Recent work across the three research lines
A brief tour of work published recently, one item per research line. Full details and links are on the publications page.
Butyrate and fear extinction memory
Molecular Psychiatry, 2026 — The HDAC inhibitor sodium butyrate moderately enhances long-term fear extinction memory retrieval in humans.
Part of the MoodBugs programme, testing whether a short-chain fatty acid produced by gut bacteria acts as an epigenetic modulator of fear memory in humans. It follows earlier work showing that colonic butyrate administration modulates fear memory without altering the acute stress response, and that variability in threat processing tracks endogenous butyrate levels.
Interoception across organ domains
Biological Psychology, 2026 — Comparison of interoceptive abilities across the respiratory, esophageal and cardiac domain: a pilot study.
Interoceptive accuracy is often treated as a single trait, largely because it is usually measured in one modality — typically the heart. This pilot compares abilities across three domains in the same participants, which is the design needed to ask whether interoception is one ability or several.
Representations in the insula
Nature Communications, 2026 — Convergent and selective representations of pain, appetitive processes, aversive processes, and cognitive control in the insula.
A collaboration using multivariate approaches to ask what the insula — a region implicated in almost everything, and therefore explained by almost nothing — actually represents distinctly versus in common across pain, appetite, aversion and cognitive control.
For the complete and always-current record, see ORCID or the FRIS research portal.
