collaborations including UK, Iceland, Columbia and Australia.