Daniela Mier

• Professor
• Professor (Full) at University of Konstanz

Functional imaging studies indicate that both the assessment of a person as untrustworthy and the assumption that a person has a sexually transmitted infection are associated with activation in regions of the salience network. However, studies are missing that combine these aspects and investigate the perceived trustworthiness of individuals previo...

The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-Short Form (ERQ-S) may offer a psychometrically sound and time-efficient alternative to the original ERQ. We analyzed data of 315 participants from the community, as well as of 153 patients (forensic inpatients, patients with schizophrenia, and patients with alcohol use disorder). Our results support the reliabi...

The theory of embodied simulation suggests a common neuronal representation for action and perception in mirror neurons (MN) that allows an automatic understanding of another person’s mental state. Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data enables a joint investigation of the MN properties cross-modal...

Much research has focused on executive function (EF) impairments in psychopathy, a severe personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy, antisocial behavior, and a disregard for social norms and moral values. However, it is still unclear to what extent EF deficits are present across psychopathy factors and, more importantly, which EF doma...

Introduction Emotion recognition impairments and a tendency to misclassify neutral faces as negative are common in schizophrenia. A possible explanation for these deficits is aberrant salience attribution. To explore the possibility of salience driven emotion recognition deficits, we implemented a novel facial emotion salience task (FEST). Methods...

Understanding the subprocesses of risky decision making is a prerequisite for understanding (dys‐)functional decisions. For the present fMRI study, we designed a novel variant of the balloon‐analog‐risk task (BART) that measures three phases: decision making, reward anticipation, and feedback processing. Twenty‐nine healthy young adults completed t...

Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder marked by a wide range of emotional deficits, including a lack of empathy, emotion dysregulation, and alexithymia. Previous research has largely examined these emotional impairments in isolation, ignoring their influence on each other. Thus, we examined the concurrent interrelationship between emotional...

Objective In clinical practice, persistent somatic symptoms are regularly explained using a cognitive-behavioral model (CBM). In the CBM, predisposing, perpetuating, and precipitating factors are assumed to interact and to cause the onset and endurance of somatic symptoms. However, these models are rarely investigated in their entirety. Methods We...

Research on people deprived of liberty raises serious questions, especially concerning behavioral genetic studies. Does including criminally detained patients with mental disorders in genetic studies lead to a gain of new knowledge and can this be ethically and legally justified? Evaluation of existing literature and interdisciplinary reflection. A...

Background: Employees and volunteers at national socialism related memorial sites in Germany (MemoS) are confronted with severely aversive documents of German history on a regular basis. Objective: Enhance knowledge on mental health in MemoS. Method: In an online study, mental distress, secondary traumatisation as well as potential risk and protect...

Background The post-COVID-19 condition describes the persistence or onset of somatic symptoms (e.g. fatigue) after acute COVID-19. Based on an existing cognitive-behavioral treatment protocol, we developed a specialized group intervention for individuals with post-COVID-19 condition. The present study examines the feasibility, acceptance, and effec...

Understanding the subprocesses of risky decision-making is prerequisite for understanding (dys-)functional decisions. For the present fMRI study we designed a variant of the balloon-analogue-risk task (BART) that allows separating decision making from reward anticipation and feedback processing. 29 healthy young adults completed the BART. We analyz...

Zusammenfassung Geflüchtete mit psychischen Störungen sind mit Zugangsbarrieren zum psychiatrisch-psychotherapeutische Versorgungssystem konfrontiert. Um diesen Barrieren zu begegnen, wurde im Landkreis Konstanz ein Modellprojekt zur Unterstützung der Gesundheitsversorgung und Integration psychisch belasteter Geflüchteter etabliert (Koordinierte ps...

Objective: In clinical practice, persistent somatic symptoms are regularly explained using a cognitive-behavioral model (CBM). In the CBM, predisposing, perpetuating, and precipitating factors are assumed to interact and to cause the onset and endurance of somatic symptoms. However, these models are rarely investigated in their entirety. Methods: W...

At first glance, psychology and physics seem to have nothing in common. However, in both disciplines, sections are dealing with the study of one of the most complex objects in the universe: the human brain. Within psychology, neuropsychologists and neuroscientists “watch the brain at work” by measuring electrical and magnetic signals while particip...

