Talma Hendler

Talma Hendler (born July 9, 1955) is an Israeli psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher, known for her contributions to the field of functional brain imaging. Her research focuses on understanding human emotional responses to stressful events.

Hendler is the director of the Center for Brain Functions at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. She is a full professor at the School of Psychological Science, the Departments of Physiology and Pharmacology and Psychiatry, the Faculty of Medicine, and the Sagol School Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University. She is also the founding director of the Sagol Brain Institute in Tel Aviv.

Biography

Hendler received her bachelor's degree in biology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1979. She received her medical degree from Tel Aviv University and her PhD from Stony Brook University in New York State in the field of psychobiology. When she returned to Israel, she completed her psychiatry residency at Sheba Medical Center. She then joined the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center and founded the human neuroimaging research facility in Israel, the Sagol Brain Institute.

Hendler joined Tel Aviv University's School of Psychology as a senior faculty member in 2005.

Hendler was married to cinematographer Judd Ne'eman until he died in 2021. They have two daughters: Liba and Renana.

Research

Hendler's research mainly uses brain imaging to characterize vulnerability or resistance to psychiatric disorders. Some of her research interests include: the cause and consequence of traumatic stress, longitudinal biomarkers of trauma-induced psychopathology, anger in interpersonal context, neurobehavioral indications for ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ in goal-directed behavior, dynamic aspects of emotional experience induced by film clips and music excerpts, and the neural mechanism of emotion regulation. The research group she leads specializes in a wide range of advanced imaging methods which, in combination with physiological and behavioral data, focus on the study of emotional and perceptual processing in the healthy and pathological brain.

Hendler and her team studied brain responses in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients exposed to emotionally charged images, such as battlefield scenes. The study found that, even when images were too blurry for patients to consciously recognize, the visual cortex still showed strong responses.