Emilia Caya Lampe joined the Translational Social Neuroscience lab of Prof. Dr. Hein at the Center of Mental Health as a medical doctoral researcher in 2022. She is a medical student at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg.

Her research focuses on the effects of social interactions on mental and physical health in patients with affective and anxiety disorders as well as patients with chronic pain syndromes (CRPS and BIPN). In addition to subjective well-being and pain experience during and after a social interaction, the study will examine related physiological responses such as heart rate and heart rate variability. In order to investigate those variables, the project will make use of smartphone-based questionnaires and sensor-based ECG-measurements integrated into the daily lives of the participants. The research project aims to characterize factors of social contact that influence symptom progression and regression and therefor help improve the treatment of affective and anxiety disorders as well as chronic pain syndromes.