Dr Haeme Riva Paige Park

I am interested in examining mechanisms that are involved in human behaviour and affective/cognitive processes, the relationships between these constructs, and how they affect emotional and developmental trajectories in both healthy and clinical populations. I completed my PhD on schizotypal personality at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, which focused on nonclinical individual differences that lead to differential behavioural and neural manifestations (using fMRI, sMRI, and EEG). This was followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in experimental psychology/neuroscience at Ghent University, Belgium, where I examined the neural overlap between motivational and emotional processes using fMRI. I am now currently working in the Gatt Resilience Group based at Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA), examining the question of what makes some people more resilient to adversity compared to others. In particular, I am interested in how variability in mental wellbeing and resilience may be observed in the brain on both behavioural and neural levels across the lifespan, the psychosocial factors that contribute to such variability (e.g., personality traits, early life experiences), as well as genetic and environmental contributions (via examining twin populations).