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December 2003 - present
Publications
Publications (60)
Background
Attentional biases to emotional information are assumed to play a crucial role in the onset and maintenance of depression. Moreover, recent studies show that biases may remain present in previously affected individuals during non-symptomatic stages even after acute depression has fully subsided. For example, in an investigation probing a...
Zusammenfassung: Fragestellung: Es wurde untersucht, ob Alkoholkonsum während einer abstinenzorientierten Entwöhnungsbehandlung einen Zusammenhang mit dem Abstinenzstatus und der beruflichen Teilhabe ein Jahr nach Behandlungsende aufweist. Außerdem wurde untersucht, ob der Zusammenhang durch andere bekannte Prädiktoren langfristiger Abstinenz beein...
The clinician-rated Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) is a widely used assessment tool for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, the measurement invariance (MI) properties of the Y-BOCS, a prerequisite for group or time point comparisons in clinical research, have received little attention in previous studies. In this study, we...
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a prevalent mental disorder affecting ~2–3% of the population. This disorder involves genetic and, possibly, epigenetic risk factors. The dynamic nature of epigenetics also presents a promising avenue for identifying biomarkers associated with symptom severity, clinical progression, and treatment response in O...
Background:
Depression is highly prevalent among individuals with chronic back pain. Internet-based interventions can be effective in treating and preventing depression in this patient group, but it is unclear who benefits most from this intervention format.
Method:
In an analysis of two randomized trials (N = 504), we explored ways to predict h...
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental disorder affecting 2-3% of the general population. The dynamic nature of epigenetics provides a unique opportunity to find biomarkers of OCD symptoms, clinical progression, and treatment response. Consequently, we analyzed a case-control study on Illumina Methylation EPIC BeadChip from 185 OCD patient...
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental disorder affecting 2-3% of the general population. The dynamic nature of epigenetics provides a unique opportunity to find biomarkers of OCD symptoms, clinical progression, and treatment response. Consequently, we analyzed a case-control study on Illumina Methylation EPIC BeadChip from 185 OCD patient...
Background: Exposure and response prevention is effective and recommended as the first choice for treating obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD). Its mechanisms of action are rarely studied, but two major theories make distinct assumptions: while the emotional processing theory assumes that treatment effects are associated with habituation within an...
Acute major depression is characterized by specific abnormalities in the way emotional material is attended to. In late stages of stimulus processing, clinically depressed and dysphoric individuals show difficulties to disengage attention from emotionally negative material. It is unclear, however, whether aberrant disengagement is a transitory atte...
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...
Background
Examining predictive biomarkers to identify individuals who will likely benefit from a specific treatment is important for the development of targeted interventions. The late positive potential (LPP) is a neural marker of attention and elaborated stimulus processing, and increased LPP responses to negative stimuli are characteristic of p...
A core challenge in modeling partial measurement invariance (MI) is choosing reference items as anchors for which MI indeed holds. Many approaches dealing with this issue have been proposed, each making a different assumption about MI and yielding a single set of anchor items. Here, we consider the case where i) partial MI modeling is used for esti...
Background
Exposure and response prevention is effective and recommended as the first choice for treating obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD). Its mechanisms of action are rarely studied, but two major theories make distinct assumptions: while the emotional processing theory assumes that treatment effects are associated with habituation within and...
Introduction:
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has proven its efficacy in randomized controlled trials (RCTs).
Objective:
To test generalizability to routine care settings, we conducted an effectiveness study to provide naturalistic outcome data and their predictors.
Methods:
Pre-post changes in sympto...
Pavlovian learning mechanisms are of great importance both for models of psychiatric disorders and treatment approaches, but understudied in obsessive‐compulsive disorder (OCD). Using an established Pavlovian fear conditioning and reversal procedure, we studied skin conductance responses in 41 patients with OCD and in 32 matched healthy control par...
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...
Objective:
Evidence of larger drug effects in highly standardised studies (efficacy) compared to clinical routine (effectiveness) is discussed as efficacy-effectiveness gap. This study aimed to quantify effect size differences of RCTs and non-RCTs in the treatment of depression with venlafaxine and duloxetine and to identify effect modifying predi...
Pavlovian learning mechanisms are of great importance both for models of psychiatric disorders and treatment approaches, but understudied in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Using an established Pavlovian fear conditioning and reversal procedure, we studied skin conductance responses (SCRs) in 41 patients with OCD and in 32 matched healthy cont...
