Patricia Christian

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet (Social Perception Lab), with an academic background in cognitive neuroscience and clinical psychology. During my PhD in Systemic Neurosciences at the Department of Biology at LMU Munich, I began investigating the neural mechanisms involved in social decision-making, metacognition, and social cognition. In parallel, I trained as a clinical psychotherapist and worked in clinical research at the Department of Clinical Psychology at LMU. I have gained experience with a broad range of neuroscientific methods,  including EEG, fMRI, eye-tracking, and non-invasive brain stimulation as well as clinical research. My research is driven by a strong interest in how we perceive and interpret others’ subtle social cues and actions - core processes that shape our social understanding, and how those might be affected in neuropsychiatric disorders.

My research focuses on the cognitive and neural processes involved in perceiving and interpreting subtle social cues. In everyday interactions, we are constantly exposed to dynamic social signals—such as gaze direction, facial expressions, and body posture—that shape how we understand others' mental states, a process known as mentalizing. I am particularly interested in more implicit, automatic, and spontaneous forms of mentalizing—processes that often occur outside of conscious awareness but play a critical role in supporting efficient social understanding and interaction. My work aims to identify the neurocognitive processes and brain regions that underlie our ability to construct others’ attention and their mental states efficiently. In addition, I investigate how these mechanisms contribute not only to representing others' mental states but also to our capacity to monitor our understanding of the world, commonly referred to as metacognition. A further goal of my research is to understand how these processes may be altered in neuropsychiatric conditions, such as autism and social anxiety disorder, that are characterized by difficulties in interpreting social cues and constructing representations of others’ attention and intentions.