Andreas Heinz

Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin | Charité · Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences

Pavlovian cues can influence ongoing instrumental behaviour via Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) processes. While appetitive Pavlovian cues tend to promote instrumental approach, they are detrimental when avoidance behaviour is required, and vice versa for aversive cues. We recently reported that susceptibility to interference between Pavlo...

Background Previous research concluded that substance (mis)use is increasing among forcibly displaced populations. Nevertheless, little research has been conducted within a social ecological framework aimed at identifying and understanding the factors affecting substance (mis)use embedded in the post-migration context in high-income countries. The...

Behavioral adaptation is a fundamental cognitive ability, ensuring survival by allowing for flexible adjustment to changing environments. In laboratory settings, behavioral adaptation can be measured with reversal learning paradigms requiring agents to adjust reward learning to stimulus‐action‐outcome contingency changes. Stress is found to alter f...

Background: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a critical public health issue with sex-specific characteristics and the need for a better mechanistic understanding. Initial evidence suggests that progesterone can reduce alcohol intake, while estradiol leads to an increase. However, we lack knowledge about how progesterone relative to estradiol influence...

Rationale One hallmark of addiction is an altered neuronal reward processing. In healthy individuals (HC), reduced activity in fronto-striatal regions including the insula has been observed when a reward anticipation task was performed repeatedly. This effect could indicate a desensitization of the neural reward system due to repetition. Here, we i...

Importance Alcohol consumption (AC) leads to death and disability worldwide. Ongoing discussions on potential negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on AC need to be informed by real-world evidence. Objective To examine whether lockdown measures are associated with AC and consumption-related temporal and psychological within-person mechanisms. D...

Background and Hypothesis Current frameworks propose that delusions result from aberrant belief updating due to altered prediction error (PE) signaling and misestimation of environmental volatility. We aimed to investigate whether behavioral and neural signatures of belief updating are specifically related to the presence of delusions or generally...

Self-regulation, the ability to guide behavior according to one’s goals, plays an integral role in understanding loss of control over unwanted behaviors, for example in alcohol use disorder (AUD). Yet, experimental tasks that measure processes underlying self-regulation are not easy to deploy in contexts where such behaviors usually occur, namely o...

Recent longitudinal studies in youth have reported MRI correlates of prospective anxiety symptoms during adolescence, a vulnerable period for the onset of anxiety disorders. However, their predictive value has not been established. Individual prediction through machine-learning algorithms might help bridge the gap to clinical relevance. A voting cl...

Background: Obesity has been linked to altered reward processing but little is known about which components of reward processing including motivation, sensitivity and learning are impaired in obesity. We examined whether obesity compared to healthy weight controls is associated with differences in distinct subdomains of reward processing. To this...

Sleep is an important contributor for neural maturation and emotion regulation during adolescence, with long-term effects on a range of white matter tracts implicated in affective processing in at-risk populations. We investigated the effects of adolescent sleep patterns on longitudinal changes in white matter development and whether this is relate...

Introduction: Lithium augmentation (LA) of antidepressants is a first-line therapy option for treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Nevertheless, it is rarely used in geriatric patients mostly because of the fear of kidney toxicity. The purpose of this study is to investigate estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) changes and number of acute...

With the growth of decentralized/federated analysis approaches in neuroimaging, the opportunities to study brain disorders using data from multiple sites has grown multi-fold. One such initiative is the Neuromark, a fully automated spatially constrained independent component analysis (ICA) that is used to link brain network abnormalities among diff...

Introduction: Positively conditioned Pavlovian cues tend to promote approach and negative cues promote withdrawal in a Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) paradigm, and the strength of this PIT effect was associated with the subsequent relapse risk in alcohol-dependent (AD) patients. When investigating the effect of alcohol-related background...

The neurobiological bases of the association between development and psychopathology remain poorly understood. Here, we identify a shared spatial pattern of cortical thickness (CT) in normative development and several psychiatric and neurological disorders. Principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to CT of 68 regions in the Desikan-Killiany a...

