Lucy Stafford

It's that time of year when many start thinking about applying for PhDs. If you're applying for a UK PhD position, here is a blog post I wrote a while back that might be helpful

#cognition #psychscisky #neuroskyence #psychjobs

Scientists discover surprising link between gut-brain interactions and mental health Every emotion has a physical side, but one organ has been curiously overlooked in brain-body research. Now, scientists are turning their attention to the stomach—and discovering signals that may chang...

Thank you to @psypost.bsky.social for featuring our @natmentalhealth.nature.com research on stomach–brain communication and worse mental health symptoms
www.psypost.org/scientists-d...
Was also shared on X but with weirdly more hair colour comments 🌈 than the science itself 😅:
x.com/OwenGregoria...

Even after recovery, relapse is heartbreakingly common in anorexia nervosa. Could the answer lie in the gut’s hidden signals? 🧵

Perceptual Dysfunction in Eating Disorders - PubMed Eating disorders (EDs) are characterized by abnormal responses to food and weight-related stimuli and are associated with significant distress, impairment, and poor outcomes. Because many of the cardi...

Reilly, Brown & Frank link altered taste, touch, vision, and gut sensing to anorexia and bulimia nervosa, highlight knowledge gaps, and proposing neurobiologically-informed strategies for clinical translation. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38730196/

🚨Do you want to join our online seminars?

Next month we have this amazing seminar with Anna and Noa!
Register to join, it’s free 🤓

#somatosensation
#interoception
#sensory
#body
#science
#neuroscience

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

"I feel full with shame": A qualitative perspective on gastric interoceptive sensibility “Am I hungry? Did I overeat at lunch?” Gastric interoception - the sensing, interpretation, and regulation of signals from the gastrointestinal system…

New qualitative paper! A foray into gastric interception. @lucysta02475610.bsky.social ran a LOT of focus groups, across groups with eating disorders, gastric disorders and neither, to understand how people experience the sensations from their GI system. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Stomach–brain synchronisation is associated with poorer mental health In common parlance, ‘being in touch with your body’ is often used positively. However, in a recent study, Banellis, Rebollo, and colleagues show that better stomach–brain synchronisation is actually a...

In this @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social Spotlight, I describe how a recent paper by @leahbanellis.bsky.social, @brainandstomach.bsky.social, et al. opens new avenues in interoception research, including those focussed on the subjective interpretation of internal signals: www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

🧠 New publication out!
👁️‍🗨️ 🫀 In this perspective, we draw parallels with anosognosia
for hemiplegia, commonly seen in acute stroke patients, in the attempt to explain anosognosia for the illness in anorexia nervosa, based on recent
computational accounts
 
www.frontiersin.org/journals/neu...

On Prolific, "we estimate that about 34% of online study participants use LLMs to answer open-ended questions atleast some of the time..."

Seems like a very timely paper for behavioural scientists using online samples: osf.io/preprints/so... ;

We really need more papers on this issue

A roller coaster of a thread for any interoceptive researchers ⬇️

Wow, this is the kind of evidence we need to move ahead in the field. I'll go out on a limb here: I guess it is more about the gut than cardiac and respiratory domains. Huge effort by @leahbanellis.bsky.social @micahgallen.com and the entire team 👏

the tldr of my thread is that, interoceptive sensing at rest has no relationship to mental health symptoms, and we think this is likely because we need to measure interoception during and after arousal, close in time to symptoms, with ecological measures.

The latest from our lab @the-ecg.bsky.social: interoceptive sensing at rest is *not* related to mental health symptoms 🤔 Read our study here 👇

Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation Interoception-the sensing and perception of the internal viscera-is widely cast as a transdiagnostic mechanism linking brain-body interaction to mental illness. Prevailing models propose that altered ...

Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇

This leads me to our final point. Interoceptive accuracy is not the construct for emotion or mental health. We think that interoceptive narratives and beliefs, and how interoceptive sensastions change during acute stress and arousal, is so much more important.

Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities

Research opportunity! Email or click the link for more info: www.canva.com/design/DAGmM...

