Staff

Dr Rachel Mitchell, B.Sc. (Hons.) Psychology & Neuroscience, M. Res. Biomedical Sciences, Ph.D. Psychiatry & Behavioural Sciences, Pg. Cert. Teaching & Learning

Contact Dr Rachel Mitchell

Administrative Duties

Durham University MRI Facility Manager.

Coordinator of Durham University NeuroImaging Collective (DUNiC).

Research Committee.

Coordinator of the ‘Abnormal Psychology & Personality’ teaching stream.

fMRI representative on Durham University Ethics Advisory Sub-Committee in the Department of Psychology.

Research Groups

• Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Social, Emotional and Evolutionary Psychology

Research Interests

• The cognitive and neural bases of auditory emotion cue decoding, especially in psychiatric disorders (the psychoses) and the elderly (healthy + Parkinson’s disease).
• Right hemisphere language functions
• Abnormal lateralisation of human brain function
• The cognitive and neural processing of conflicting sources of information

Teaching Areas

• Abnormal Psychology components of INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY 2 (1st year)
• Abnormal Psychology half of ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY & PERSONALITY (2nd year)
• Academic Tutorials (2nd year)
• Group practical in METHODS IN PSYCHOLOGY 2
• MSc Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychology Dissertation
• Psychology Project & Statistics

Selected Publications

Journal papers: academic

• Alba-Ferrara, LM, Fernyhough, C, Weis, S, Mitchell, R & Hausmann, M (2012). Contributions of emotional prosody comprehension (EPC) deficits to the formation of auditory hallucinations in patients with schizophrenia. Clinical Psychology Review 32: 244-250.
• Alba-Ferrara, LM, Ellison, A & Mitchell, RLC (2012). Decoding emotional prosody: Resolving differences in functional neuroanatomy from fMRI & lesion studies using TMS. Brain Stimulation 5: 347-353.
• Mitchell, R, & Kingston, RA (2011). Does age-related decline in prosodic emotion identification extend to discrimination of prosodic emotion cues? International Journal of Psychological Studies 3: 156-163.
• Alba-Ferrara, LM, Hausmann, M, Mitchell, R & Weis, S (2011). The neural underpinnings of emotional prosody comprehension: Disentangling simple and complex emotions. PloS ONE 6: e28701.
• Mitchell RLC & Barbosa Bouças SL (2009). Decoding Emotional Prosody in Parkinson’s Disease and its Potential Neuropsychological Basis. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 31(5): 553-564.
• Mitchell RLC & Ross ED (2008). fMRI Evidence for the Effect of Verbal Complexity on Lateralisation of the Neural Response Associated with Decoding Prosodic Emotion. Neuropsychologia 46(12): 2880-2887.
• Mitchell, R. (2007). fMRI delineation of working memory for emotional prosody in the brain: Commonalities with the lexico-semantic emotion network. NeuroImage 36(3): 1015-1025.
• Mitchell, R. (2007). Schizophrenia as a disorder of lateralisation for language that affects left and right hemisphere language functions. Brain 130: e68.
• Mitchell, R. & Phillips, L. H. (2007). The psychological, neurochemical and functional neuroanatomical mediators of the effects of mood on executive functions. Neuropsychologia 45(5): 617-629.
• Mitchell, R. (2006). Anterior cingulate activity and level of cognitive conflict: Explicit Comparisons. Behavioral Neuroscience 120(6): 1395-1401.
• Mitchell, R. (2006). Does incongruent lexico-semantic and prosodic information cause discernable cognitive conflict?. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience 6(4): 298-305.
• Mitchell, R. (2006). How does the brain mediate interpretation of incongruent auditory emotions? The neural response to prosody in the presence of conflicting lexico-semantic cues. European Journal of Neuroscience 24(12): 3611-3618.
• Mitchell, R. & Crow, T.J. (2005). Right hemisphere language functions and schizophrenia: the forgotten hemisphere?. Brain 128(5): 963-978.
• Mitchell, R. (2005). The BOLD response during Stroop task-like inhibition paradigms: Effects of task difficulty & task-relevant modality. Brain and Cognition 59(1): 23-37.
• Mitchell, R., Elliott, R. Barry, M. Cruttenden, A. & Woodruff, P.W.R. (2004). Neural response to emotional prosody in schizophrenia and in bipolar affective disorder. British Journal of Psychiatry 184(3): 223-230.
• Ranote, S. Elliott, R., Abel, K.M. Mitchell, R. , Deakin, J.F. & Appleby, L. (2004). The neural basis of maternal responsiveness to infants: An fMRI study. NeuroReport 15(11): 1825-1829.
• Mitchell, R. , Elliott, R. Barry, M. Cruttenden, A. & Woodruff, P.W.R. (2003). The neural response to emotional prosody, as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Neuropsychologia 41(10): 1410-1421.
• Mitchell, R., Elliott, R. & Woodruff, P.W.R. (2001). fMRI and cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5(2): 71-81.

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