Introduction: The emergence of Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) research in the human neurobehavioral domain has been met with increased interest over the past two decades. A variety of PIT tasks were developed during this time; while successful in demonstrating transfer phenomena, existing tasks have limitations that should be addressed....

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a chronic and fatal disease. The main impediment of the AUD therapy is a high probability of relapse to alcohol abuse even after prolonged abstinence. The molecular mechanisms of cue-induced relapse are not well established, despite the fact that they may offer new targets for the treatment of AUD. Using a comprehensiv...

The course and duration of therapy, withdrawal syndromes, and resistance to therapy are important clinical topics in antidepressant therapy. The reviewed clinical evidence may help to guide clinicians and patients when planning the pharmacological part of the therapy. The treatment with antidepressants is typically divided into different phases tha...

This study examines whether climate change-associated environmental stressors, including air and noise pollution, local heat levels, as well as a lack of surrounding greenspace, mediate the effects of local poverty on mental health, using the 28-item General Health Questionnaire. We recruited 478 adults who were representative of eleven of Berlin’s...

Background Research on outcome predictors in the field of transcultural treatment for refugees and asylum seekers (RAS) is scarce. We aimed to evaluate predictors of outcome of a group intervention (Empowerment) for RAS with affective disorders which were incorporated at level three of the stratified stepped-care model within the Mental Health in R...

https://www.dgppn.de/_Resources/Persistent/d3dfe92c23a0ed0e6001487f6b3689ef9da23dd6/Positionspapier_Klima%20und%20Psyche_web.pdf

Background: The association between blunted dopaminergic neurotransmission and alcohol use disorder (AUD) is well-known. In particular, the impairment of postsynaptic dopamine 2 and 3 receptors (DRD2/3) in the ventral and dorsal striatum during the development and maintenance of alcohol addiction has been investigated in several positron emission...

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is characterized by a combination of symptoms including excessive craving, loss of control, and progressive neglect of alternative pleasures. A mechanistic understanding of what drives these symptoms is needed to improve diagnostic stratification and to develop new treatment and prevention strategies for AUD. To date, the...

Background Alcohol use disorder is characterized by perseverative alcohol use despite negative consequences. This hallmark feature of addiction potentially relates to impairments in behavioral flexibility, which can be measured by probabilistic reversal learning (PRL) paradigms. We here aimed to examine the cognitive mechanisms underlying impaired...

Background Previous research concluded that substance (mis)use is increasing among forcibly displaced populations. Nevertheless, little research has been conducted within a social ecological framework aimed at identifying and understanding the factors impacting substance (mis)use embedded in the post-migration context in high-income countries. Met...

Human hippocampal volume has been separately associated with single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), DNA methylation and gene expression, but their causal relationships remain largely unknown. Here, we aimed at identifying the causal relationships of SNPs, DNA methylation, and gene expression that are associated with hippocampal volume by integrati...

Sleep disturbance is prevalent in youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Researchers have posited that circadian dysfunction may contribute to sleep problems or exacerbate ASD symptomatology. However, there is limited genetic evidence of this. It is also unclear how insomnia risk genes identified through GWAS in general populations are related...

This study explored the generality versus specificity of two trait-liability factors for externalizing problems-disinhibition and callousness-in the concurrent and prospective prediction of symptoms of conduct disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and substance use (i.e., alcohol use disorder and history of illicit substance us...

The COVID-19 pandemic is associated with various psychological stressors due to health-related, social, economic, and individual consequences, especially for minority groups such as refugees and other migrants who live in unstable conditions and have lost their social support groups. The aim of this study was to explore the impacts of the COVID-19...

Social isolation and discrimination are growing public health concerns associated with poor physical and mental health. They are risk factors for increased morbidity and mortality and reduced quality of life. Despite their detrimental effects on health, there is a lack of knowledge regarding translation across the domains of experimental research,...

Background: Autistic traits are commonly viewed as dimensional in nature, and as continuously distributed in the general population. In this respect, the identification of predictive values of markers such as subtle autism-related alterations in brain morphology for parameter values of autistic traits could increase our understanding of this dimen...