Please share thank you!
#eatingdisorders #EDAwareness #emotions #ResearchStudy #ParticipateInResearch #PsychologyResearch #NHSresearch #UKresearch #students
@jrefox.bsky.social
‪@livuniresearch.bsky.social‬

‘It’s the perfect storm’: why are people with eating disorders at risk of suicide? A qualitative study - BMC Medicine Background Eating disorders (EDs) are associated with elevated all-cause mortality, with suicide cited as the second leading cause of death among individuals with EDs. Evidence suggests that individua...

📢New research 📢 Our new qualitative study provides the first in-depth study exploring individuals experiences and views regarding why people with eating disorders are at risk of suicide. bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
@saakshikakar.bsky.social @mrtzhrl.bsky.social
(1)

🚨 New preprint on the role of eating disorder symptoms in accelerating response vigor during foraging decisions 💫
w/ Sam Hall-McMaster

📜Link: t.co/C2lep57X4k

💻Code and data: t.co/C2lep57X4k

TLDR: RTs of the eating disorder group get progressively faster over the course of a block.

Could the diversity of findings in heartbeat-evoked response (HER) research be due to variability in methods?

In our new preprint my co-first authors, Maria Azanova and @willenjoy.bsky.social, and me systematically reviewed 132 M/EEG HER studies and found:

Positive body image and prevention of eating disorders in a school context The role of promoting a positive body image in improving young people's mental health.

Join us for this free online seminar - Positive body image and prevention of #eating #disorders in a #school context, Dr Hannah Lewis, 23 September 2025, 4-5PM UK. Please share and sign up here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/positive-b...

These are the most challenging times for early-career scientists and engineers.

My team is doing its bit to help by maintaining and even expanding our database of funding opportunities for early-career researchers.

We found 437 of them.

Download it freely here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

🧠 New study at KCL looking for volunteers with both #FND and #Autism to take part in an interview sharing your experiences!

- 15 minute survey followed by a 1 hour interview

Interested?
✉️ Please message me: lily.smythe@kcl.ac.uk

Thanks for sharing!

screenshot of the abstract of the paper - which can be found at the link in the post

The final paper from my PhD has been published!

doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Interested in illusory resizing and neural responses? Take a look at the abstract below!

Altered processing of self-produced sensations in psychosis at cortical and spinal levels Molecular Psychiatry - Altered processing of self-produced sensations in psychosis at cortical and spinal levels

just out in Molecular Psychiatry 😍: spinal & cortical alterations in processing of self-produced sensations in psychosis

including: touch, interoception, fMRI, SEP, HEP, behavior🧠🫀

#neuroskyence
#PsychSciSky
@paulasalamone.bsky.social @adamenmalm.bsky.social @rkaldewaij.bsky.social
rdcu.be/exN0e

Rumble Recognition: a gastrointestinal sound discrimination task to measure gastrointestinal interoception Gastrointestinal interoception is the sensing, interpretation and integration of signals originating from the gut. In contrast to chemosensory aspects of gut-brain signalling, perceptual aspects of ga...

And on a related note, I'm excited to read this pre-print paper on the new Rumble Recognition task of gastric interoception- looking forward to using this in the future! 🩺
sciety-labs.elifesciences.org/articles/by?...

Lucy Stafford - Take part in my research ⬇️Scroll down for links to the BODY experiment and the online surveys.⬇️

I'm looking for ~25 more people with a gastrointestinal disorder to complete an online survey on interoception. You can find this survey here: sites.google.com/york.ac.uk/l...

🙏

Today is the last day of our early bird rates!

We have talks on body perception, body image intervention, critical perspectives on beauty, LGBTQ+ experience of appearance pressures, male body image, stigma, indigenous body ideals...

Come join us!

lgboothroyd.webspace.durham.ac.uk/perspectives...

Image of paper title “testing the tripartite influence model among pregnant women”

New paper on body image during pregnancy! Free to download for 50 days kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

While many believe being ‘more in tune with your body’ improves mental health, we surprisingly found the opposite: worse mental health (higher anxiety, depression, stress, fatigue & reduced well-being)—with stronger stomach-brain connections.