Objectives: Machine learning models predicting treatment outcomes for individual patients may yield high clinical utility. However, few studies tested the utility of easy to acquire and low-cost sociodemographic and clinical data. In previous work, we reported significant predictions still insufficient for immediate clinical use in a sample with br...
Background
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an effective treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and may afford stable long-term improvements. It is not clear, however, how stability or symptom recurrence can be predicted at the time of termination of CBT.
Method
In a 1-year follow-up intention-to-treat study with 120 OCD patients r...
Die Research-Domain-Criteria-Initiative und andere haben vorgeschlagen, zur Konzeption psychischer Störungen dimensionale psychologische Konstrukte zu verwenden. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt mehrere Experimente, in denen mit Augenbewegungsaufgaben das Konstrukt der kognitiven Kontrolle evaluiert wurde. Die Studien sollten klären, welche kognit...
Objective:
Previous studies have found evidence of an attentional bias for trauma-related stimuli in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using eye-tracking (ET) technlogy. However, it is unclear whether findings for PTSD after traumatic events in adulthood can be transferred to PTSD after interpersonal trauma in childhood. The latter is often acc...
Previous research using the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) suggests that the heterogeneous symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) may reflect four underlying dimensions. However, past results vary substantially, which may be due to (a) the reliance on aggregated scores, (b) the common use of exploratory factor analyses, and...
Anliegen Präventionsstrategien und Präferenzen von Zwangsmaßnahmen (ZM) wurden aus der Sicht von psychiatrischen Patienten erfasst.
Methode Teilstrukturierte Interviews mit 90 überwiegend zwangserfahrenen Patienten mit psychotischen Erkrankungen.
Ergebnis und Diskussion Aus Patientensicht könnten ZM durch ein größeres Angebot an Einzeltherapien, Ve...
Clinical and theoretical models suggest deficient volitional initiation of action in schizophrenia patients. Recent research provided an experimental model of testing this assumption using saccade tasks. However, inconsistent findings necessitate a specification of conditions on which the deficit may occur. The present study sought to detect mechan...
This study explores whether self-disorders occur and can be assessed reliably in a non-clinical sample, and whether the prevalence of these anomalies depends upon the degree of psychometrically defined schizotypy. Participants with either high (n=30) or low (n=20) schizotypy scores were interviewed using a modified version of the Examination of Ano...
Although externally as well as internally-guided eye movements allow us to flexibly explore the visual environment, their differential neural mechanisms remain elusive. A better understanding of these neural mechanisms will help us to understand the control of action and to elucidate the nature of cognitive deficits in certain psychiatric populatio...
Slowed initiation of volitional but not visually guided saccades indicates impaired volitional action control in schizophrenia patients (SZ). The present study aimed at identifying neural correlates of this specific deficit. Fourteen SZ and 13 healthy control participants (HC) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing volitio...
Saccades made to the opposite side of a visual stimulus (antisaccades) and to central cues (simple volitional saccades) both require active response selection but whether the mechanisms of response selection differ between these tasks is unclear. Response selection can be assessed by increasing the number of response alternatives: this leads to inc...
Recent research suggests that patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have deficits in the volitional control of saccades. Specific evidence comes from increased latencies of saccadic eye movements when they were volitionally executed but not when they were visually guided. The present study sought to test whether this deviance represents...
Schizophrenia (SZ) patients showed increased volitional saccade latencies, suggesting deficient volitional initiation of action. Yet increased volitional saccade latencies may also result from deficits in attention shifts. To dissociate attention shifting and saccade initiation, we asked 25 SZ patients and 25 healthy subjects to make saccades towar...
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients show deficits in tasks of executive functioning like the antisaccade (AS) task. These deficits suggest problems in response inhibition or volitional saccade generation. Thirty patients (15 nonmedicated) and 30 healthy subjects performed antisaccades and simple volitional saccades (SVS), that is, centrall...
The antisaccade task has proven highly useful in basic and clinical neuroscience, and the neural structures involved are well documented. However, the cognitive and neural mechanisms that mediate task performance are not yet understood. An event-related fMRI study was designed to dissociate the neural correlates of two putative key functions, volit...
Schizophrenia patients show impaired saccadic response switching, pointing to action control deficits at the level of response selection. Previous studies on healthy subjects suggested that response switch effects might decrease if the prior response is longer ago, reflecting a slow dissipation of the response program persisting from the previous t...
