Anja RieselHamburg University | UHH · Department of Psychology
Anja Riesel
Ph.D.
About
102
Publications
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Introduction
Anja Riesel works at the Department of Psychology, University Hamburg. Anja does research in Clinical Psychology and Biological Psychology. Her work integrates clinical approaches with neuroscience and psychophysiological methods to examine the neurobehavioral mechanisms that lead and relate to obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety disorders or risk to those disorders.
Main current projects are 'Endophenotypes of obsessive-compulsive disorder' and 'Transdiagnostic correlates of Anxiety'.
Additional affiliations
August 2019 - present
February 2013 - July 2019
June 2010 - December 2010
Education
October 2008 - April 2015
Zentrum für Psychotherapie der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Field of study
Publications
Publications (102)
Frontal alpha asymmetry has been proposed as a ubiquitous marker of state and trait approach motivation, but recent meta-analyses found weak or nonexistent links with personality traits. It has been suggested that frontal asymmetry may show stronger individual differences in situations that elicit approach motivation (state–trait interaction). To i...
Overactive error monitoring—as measured by the error-related negativity (ERN)—is a candidate transdiagnostic risk marker for internalizing psychopathology. Previous research reported associations of the ERN and individual differences in intolerance of uncertainty (IU). These findings imply associations between the subconstructs of IU (prospective a...
Fear learning processes are believed to play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of anxiety and stress-related disorders. To integrate results across different studies, we conducted a systematic meta-analysis following PRISMA guidelines to examine differences in fear conditioning during fear acquisition, extinction, and extinction rec...
Mental time travel utilizes mental imagery to recollect past experiences and to prospect hypothetical future events. This elicits anticipatory affect responses that are pivotal to motivate goal-directed behavior towards pleasurable and away from threatening experiences. However, the temporal dynamics of neural, physiological and affective processin...
Mental time travel utilizes mental imagery to recollect past experiences and to prospect hypothetical future events. This elicits anticipatory affect responses that are pivotal to motivate goal-directed behavior towards pleasurable and away from threatening experiences. However, the temporal dynamics of neural, physiological and affective processin...
The effectiveness of error-related negativity (ERN) in assessing individual differences hinges on its internal consistency. Despite evidence that task used to record ERN moderates internal consistency, this moderation is rarely examined within the same sample, risking inaccurate generalizations of psychometrics. A direct and conceptual replication...
Intact cognitive control is critical for goal‐directed behavior and is widely studied using the error‐related negativity (ERN). A common assumption in such studies is that ERNs recorded during different experimental paradigms reflect the same construct or functionally equivalent processes and that ERN is functionally distinct from other error‐monit...
Intact cognitive control is critical for goal-directed behavior and is widely studied in healthy and clinical populations using the error-related negativity (ERN). A common assumption in such studies is that ERNs recorded during different experimental paradigms reflect the same construct or functionally equivalent processes and that ERN is function...
Background: Error processing is a crucial cognitive function allowing humans to adjust future behavior and can be measured by the error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity (Pe). However, not all errors are consequential, or even dangerous, underlining the need for flexible adjustments. Overactive error processing transdiagnostically chara...
A widely shared framework suggests that anxiety maps onto two dimensions: anxious apprehension and anxious arousal. Previous research linked individual differences in these dimensions to differential neural response patterns in neuropsychological, imaging, and physiological studies. Differential effects of the anxiety dimensions might contribute to...
Die Forschung in der Klinischen Psychologie befasst sich mit den Fragen der Häufigkeit, Entstehung, Entwicklung, Aufrechterhaltung, Diagnostik und Behandlung psychischer Störungen. Im Fokus stehen insbesondere die Veränderung psychischen Erlebens sowie die Entstehungsbedingungen und die Frage, welche Maßnahmen dazu beitragen können, die Entwicklung...
Die Psychotherapie gehört neben der medikamentösen Therapie zu den wichtigsten Methoden, um psychische Störungen zu behandeln. Die bekannteste Definition für Psychotherapie stammt von Stotzka (1975) und beschreibt Psychotherapie als bewussten oder geplanten interaktionellen Prozess zur Beeinflussung von Störungen oder Leiden mittels psychologischer...
