Professorship in Cognitive and Clinical Psychology: Vibeke Fuglsang Bliksted

Bliksted is currently leading a research project in collaboration with the North Denmark Region and Region Zealand, where the effect of a new treatment offer for young people with social-cognitive difficulties is investigated. The project involves the expertise of Australian researcher Dr. Frances Dark and is based on training and compensation of social cognitive functions.

She has also helped develop an innovative form of treatment aimed at young people with auditory hallucinations. Together with a specialist psychologist and the British researcher Dr. Charlie Harriot-Maitland, a manualized compassion-focused therapy offer has been created, where parents are actively involved and experience simulated hallucinations to strengthen understanding and treatment.

Vibeke Fuglsang Bliksted began her research career in the OPUS treatment unit, where she experienced a need for better tests to measure social cognition – the ability to decode emotions, intentions and social signals. This was the start of a PhD. with guidance from the international capacity Chris Frith, and later a research career with brain scans (fMRI) and building test methods in collaboration with researchers from Japan, China and Germany, among others.

Her research also embraces life-course studies, including a central role in a nationwide project on children of parents with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. The aim is to identify early risk signs and promote prevention and early treatment.

Currently, Bliksted and colleagues are developing VirtualReality-based social-cognitive tests and treatment methods targeted at patients with e.g. multiple sclerosis. She is also co-chairperson of the National Schizophrenia Database and the Danish multidisciplinary psychiatry groups, as well as chairperson of a working group that prepares new recommendations for the assessment and treatment of cognitive and social-cognitive difficulties in psychosis.

In addition to her professorship, she works as a specialist psychologist in Local Psychiatry Odense. Vibeke Fuglsang Bliksted was born in Thy in 1970 and lives in Silkeborg with her husband and twin daughters of 20 years.