Faya Reinhold
PhD candidate
Research Interests
I am a PhD student in the Amsterdam Emotional Memory Lab. Emotional memories have a huge impact on our behavior and subsequently on our daily life. However, studies have shown that it is possible to change a memory and reconsolidate an updated version. The opportunity to alter memories in such a way that we reduce the emotionality is a very exciting field of research. I am particularly interested in the role of sleep in emotional memory reconsolidation, as it seems to be the necessary last step in the reconsolidation process. For this, I will investigate the function of sleep for forgetting learned fear memories in fear conditioning paradigms.
Background
I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree (BSc) in Psychology from the University of Groningen in 2016. The fact that there is still so much to be discovered about the brain raised my enthusiasm for science. Therefore, the Research Master in Cognitive Neuropsychology (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2018, cum laude) has been the perfect fit. This Master’s program has given me a better understanding of cognitive processes in the brain and how we can measure them in specific experimental designs. Moreover, I learned about key brain imaging methods (i.e., fMRI and EEG), and was part of two projects that applied these methods (1. investigation of the impact of reward on the early visual cortex in an fMRI study; 2. investigation of differences in neural mechanisms related to attention in people with and without burnout symptoms in an EEG study).