Was sind Kernmerkmale von psychischen Störungen? Was verursacht Ängste, Zwänge oder Schizophrenien? Wie viele Menschen leiden unter einer psychischen Störunge? Das folgende Kapitel beschäftigt sich mit der Symptomatik, Häufigkeit und Ätiologie der häufigsten und wichtigsten psychischen Störungen. Betrachtet werden Schizophrenie, depressive Störunge...
Wir haben in diesem Buch einen Einblick in die Teilbereiche Klinische Psychologie und Psychotherapie gegeben. Dieses Kapitel fasst nocheinmal die zentralen Inhalte und Aufgabengebiete des Fachbereichs und deren Anwendung zusammen und verweißt auf aktuelle Entwicklungen.
Ist es Liebeskummer, nur ein Stimmungstief oder doch eine Depression? Ab wann sprechen wir von einer psychischen Störung? Welche psychischen Störungen gibt es? Wie lassen sich psychische Störungen diagnostizieren und klassifizieren? Mit diesen Kernfragen beschäftigt sich das folgende Kapitel.
A widely shared framework suggests that anxiety maps onto two dimensions: Anxious apprehension and anxious arousal. Previous research linked individual differences in these dimensions to differential neural response patterns in neuropsychological, imaging, and physiological studies. Differential effects of the anxiety dimensions might contribute to...
Background
Although cognitive behavioral therapy is a highly effective treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), yielding large symptom reductions on the group level, individual treatment response varies considerably. Identification of treatment response predictors may provide important information for maximizing individual treatment respo...
Avoidance behavior is a core symptom of anxiety disorders that may hinder adaptation. Anxiety disorders are heterogeneous and previous research suggests to decompose anxiety into two dimensions: anxious apprehension and anxious arousal. How these two dimensions are associated with avoidance of and exposure to threatening stimuli, as well as their a...
The error-related negativity (ERN), a neural response to errors, has been associated with several forms of psychopathology and assumed to represent a neural risk marker for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety disorders. Yet, it is still unknown which specific symptoms or traits best explain ERN variation. This study investigated perform...
Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) represents a transdiagnostic risk factor for internalizing psychopathology. However, little is known regarding its psychophysiological correlates. IU is thought to render individuals hypersensitive to threatening events, even if the occurrence probability is low. To test this, we recruited 90 students who completed t...
Background: The error-related negativity (ERN) has been linked to individual differences in intolerance of uncertainty (IU). Specifically, previous findings imply a bidirectional association between the subconstructs of IU (prospective and inhibitory IU) and the ERN, which we ought to replicate and extend by testing for causal relationships.
Metho...
Despite a plethora of research, associations between individual differences in personality and electroencephalogram (EEG) parameters remain poorly understood due to concerns of low replicability and insufficiently powered data analyses due to relatively small effect sizes. The present article describes how a multi-laboratory team of EEG-personality...
Enhanced amplitudes of the error-related negativity (ERN) have been suggested to be a transdiagnostic neural risk marker for internalizing psychopathology. Previous studies propose worry to be an underlying mechanism driving the association between enhanced ERN and anxiety. The present preregistered study focused on disentangling possible effects o...
Objective
Unrealistic pessimism (UP) is an aspect of overestimation of threat (OET) that has been associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder/symptoms (OCD/OCS). During the COVID-19 pandemic, UP may have played an important role in the course of OCD. To investigate the relationship, we conducted two longitudinal studies assuming that higher UP pr...
Between-individuals variation in neural responses to errors and rewards is associated with the degree of risk for developing depression and anxiety, but not all individuals with perturbations in systems that generate these responses go on to develop symptoms. We propose that exposure to stressful life events may determine when these individual diff...
Studies have shown that people with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) have impairments in spatial working memory (SWM) performance. However, it remains unclear whether this deficit represents a cognitive endophenotype preceding symptoms or a correlate of OCD. We investigated SWM in 69 people with OCD, 77 unaffected first-degree relatives of peopl...
Previous studies repeatedly found heightened ERN amplitudes in anxious and worrisome individuals, but most studies utilized cross sectional designs that do not allow causal inferences. In this preregistered study, participants (n = 90) were randomly assigned to either a worry induction, reduction, or a passive control group. A flanker task was admi...
Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) represents a transdiagnostic risk factor for internalizing psychopathology. IU is thought to render individuals hypersensitive to threatening events, even if the probability of occurrence is extremely low. To test this, we recruited 90 students who completed two NPU-threat tests that separate temporal unpredictabilit...