Refugees with mental disorders are confronted with access barriers to the psychiatric- psychotherapeutic care system. In order to counter these barriers, a model project to support the health care and integration of mentally distressed refugees was established in the district of Constance and evaluated in an initial 3-year model phase. A coordinati...

Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder marked by a wide range of emotional deficits, including a lack of empathy, emotion dysregulation, and alexithymia. Previous research has largely examined these emotional impairments in isolation, ignoring their influence on each other. Thus, we examined the concurrent interrelationship between emotional...

Zusammenfassung: Theoretischer Hintergrund: Das Verständnis der Antipsychotika-Adhärenz ist lückenhaft, obwohl sie ein Grundpfeiler der Schizophrenie-Behandlung darstellt. Die spezifische Erfassung der Wahrnehmung von Risiken bei Einnahme sowie Absetzen von Antipsychotika könnte zur Erklärung der Adhärenz beitragen. Fragestellung: Explorative Studi...

Much research has focused on executive function (EF) impairments in psychopathy. However, it is still unclear to what extent these deficits are present and, more importantly, which EF domains are impaired. The present meta-analysis answers this question by synthesizing the results of 50 studies involving 5,694 participants from 12 different countri...

Unlabelled: The widely used Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) measures the habitual use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. Recently, a more economical 8-item version of the ERQ was proposed that showed good model fit. We assessed whether the latent constructs of the ERQ-8 are generalizable across different countries and cult...

Psychopathie geht mit deutlichen Einschränkungen im Erleben eigener Emotionen, in der Empathie und in moralischen Entscheidungen einher. Gleichzeitig ist diese schwere Persönlichkeitsstörung aber auch durch einen manipulativen Lebensstil gekennzeichnet, der emotionale Kompetenzen voraussetzt. Gängige Psychopathiemodelle können ein solches Paradoxon...

The widely used Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) measures the habitual use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. Recently, a more economical 8-item version of the ERQ was proposed that showed good model fit. We assessed whether the latent constructs of the ERQ-8 are generalizable across different countries and cultures. To this...

Psychopathy is characterized by extensive emotional impairments. However, the current empirical literature on empathy and alexithymia in psychopathy provides heterogeneous results. Random-effects models were performed on studies examining the association between psychopathy and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index as well as the Toronto Alexithymia S...

The human mirror neuron system (MNS) can be considered the neural basis of social cognition. Identifying the global network structure of this system can provide significant progress in the field. In this study, we use dynamic causal modeling (DCM) to determine the effective connectivity between central regions of the MNS for the first time during d...

Objectives: While previous research has mainly focused on the impact of the first acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health, little empirical knowledge exists about depression, anxiety, and somatic symptom levels and possible predictors of symptom levels in the pandemic’s recovery phase. The present study aimed to analyze the mental bur...

Introduction: Psychopathy is characterized by extensive emotional impairments. However, the current empirical literature on empathy and emotional awareness in psychopathy provides heterogeneous results. Methods: Multiple random-effects models were performed on studies examining the association between psychopathy and the Interpersonal Reactivity In...

According to the theory of embodied simulation, mirror neurons (MN) in our brain's motor system are the neuronal basis of all social‐cognitive processes. The assumption of such a mirroring process in humans could be supported by results showing that within one person the same region is involved in different social cognition tasks. We conducted an f...

Patients with past exposure to adverse experiences are frequent in clinical services, many of them suffering from co-occurring Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Despite first evi-dence that encourages diagnostics and trauma therapy provision for PTSD, complex cases are often excluded from evidence-based treatments. First, we review the evidence...

see https://osf.io/qjfmu/

Dynamic causal modeling (DCM) is an analysis technique that has been successfully used to infer about directed connectivity between brain regions based on imaging data such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Most variants of DCM for fMRI rely on a simple bilinear differential equation for neural activation, making it difficult to inte...

Our ability to infer other individuals’ emotions is central for successful social interactions. Based on the theory of embodied simulation, our mirror neuron system (MNS) provides the essential link between the observed facial configuration of another individual and our inference of that emotion by means of common neuronal activation. However, so f...

Deficits in social cognition have been proposed as a marker of schizophrenia. Growing evidence suggests especially hyperfunctioning of the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in response to neutral social stimuli reflecting the neural correlates of social-cognitive impairments in schizophrenia. We characterized healthy participants acco...

