Marcus O. Harrington
Research Associate

Profile

Biography

• PhD in Psychology, University of Lincoln, UK, 2014-2018
• BSc in Psychology, University of Lincoln, UK, 2011-2014

Research

Overview

My research interests are broadly related to sleep, memory, and emotion.

During my PhD, I investigated the role of REM sleep and emotional memory consolidation in depression vulnerability. This research aimed to improve our understanding of the cognitive, physiological, and genetic risk-factors underlying emotional memory bias in major depressive disorder.

As a Research Associate, I have been addressing several important research questions:

• How does sleep help us to control our thoughts and regulate our emotions?
• What are the mechanisms that underlie sleep-associated memory consolidation?
• Can we enhance the emotional and cognitive benefits of sleep?
• Is there a relationship between consolidation and subsequent learning?

My research uses behavioural testing, functional neuroimaging, and psychophysiology.

Research group(s)

• Emotion Processing and Offline Consolidation (EPOC) lab
• Sleep Language and Memory (SLAM) lab

Collaborators

• Scott Cairney
  University of York
• Michael Anderson
  MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
• Hong-Viet Ngo
  University of Lübeck
• Simon Durrant
  University of Lincoln
• Kyla Pennington
  University of Lincoln

Publications

Selected publications

• Harrington, M. O., Ashton, J. E., Sankarasubramanian, S., Anderson, M. C., & Cairney, S. A. (2021). Losing Control: Sleep Deprivation Impairs the Suppression of Unwanted Thoughts. Clinical Psychological Science, 9(1), 97–113.
• Harrington, M. O., & Cairney, S. A. (2021). Sleep Loss Gives Rise to Intrusive Thoughts. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(6), 434–436.
• Harrington, M. O., Ashton, J. E., Ngo, H. V. V., & Cairney, S. A. (2021). Phase-locked auditory stimulation of theta oscillations during rapid eye movement sleep. Sleep, 44(4), 1–9.
• Harrington, M. O., Ngo, H.-V. V., & Cairney, S. A. (2021). No benefit of auditory closed-loop stimulation on memory for semantically-incongruent associations. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 183, 107482.
• Harrington, M. O., & Cairney, S. A. (2021). Sounding it out: auditory stimulation and overnight memory processing. Current Sleep Medicine Reports, 7(3), 112-119.
• Ashton, J. E., Harrington, M. O., Langthorne, D., Ngo, H. V. V., & Cairney, S. A. (2020). Sleep deprivation induces fragmented memory loss. Learning and Memory, 27(4), 130–135.

Full publications list

Google Scholar Profile