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has particularly affected people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Exacerbation of obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) has been suspected for those with contamination-related OCD (C-OCD). However, the course of OCS over the ongoing pandemic remains unclear.
We assessed 268 participants with OCD (n = 184...
Alterations in frontal and parietal neural activations during working memory task performance have been suggested as a candidate endophenotype of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in studies involving first-degree relatives. However, the direct link between genetic risk for OCD and neuro-functional alterations during working memory performance ha...
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic is a major life stressor posing serious threats not only to physical but also to mental health. To better understand mechanisms of vulnerability and identify individuals at risk for psychopathological symptoms in response to stressors is critical for prevention and intervention. The error-related negativity (ERN) ha...
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has recently been linked to increased methylation levels in the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) gene, and OXTR hypermethylation has predicted a worse treatment response to cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Furthermore, OCD is associated with childhood trauma and stressful life events, which have both been shown to af...
Background
Indicators of increased error monitoring are associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), as shown in EEG and fMRI studies. As most studies used strictly controlled samples (excluding comorbidity and medication) it remains open whether these findings extend to naturalistic settings. Thus, we assessed error-related brain activity...
Indirekte Zusammenhänge der ERN über Risikowahrnehmung und Stresserleben auf die Entstehung von internalisierender Symptomatik während der ersten COVID 19 Welle in Deutschland.
Anxious apprehension and anxious arousal are central transdiagnostic anxiety dimensions and have been linked to divergent patterns of frontal and parietal alpha asymmetry. The present study examined the relationship between alpha asymmetry and anxiety dimensions in 130 individuals whose electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded at rest. We applied a...
The monitoring of one's own actions allows humans to adjust to a changing and complex world. Previous neuroscientific research found overactive action monitoring and increased sensitivity to errors to be associated with anxiety and it is assumed to contribute to the development and maintenance of anxiety symptoms. A largely shared decomposition of...
Objective
Obsessive‐compulsive disorder (OCD) is a complex psychiatric disorder with a substantial genetic contribution. While the specific variants underlying OCD’s heritability are still unknown, findings from genome‐wide association studies (GWAS) corroborate the importance of common SNPs explaining the phenotypic variance in OCD. Investigating...
The error-related negativity (ERN) is an event-related potential (ERP) component that is widely used to study human performance monitoring. However, substantial methodological differences exist across studies and it is unclear to what extent these differences may impact the reliability and replicability of observed effects. The current study used m...
Because obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a highly impairing and often chronic psychiatric disorder, there is high interest in novel add-on or alternative intervention approaches. The error-related negativity (ERN), a response-related ERP occurring shortly after incorrect responses, might provide a promising target for novel interventions. Inc...
Tic-related OCD (obsessive–compulsive disorder) was introduced as an OCD subtype in the DSM-5 based mainly on family and clinical data that showed differences between OCD in dependence of accompanying tics. Little is known, however, regarding neurocognitive differences between subtypes. We used the stop-signal task to examine whether differences ex...
The ability to detect and respond to errors, and to subsequently recruit cognitive control to remediate those errors, is critical to successful adaptation in a changing environment. However, there is also evidence that, for anxious individuals, this error signal is enhanced, highlighting affective and motivational influences on error monitoring. Th...
Hyperactive error monitoring is a robust neurocognitive characteristic in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Yet, relatively little is known about the flexibility and potential moderators of error monitoring in OCD. The current study investigates error monitoring in 30 healthy participants and 28 patients with OCD using a flanker task in 2 condit...
Previous research has demonstrated that task‐irrelevant emotional distractors interfere with task performance especially under low phasic executive control (i.e., in nonconflict trials). In the present study, we measured medio‐frontal ERPs (N2 and correct‐related negativity, CRN) to elucidate which aspects of task performance are affected by emotio...
Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) show dysfunctions of the fronto-striatal circuitry, which imply corresponding oculomotor deficits including smooth pursuit eye movements (SPEM). However, evidence for a deficit in SPEM is inconclusive, with some studies reporting reduced velocity gain while others did not find any SPEM dysfunctions...
Background
Increased neural error-signals have been observed in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety disorders, and inconsistently in depression. Reduced neural error-signals have been observed in substance use disorders (SUD). Thus, alterations in error-monitoring are proposed as a transdiagnostic endophenotype. To strengthen this notion,...