Obsessive–compulsive symptoms (OCS) in patients with schizophrenia are a common co-occurring condition, often associated with additional impairments. A subgroup of these patients develops OCS during treatment with second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs), most importantly clozapine and olanzapine. So far, little is known about possible neural mechan...

In-ethnicity bias, as one of the in-group biases, is widespread in different cultures, interfering with cross-ethnicity communication. Recent studies have revealed that an in-ethnicity bias can be reduced by an in-team bias caused by the membership in a mixed-ethnicity team. However, the neural correlates of different in-group biases are still not...

Aberrant salience may explain hasty decision making and psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia. In healthy individuals, final decisions in probabilistic reasoning tasks are related to Nucleus accumbens (Nacc) activation. However, research investigating the Nacc in social decision making is missing. Our study aimed at investigating the role of the Nacc...

Patients with pathological health anxiety (PHA) tend to automatically interpret bodily sensations as sign of a severe illness. To elucidate the neural correlates of this cognitive bias, we applied an functional magnetic resonance imaging adaption of a body-symptom implicit association test with symptom words in patients with PHA (n = 32) in compari...

There is accumulating evidence for deficits in the perception and regulation of one's own emotions, as well as the recognition of others' emotions in somatic symptom disorder (SSD). However, investigations of SSD focusing on specific aspects of emotion processing and how these might interact are missing. We included 35 patients with SSD and 35 heal...

Schizophrenia is associated with significant impairments in social cognition. These impairments have been shown to go along with altered activation of the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). However, studies that investigate connectivity of pSTS during social cognition in schizophrenia are sparse. Twenty-two patients with schizophrenia and 2...

Psychologie und Physik scheinen auf den ersten Blick nichts miteinander zu tun zu haben. Doch in beiden Fachrichtungen gibt es Teilgebiete, die sich mit der Erforschung eines der komplexesten Objekte des Universums beschäftigen: dem menschlichen Gehirn. Innerhalb der Psychologie sind es Neuropsychologen, die durch die Messung von elektrischen und m...

Background: Addicts to specific internet applications involving communication features showed increased social anxiety, emotional competence deficits and impaired prefrontal-related inhibitory control. The dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (dACC) likely plays an important role in cognitive control and negative affect (such as social exclusion, pain...

Background: The aim of this study was to explore whether certain aspects of emotion dysregulation (i.e., facets of alexithymia and rumination) are more closely linked to hypochondriasis than to depression and vice versa. Methods: Nineteen patients with hypochondriasis (HYP), 33 patients with depression, and 52 healthy control participants comple...

Background: An attentional bias to health-threat stimuli is assumed to represent the primary pathogenetic factor for the development and maintenance of pathological health anxiety (PHA; formerly termed "hypochondriasis"). However, little is known about the neural basis of this attentional bias in individuals with PHA. Methods: A group of patient...

Detecting and evaluating emotional information from facial expressions as a basis for behavioural adaption belong to the core social-cognitive abilities of mankind. Dysfunctions in emotional face processing are observed in several major psychiatric disorders like depression and schizophrenia. In search for psychiatric disease biomarkers using the i...

Aim: Patients with an increased risk for psychosis ('at-risk mental state' (ARMS)) present various neurocognitive deficits. Not least because of differences in identifying the ARMS, results of previous studies are inconsistent. In most studies ARMS-patients are classified by the experience of attenuated psychotic symptoms (APS) and/or brief limite...

“When I was one and a half years old, I was on a ferry lying on red seats” – while several autobiographical accounts by people with autism reveal vivid memories of early childhood, the vast amount of experimental investigations found deficits in personal autobiographic memory in autism. To assess this contradiction empirically, we implemented an on...

Previous research has revealed alterations and deficits in facial emotion recognition in patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD). During interpersonal communication in daily life, social signals such as speech content, variation in prosody, and facial expression need to be considered simultaneously. We hypothesized that deficits in high...

The pineal gland, as part of the human epithalamus, is the main production site of peripheral melatonin, which promotes the modulation of sleep patterns, circadian rhythms and circadian preferences (morningness vs. eveningness). The present study analyses the pineal gland volume (PGV) and its association with circadian preferences and symptom sever...

The negative interpretation of body sensations (e.g., as sign of a severe illness) is a crucial cognitive process in pathological health anxiety (HA). However, little is known about the nature and the degree of automaticity of this interpretation bias. We applied an implicit association test (IAT) in 20 subjects during functional magnetic resonance...

