Emily Holmes

Emily A. Holmes (born 1971 in Surrey, England) is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist known for her research on mental imagery in relation to psychological treatments for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bipolar disorder, and depression. Holmes is Professor of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institute in Sweden. She also holds an appointment as Honorary Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford. The British Psychological Society awarded Holmes the May Davidson Award in 2007 and Spearman Medal in 2010. Holmes also received the Comenius Early Career Psychologist Award from the European Federation of Psychologists’ Associations in 2011 and the Humboldt Foundation Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award in 2013. In 2014, she received the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology "for her groundbreaking research into the role of imagery in emotions and emotional disorders [...] that encoding events as mental images—rather than in verbal form—can enhance both the intensity and the duration of emotional consequences." Biography Holmes grew up in Surrey, England. She completed a BA in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford in 1993. The following year she obtained a master's degree in Social Science at the Institute of Psychology, Uppsala University in Sweden, where she worked with Gunnar Jansson on haptic/tactile perception in blind individuals. She then attended art college for a year and followed this up by spending several years in New York. During this time she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art running touch tours for visitors who were visually impaired and also with homeless people who were not receiving adequate care or support for mental health conditions. The latter experience began to shape the subsequent direction of her life.