Güldehan Durman
PhD candidate
Research Interests
Many psychological interventions target emotional memory as an underlying factor to promote symptom relief in patients. However, instead of being the mechanism of action, emotional memory is perhaps only a theoretical construct that provides a strong rationale for clinical scientist and practitioners. Such a view would align with the network model of psychopathology, where mental disorders are conceptualised as dynamic networks of interacting symptoms without an underlying latent entity. In my PhD project, I investigate the function of emotional memory from the latent-factor and network theory approaches. My project is a part of the New Science of Mental Disorders (NSMD) consortium and is supervised by Prof. Dr. Merel Kindt, Prof. Dr. Arnoud Arntz and Dr. Tessa Blanken.
Background
I completed my bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Psychology at Emory University (GA) in 2019. I worked as a research specialist in the Dilks Lab, where I collaborated on behavioral and imaging studies on visual and social perception. To gain more clinical focus, I pursued a Research Master’s degree in Clinical and Developmental Psychopathology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2022, cum laude). Due to my interest in translational research, I conducted my thesis on the effectiveness of psychological interventions on ethnic and racial minority groups and worked as a researcher in meta-analytic projects under the supervision of Prof. dr. Pim Cuijpers, before I joined the Amsterdam Emotional Memory Lab in November 2022.