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Joao Garcez Aurelio Santos

PhD research student

Clinical Psychology

Email: J.G.A.Santos@sms.ed.ac.uk

Tel: +35 (0)191 230 1612

Location:

3rd Floor, Doorway 6, Medical School, Teviot Place

Outline Biography

I graduated in Psychology from ISPA (Portuguese University) in 2006 and since then I have worked in different locations, with different responsibilities, namely:

A professional internship at the Lehr und Forschungs Praxis, a research and clinical practice centre belonging to the University of Vienna, Austria, funded by the Leonardo Da Vinci program;
National supervisor, in Portugal, of the study of “Health and Psychological Well-Being”, funded by private and public institutions, which sought to evaluate the current state of mental health in Portugal via a nationwide study;
Past secretary and current member of the Health and Psychology Research and Development Unit, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology with the purpose of producing research that has both theoretical and practical impact in the field of Health Psychology;
Currently developing PhD studies under funding from the Foundation for Science and Technology (full scholarship).

My research interests include but are not limited to different memory processes (encoding, consolidation, reconsolidation, recall), different memory systems and outputs (short/long-term, declarative/non-declarative, episodic/semantic/sensory and retrospective/prospective/episodic foresight). Additionally, I am very interested in how these processes translate into clinical populations, particularly depressed individuals.

Project Title

The objective of this PhD is to study Mental Time Travel (MTT) in depressed and non-depressed participants, thereby enabling a much needed better understanding of the mechanisms, phenomenal characteristics, differences and similarities related with voluntary and involuntary MTT into the past and future in both populations. Being the first study to our knowledge, that analyzes the above mentioned different variables in a sample of depressed participants, it will also allow us to better understand the phenomenon of depression, namely of how involuntary MTT influences depressed individuals and dictates and reinforces certain behaviors.

The analysis of the results obtained by a clinical sample and its comparison with a control group, will help to develop a global picture on MTT and its mechanisms. Given the existing doubts about the differences in mechanisms concerning involuntary and voluntary MTT, and the fact that the SPAARS model has been deemed one of the possible explaining models, it seems important to further analyze the results in light of this model and to test its applicability. We therefore propose to attain several objectives, namely:

Project details

Current Supervisor:
Professor Mick Power (University of Edinburgh, School of Health in Social Sciences)

Current Co-Supervisors:
Professor Victor Cláudio (ISPA & UIPES, R&D);

Professor Kenneth Laidlaw (University of Edinburgh, School of Health in Social Sciences)

Host Institution in Portugal:
UIPES R&D (Health and Psychology Research and Investigation Unit)

Funding Institution:
Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Scholarship SFRH/BD/69332/2010

Publications

Publications/presentations/papers list for Joao Garcez Aurelio Santos

This article was published on May 1, 2013