Project background

Approximately 1 in 2 people will experience a distressing event at some point in their life. In most cases, these memories naturally fade over time. However, for about 10% of the population, traumatic experiences develop into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) causing symptoms such as intrusive thoughts, panic attacks and sleep problems, greatly reducing their quality of life. These severe consequences raise the questions of what determines the fade of distressing experience and how can we prevent or treat their maladaptive manifestation.

Intriguingly, our eyes have been identified as a central factor within this mystery. On the one hand, paradoxical sleep or also known as rapid eye movement sleep (REM) named after is hallmarking eye characteristics has been linked to a depotentiation of emotional reactivity of distressing memory. On the other hand, performing slow horizontal eye movements while recalling a distressing experience – a therapeutic approach known as eye movement desensitisation reprocessing (EMDR) – has proven to be a highly effective for the treatment of PTSD and anxiety. Considering this obvious link of eye movements between REM sleep and EMDR, remarkably little to no research has been conducted to shed light into this relation to this day.

The University of Essex is excited to offer a fully funded PhD studentship as part of an ongoing collaborative initiative to tackle this question with a novel line of research which perfectly combines expertise from cognition, neuroscience and medical technology. It will uncover how distressing experiences are shaped by EMDR and REM sleep and will have huge impact on the prevention and treatment of trauma- or anxiety-related disorders and help inspire new, accessible and effective interventions.

The research is an interdisciplinary project led by an academic supervisory team in the Department of Psychology and the industrial partner SOMNOmedics – a German manufacturer of medical technology. It will combine psychological research methods with state-of-the-art sleep technology to conduct empirical research in healthy young participants.

We are looking for a dynamic and committed PhD student to undertake this research to advance our fundamental understanding and innovate new technology with our collaborative partner. The project will give the student a wealth of research experience both in an academic and an industry setting and will be particularly suited to students who wish to develop their career working within or in collaboration with applied research.