Poor antisaccade performance is a reliable index of action control deficits in schizophrenia. To further elucidate the underlying cognitive impairments, the current study aimed to confirm effects of switching the response direction on saccadic performance and to investigate whether response switch effects relate to perseveration. Fourteen schizophr...
The antisaccade task is a model of the conflict between an unwanted reflexive response (which must be inhibited) and a complex volitional response (which must be generated). The present experiment aimed to investigate separately the neural correlates of these cognitive components using a delayed saccade paradigm to dissociate saccade inhibition fro...
„Aufmerksamkeit“ ist ein Begriff für verschiedene Eigenschaften menschlicher Informationsverarbeitung. Von Aufmerksamkeit
sprechen wir z. B. dann, wenn die Informationsverarbeitung in bestimmter Weise ausgerichtet wird. Beobachten wir unsere Umgebung,
werden wir bestimmte Veränderungen umso genauer wahrnehmen, je aufmerksamer wir sind. Lenken wir u...
Based on a review of neurobiological and neuropsychological findings in schizophrenia, we illustrate how experimental neuropsychological research contributes to the understanding of schizophrenia. It is shown that cognitive performance deficits are a central feature of schizophrenia. They are closely connected with changes of brain physiology and a...
Auf Grundlage eines Überblicks über neurobiologische und neuropsychologische Befunde bei Schizophrenie wird dargestellt, wie experimentell-neuropsychologische Forschung zum Verständnis schizophrener Erkrankungen beitragen kann. Es wird gezeigt, dass kognitive Leistungsdefizite ein zentrales Merkmal schizophrener Erkrankungen sind. Sie stehen in eng...
Event-related potential (ERP) studies identified the error-related negativity (Ne/ERN) and the error positivity (Pe) to be associated with performance errors. However, the functional significance of these components is not yet resolved. With the present study we intended to further investigate to what extent these components are related to error aw...
Action control deficits of schizophrenia patients result from frontostriatal brain abnormalities and presumably reflect an impairment of selective cognitive processes. This study aimed at dissociating two different levels of action control in saccades toward and away from visual stimuli (pro- and antisaccades). Results of previous studies suggested...
Schizophrenia patients show prefrontal cortex dysfunctions of neurodevelopmental origin, but the cognitive implications of these dysfunctions are not yet understood. This study used experimental variations of oculomotor tasks to evaluate the relative roles of volitional action initiation and the inhibition of reflexive behavior. Thirty schizophreni...
Objective: Task of the project was to develop and evaluate a motivational programme for drug addicts not responding to addiction treatment to achieve primary a better integration in the addiction treatment system and a psychosocial stabilization. Methods: In the frame of a formative evaluation approach of individual treatment a pre-post-design with...
Impaired antisaccade performance in schizophrenia (SZ) may originate from poor task preparation, suggested by low amplitudes of the contingent negative variation (CNV) before antisaccades. To dissociate components of preparation we measured the CNV in standard pro- and antisaccades and a stimulus preceding negativity (SPN) in delayed pro- and antis...
Previous studies suggested that random switching between pro- and antisaccades increases errors in both tasks. However, little is known about the effects of switching between leftward and rightward saccades (response switching). The present study investigated task and response switching using an alternating runs procedure. Tasks (i.e., prosaccades...
The antisaccade task is well suited to study the interplay between environmental stimuli and action goals in controlling behavior. It requires subjects to look to the mirror position of visual stimuli. Schizophrenia patients usually show enhanced rates of erroneous saccades toward the stimulus. The present study was designed to investigate the role...
The antisaccade task appears to be particularly suitable for analyzing processes involved in executive control of action. Schizophrenic patients show enhanced rates of erroneous reflexive saccades in this task. This is commonly interpreted as a failure of inhibitory mechanisms. The role of volitional saccade generation is largely neglected in these...
Executive dysfunctions can be frequently observed in schizophrenia. They are more persistent than psychotic symptoms and are assumed to contribute to a variety of clinical signs of the disease. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying dysexecutive behaviors are not yet understood. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how saccade tasks can...
After methadone maintenance was introduced in Germany in 1988, it has become the most common treatment approach for opioid dependency. 14 German methadone treatment outcome studies were analyzed according to a standard scheme. Most of them were uncontrolled observational studies and 13 could be included into a quantitative and qualitative summary o...
