The experience of physical symptoms that cannot be attributed to an organic dysfunction (medically unexplained physical symptoms) is a puzzling phenomenon with a substantial impact on individuals, health care systems and society.

Dr Elena Constantinou will discuss in this talk how the experience of negative emotions can bias the perception of bodily signals leading to such medically unexplained symptoms.

Dr Elena Constantinou

Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Cyprus
Visiting Researcher, King’s College London

Dr Elena Constantinou is a post-doctoral researcher with a research background in areas of clinical and health psychology. She has a BA in Psychology and MA in Educational/Cognitive Psychology from the University of Cyprus. She obtained her PhD in Psychology in 2014 from the University of Leuven (Belgium). Her doctoral work examined how emotions can bias the perception of physical symptoms, leading to symptom over-perception as seen in functional syndromes like Irritable Bowel Syndrome, fibromyalgia or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. After her PhD, Dr Constantinou worked as a researcher in a series of research projects at Queen Mary University of London, Goldsmiths University of London and King’s College London. For the last two years (2017-2019), Dr Constantinou worked on the Fear Learning and Anxiety Response (FLARe) project at King’s College London, which uses an experimental paradigm (fear conditioning) to model the mechanisms underlying the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Dr Constantinou is currently at the University of Cyprus after receiving funding to conduct a research project, which aims to explore the coherence or concordance among multiple emotional responses and how this is linked to psychopathology, especially anxiety disorders. Research Interests Dr Constantinou’s research focuses on the psychophysiology of emotion, and more specifically on aberrant emotional responding as manifested in emotion-related disorders, like anxiety and depression. In addition, she is interested in the interaction between emotion and cognition: how emotions can bias cognitive and perceptual processes, e.g. the perception of bodily signals, but also how cognition (emotion regulation strategies) can influence emotional experiences.