Emma completed her Bachelor’s degree in Biology at the Universitat de Barcelona in 2018, where she joined the Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit to complete her thesis on the effects of music on memory interference under the supervision of Prof. Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells and Dr. Neus Ramós-Escobar. She went on to pursue a Master’s in Research in Behaviour and Cognition at the same institution, continuing in the same group to work on the project “Playing and Singing for the Recovering Brain: Efficacy of Enriched Social-Motivational Musical Interventions in Stroke Rehabilitation”, funded by Fundació La Marató de TV3. In parallel, she earned a Master’s in Music Therapy (Universitat de Barcelona – IL3, 2021), completing clinical practice in a special education school with children with autism, Down syndrome, and cerebral palsy.
In 2020, she began her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells and Prof. Jennifer Grau-Sánchez, continuing work on “Playing and Singing for the Recovering Brain”. Her thesis aimed to design an enriched version of Music-supported Therapy (eMST) incorporating socio-motivational factors and test its effectiveness in chronic stroke rehabilitation, as well as to explore the presence of post-stroke anhedonia, a condition characterized by a diminished sensitivity to pleasure that may hinder rehabilitation engagement. The thesis includes four studies: a pilot study testing the feasibility of an app developed to provide self-training eMST sessions, a protocol study describing all therapeutic musical exercises, a randomized controlled trial evaluating the effectiveness of the protocol, and a cohort study exploring the prevalence and associated factors of anhedonia after stroke. In the final year of her PhD, she completed an internship at the Center for Music in the Brain (Aarhus University, Denmark), initiating a collaboration with Prof. Boris Kleber on a project exploring individual differences in singing reward.
Emma will defend her PhD thesis in December 2024 as part of the Doctoral Programme in Brain, Cognition and Behavior at the Universitat de Barcelona.
Enriched Music-supported Therapy and motivational factors in chronic stroke rehabilitation
Doctoral Programme in Cervell, Cognició i Conducta.
Supervisors: Antoni Rodríguez Fornells and Jennifer Grau
The thesis will be defended in:
Facultat de Psicologia – Universitat de Barcelona
Campus Mundet
Pg.Vall d’Hebron 171
Edifici de Ponent