Increasing evidence indicates that patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) exhibit alterations in fronto-striatal circuitry. Performance deficits in the antisaccade task would support this model, but results from previous small-scale studies have been inconclusive as either increased error rates, prolonged antisaccade latencies, both or n...
Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) show deficient planning capacity in the Tower of London (TOL) problem solving task. Preliminary evidence for similar deficits in unaffected first-degree relatives suggests that impaired planning may constitute an endophenotype of OCD. However, results on this issue are inconsistent, possibly owing t...
Touch is central to mammalian communication, socialisation, and wellbeing. Despite this prominence, interpersonal touch is relatively understudied. In this preregistered investigation, we assessed the influence of interpersonal touch on the subjective, neural, and behavioural correlates of cognitive control. Forty-five romantic couples were recruit...
Touch is central to mammalian communication, socialisation, and wellbeing. Despite this prominence, interpersonal touch is relatively understudied. In this preregistered investigation, we assessed the influence of interpersonal touch on the subjective, neural, and behavioural correlates of cognitive control. Forty-five romantic couples were recruit...
Previous research in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has indicated performance decrements in working memory (WM) and response inhibition. However, underlying neural mechanisms of WM deficits are not well understood to date, and empirical evidence for a proposed conceptual link to inhibition deficits is missing.
We investigated WM...
Frontal electroencephalographic alpha asymmetry as an indicator of trait approach and trait inhibition systems has previously been studied in individuals with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) with mixed results. We explored frontal alpha asymmetry as a possible risk factor in OCD by investigating a large sample of OCD patients (n = 113), healthy...
Recent evidence indicates that patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as well as their unaffected first-degree relatives show deficits in the volitional control of saccades, suggesting that volitional saccade performance may constitute an endophenotype of OCD. Here, we aimed to replicate and extend these findings in a large, independent...
Objective:
The etiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is assumed to involve interactions between genetically determined vulnerability factors and significant environmental features. Here, we aim to investigate how the personality trait harm avoidance and the experience of childhood adversities contribute to OCD.
Method:
A total of 169 p...
Background:
Feelings of doubt and perseverative behaviours are key symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and have been linked to hyperactive error and conflict signals in the brain. While enhanced neural correlates of error monitoring have been robustly shown, far less is known about conflict processing and adaptation in OCD.
Method:
W...
Background
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a severe psychiatric disorder, which aggregates in families. Its etiology is assumed to involve interactions between genetically determined vulnerability factors and critical environmental influences. In the present study, we aim to investigate how the personality trait harm avoidance and the experi...
Hyperactive error-related brain activity has been found in individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), generalized and social anxiety as well as depression and has been proposed as a transdiagnostic marker. The specific phenotype to which it is related is still debated and anxious apprehension, threat sensitivity and checking have been pr...
Endophenotypes are conceived as measurable but not directly observable features of mental disorders that link clinical symptoms with their genetic underpinnings. They promise to guide the search for specific causal gene variants but also to understand mechanisms of symptom generation more precisely. Several criteria have been listed that must been...
Brain correlates of performance-monitoring have been shown to be hyperactive in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), indexed by enhanced amplitudes of the error-related negativity (ERN) in the event-related potential (ERP). This hyperactivity was found to be temporally stable, independent of symptom remission, and could not be further...
Overactive performance monitoring, as measured by the error-related negativity in the event-related brain potential, represents one of the most robust psychophysiological alterations in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It has been proposed as an endophenotype for OCD because it is heritable and more prevalent in families of OCD patients. Consis...
Overactive performance monitoring, indexed by greater error-related brain activity, has been frequently observed in individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Similar alterations have been found in individuals with major depressive and generalized anxiety disorders. The main objective was to extend these findings by investigating perform...
The present study investigated the modulation of the N2 and the correct-related negativity (CRN) by conflict frequency. Conflict costs, as measured by reaction times and error rate, were reduced with increasing conflict frequency, indicating improved conflict resolution. N2 amplitudes in incompatible trials increased with higher conflict frequency,...
The feedback negativity (FN) is an event-related potential component which is typically conceptualized as a negativity in response to losses that is absent in response to gains. However, there is also evidence that variation in the FN reflects the neural response to gains. The present study sought to explore these possibilities by manipulating the...
Overactive performance monitoring has been consistently reported in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD is a clinically heterogeneous disorder and is characterized by several symptom dimensions that may have partially distinct neural correlates. We examined whether performance-monitoring alterations are related to symptom severity and symptom...
