ABOUT | Prof. Emily A. Holmes

Professor Emily Holmes, PhD, DClinPsych leads PERCEPT – Mental Imagery and Mental Health at the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health, Uppsala University. Her research is underpinned by a core interest in mental health science, and the translation of basic findings to create innovations to improve psychological treatments.

Holmes received her BA (Hons) in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, UK, and her Masters in Social Sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is also a clinician and completed a clinical psychology training doctorate at Royal Holloway University of London, and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, UK. She became Professor in 2010 at the University of Oxford. She is currently Professor at Uppsala University and is affiliated at Karolinska Institutet. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences – Kungl. Vetenskapsakademien (KVA). She was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts UK in 2022.

Her scientific contributions have been recognised by several international awards, including from the American Psychological Association (2014) and the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2013).

Holmes was a founding contributor and then served on the Board of Trustees of the UK based research charity “MQ; transforming mental health” until 2022. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the research charity “MQ Foundation” in the USA.

The main focus of Holmes research is mental imagery.  She has experimentally demonstrated that mental imagery has a powerful impact on emotion, compared to words. While investigating how we think in the form of imagery has fundamental relevance to the science of mental life, it also has relevance to mental health.

Her work on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and bipolar disorder reveals how mental imagery is key. Her particular interest is intrusive memories—imagery that springs to mind unbidden. She works on new methods to prevent intrusive memories after trauma, known collectively as “imagery competing task interventions” (ICTI). Current studies seek to reduce the persistence of intrusive memories after trauma exposure e.g. for healthcare workers who worked in the COVID-19 pandemic. The hope is to derive novel tools that people can use after trauma which are scalable and brief.

Holmes is keen to support the future of psychological treatment innovation, how interventions might be made more readily available to more people, and initiatives where different fields can come together under the umbrella of “mental health science”. Examples are: (i)The Lancet Psychiatry Commission on psychological treatments research in tomorrow’s science, (ii)Multidisciplinary research priorities for the COVID-19 pandemic: a call for action for mental health science, and (iii)  commentary in Nature on Psychological treatments: A call for mental-health science.

For a more detailed overview of research themes see here.