Background The Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) paradigm measures the effects of Pavlovian conditioned cues on instrumental behavior in the laboratory. A previous study in our research group observed activity in the left nucleus accumbens (NAcc) elicited by a non-drug-related PIT task across alcohol-dependent (AD) patients and healthy contr...

Black people and People of Color are disproportionately affected by racism and show increased rates of psychosis. To examine whether racialized migrant groups are particularly exposed to racism and therefore have higher risks for psychosis, this paper (1) systematically assesses rates of psychosis among racialized migrant groups concerning the coun...

Attenuated positive symptoms (APS), transient psychotic-like symptoms (brief, limited intermittent psychotic symptoms, BLIPS), and predictive cognitive-perceptive basic-symptoms (BS) criteria can help identify a help-seeking population of young people at clinical high-risk of a first episode psychosis (CHRp). Phenomenological, there are substantial...

Common variation in the gene encoding the neuron-specific RNA splicing factor RNA Binding Fox-1 Homolog 1 ( RBFOX1 ) has been identified as a risk factor for several psychiatric conditions, and rare genetic variants have been found causal for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here, we explored the genetic landscape of RBFOX1 more deeply, integrating...

In recent years, different forms of poverty and their interaction with mental illness have been in the focus of research, although the implementation of action in mental health care and policy making so far is scarce. This perspective article offers different perspectives of poverty and its reciprocal association with mental illness and outlines po...

Conduct problems (CP) in patients with disruptive behavior disorders have been linked to impaired prefrontal processing of negative facial affect compared to controls. However, it is unknown whether associations with prefrontal activity during affective face processing hold along the CP dimension in a healthy population sample, and how subcortical...

Importance: Alcohol consumption (AC) leads to death and disability worldwide. Ongoing discussions on potential negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on AC need to be informed by real-world evidence. Objective: To examine whether lockdown measures are associated with AC and consumption-related temporal and psychological within-person mechanis...

Aims: To evaluate qualitative research on substance use and substance use disorders (SUDs) among refugees in terms of practitioners' and substance users' attitudes, beliefs, and experiences. Methods: Six medical, allied health, and social sciences databases (EBSCO, PubMed, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, Scholar, and the Cochrane Library) were sy...

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a chronic and fatal disease. The main impediment of the AUD therapy is a high probability of relapse to alcohol abuse even after prolonged abstinence. The molecular mechanisms of cue-induced relapse are not well established, despite the fact that they may offer new targets for the treatment of AUD. Using a comprehensiv...

A mechanism known as Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) describes a phenomenon by which the values of environmental cues acquired through Pavlovian conditioning can motivate instrumental behavior. PIT may be one basic mechanism of action control that can characterize mental disorders on a dimensional level beyond current classification system...

In this preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis, we integrated the empirical findings of 27 experiments that had assessed stop-signal task (SST) performance in adult ADHD (1799 participants). Our analysis revealed reliable deficits in SSRT in the ADHD group, with a moderate effect size (g = 0.51). These deficits were not influenced by stu...

Background In recent years, there has been an increasing quest in improving our understanding of neurocognitive deficits underlying adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Current statistical manuals of psychiatric disorders emphasize inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity symptoms, but empirical studies have also shown consistent...

Self-regulation, the ability to guide behavior according to one’s goals, plays an integral role in understanding loss of control behaviors a pertinent example being substance use disorders (SUD). Yet, experimental tasks that measure processes underlying self-regulation are not easy to deploy in contexts where such behaviors often occur, namely in r...

This study aimed to build on the relationship of well-established self-report and behavioral assessments to the latent constructs positive (PVS) and negative valence systems (NVS), cognitive systems (CS), and social processes (SP) of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework in a large transnosological population which cuts across DSM/ICD-10 di...

Background Current evidence points towards a high prevalence of psychological distress in refugee populations, contrasting with a scarcity of resources and amplified by linguistic, institutional, financial, and cultural barriers. The objective of the study is to investigate the overall effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a Stepped Care and Coll...

