Gaia Lapomarda

Dr. Gaia Lapomarda is a researcher at the Institute of Psychology, University of Innsbruck, based in the Department of Affective Neuroscience. Her work integrates neuroscience and psychology to explore how emotional states influence cognition and perception, with a strong focus on clinical applications.

Research Interests:

• Affective neuroscience and emotion regulation mechanisms
• EEG-based biomarkers of emotional processing
• Neuroimaging of psychiatric disorders (bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder)
• Impact of childhood trauma on brain structure and function
• Temporal perception and sensory processing under emotional states

Her research bridges basic neuroscience with clinical psychiatry, employing advanced techniques like multimodal neuroimaging (mCCA+jICA), machine learning for biomarker discovery, and EEG-based investigations of neural oscillations. A recurring theme is how affective states modulate fundamental cognitive processes like time perception and visual processing speed.

Key Findings from Publications: Dr. Lapomarda's work reveals altered thalamic-parahippocampal circuits in schizophrenia/bipolar disorder, demonstrates sustained EEG changes post-emotion regulation, and identifies structural brain patterns predicting trauma-related symptoms in borderline personality disorder. Her 2025 study on language comprehension adds a novel social dimension, exploring how perceived speaker identity influences sentence processing.