Objective Adolescence is a critical period for circadian rhythm, with a strong shift towards eveningness around age 14. Also, eveningness in adolescence has been found to predict later onset of depressive symptomatology. However, no previous study has investigated structural variations associated with chronotype in early adolescence, and how this a...

Background Negative life experiences (NLE) increase the risk for externalizing (EB) and internalizing (IB) behaviors in adolescence and adult psychopathology. DNA methylation (DNAm) associated with behavioral problems may reflect this risk and long-lasting effects of NLE. Methods To identify consistent associations between blood DNAm and EB or IB...

Objectives: Even low to moderate levels of alcohol consumption can have detrimental health consequences, especially in older adults (OA). Although many studies report an increase in the proportion of drinkers among OA, there are regional variations. Therefore, we examined alcohol consumption and the prevalence of hazardous alcohol use (HAU) among m...

Alcohol misuse during adolescence (AAM) has been associated with disruptive development of adolescent brains. In this longitudinal machine learning (ML) study, we could predict AAM significantly from brain structure (T1-weighted imaging and DTI) with accuracies of 73 - 78% in the IMAGEN dataset (n ~1182). Our results not only show that structural d...

While there is substantial evidence that cannabis use is associated with differences in human brain development, most of this evidence is correlational in nature. Bayesian causal network (BCN) modeling attempts to identify probable causal relationships in correlational data using conditional probabilities to estimate directional associations betwee...

Background According to the reward deficiency syndrome and allostatic hypotheses, hyposensitivity of mesocorticolimbic regions to non-alcohol-related stimuli predisposes to dependence or is long-lastingly enhanced by chronic substance use. To date, no study has directly compared mesocorticolimbic brain activity during non-drug reward anticipation b...

Background Aberrant brain connectivity during emotional processing, especially within the fronto-limbic pathway, is one of the hallmarks of major depressive disorder (MDD). However, the methodological heterogeneity of previous studies made it difficult to determine the functional and etiological implications of specific alterations in brain connect...

Over the past few decades, neuroimaging has become a ubiquitous tool in basic research and clinical studies of the human brain. However, no reference standards currently exist to quantify individual differences in neuroimaging metrics over time, in contrast to growth charts for anthropometric traits such as height and weight ¹ . Here we assemble an...

Human brain structure changes throughout the lifespan. Altered brain growth or rates of decline are implicated in a vast range of psychiatric, developmental and neurodegenerative diseases. In this study, we identified common genetic variants that affect rates of brain growth or atrophy in what is, to our knowledge, the first genome-wide association...

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technology has been increasingly used in neuroscience studies. Reproducibility of statistically significant findings generated by MRI-based studies, especially association studies (phenotype vs. MRI metric) and task-induced brain activation, has been recently heavily debated. However, most currently available reprod...

Background Even after qualified detoxification, alcohol-dependent (AD) patients may relapse to drinking alcohol despite their decision to abstain. Two mechanisms may play important roles: first, the impact of environmental cues on instrumental behavior (i.e., Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) effect), which was found to be stronger in prospe...

Dieter Henrich, Manfred Frank, and others represent a tradition in the conceptualization of self-consciousness that emphasizes the importance of pre-reflective self-awareness. As already pointed out by Fichte, attempts to explain self-consciousness via higher-order reflective acts run into vicious circles. Conceptualization of self-consciousness is...

Introduction: Over the last decades, our understanding of the cognitive, motivational, and neural processes involved in addictive behavior has increased enormously. A plethora of laboratory-based and cross-sectional studies has linked cognitive-behavioral measures to between-subject differences in drinking behavior. However, such laboratory-based...

It has been suggested that autistic traits are associated with less frequent alcohol use in adolescence. Our study seeks to examine the relationship between autistic traits and alcohol use in a large adolescent population. Leveraging data from the IMAGEN cohort, including 2045 14-year-old adolescents that were followed-up to age 18, we selected ite...