Prior studies have confirmed a bias against disconfirmatory evidence (BADE) in schizophrenia which has been associated with delusions. However, its role in the pathogenesis of psychosis is yet unclear. The objective was to investigate BADE for the first time in subjects with an at-risk-mental-state for psychosis (ARMS), patients with a first episod...

Patients with schizophrenia not only suffer from prototypical psychotic symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations and from cognitive deficits, but also from tremendous deficits in social functioning. However, little is known about the interplay between the cognitive and the social-cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. Our chapter gives an overvi...

Background: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is characterized by severe deficits in social interactions, which might be linked to deficits in emotion recognition. Research on emotion recognition abilities in BPD revealed heterogeneous results, ranging from deficits to heightened sensitivity. The most stable findings point to an impairment in...

Pathological health anxiety refers to the medically unfounded fear of suffering from a severe illness. Differences in cognitive processes related to attention, memory, and evaluation of health threat have been hypothesized to underlie pathological health anxiety. In no study, however, have researchers systematically and simultaneously assessed diff...

Metamemory describes the monitoring and knowledge about one's memory capabilities. Patients with schizophrenia have been found to be less able in differentiating between correct and false answers (smaller confidence gap) when asked to provide retrospective confidence ratings in previous studies. Furthermore, higher proportions of very-high-confiden...

Zentrale Komponenten in kognitiv-behavioralen Erklarungsmodellen der Hypochondrie und den daraus abgeleiteten Behandlungen sind eine selektive Aufmerksamkeitslenkung auf korperliche Empfindungen und ein katastrophisierender Symptominterpretationsbias. Wir untersuchten, ob sich die Effektivitat einer storungsspezifischen Kognitiven Verhaltenstherapi...

As neuronal pathologies cause only minor morphological alterations, molecular imaging techniques are a prerequisite for the study of diseases of the brain. The development of molecular probes that specifically bind biochemical markers and the advances of instrumentation have revolutionized the possibilities to gain insight into the human brain orga...

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been reported to show atypical attention and evaluative processing, in particular for social stimuli such as faces. The usual measure in these studies is an explicit, subjective judgment, which is the culmination of complex-temporally extended processes that are not typically dissected in detail. Here...

In the DSM-5, the diagnosis of hypochondriasis was replaced by two new diagnositic entities: somatic symptom disorder (SSD) and illness anxiety disorder (IAD). Both diagnoses share high health anxiety as a common criterion, but additonal somatic symptoms are only required for SSD but not IAD. Our aim was to provide empirical evidence for the validi...

To examine whether a 2-week attribution modification training (AMT) changes symptom severity, emotional evaluation of health-threatening stimuli, and cognitive biases in pathological health anxiety. We randomized 85 patients with pathological health anxiety into an electronic diary-based AMT group (AMTG; n = 42) and a control group without AMT (CG;...

Background: Patients with schizophrenia display metacognitive impairments, such as hasty decision-making during probabilistic reasoning - the "jumping to conclusion" bias (JTC). Our recent fMRI study revealed reduced activations in the right ventral striatum (VS) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to be associated with decision-making in patient...

Amygdala function is of high interest for cognitive, social and psychiatric neuroscience, emphasizing the need for reliable assessments in humans. Previous work has indicated unsatisfactorily low within-subject reliability of amygdala activation fMRI measures. Based on basic science evidence for strong habituation of amygdala response to repeated s...

Background: Patients with schizophrenia have an approximately 10-fold higher risk for obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) than the general population. A large subgroup seems to experience OCS as a consequence of second-generation antipsychotic agents (SGA), such as clozapine. So far little is known about underlying neural mechanisms. Methods: To...

Patients with schizophrenia suffer from deficits in monitoring and controlling their own thoughts. Within these so-called metacognitive impairments, alterations in probabilistic reasoning might be one cognitive phenomenon disposing to delusions. However, so far little is known about alterations in associated brain functionality. A previously establ...

Test the relationship between pupil diameter and LC activation in humans.

Objectives. Psychopathy is characterized by severe deficits in emotion processing and empathy. These emotional deficits might not only affect the feeling of own emotions, but also the understanding of others' emotional and mental states. The present study aims on identifying the neurobiological correlates of social-cognitive related alterations in...

Neuronal plasticity is crucial for flexible interaction with a changing environment and its disruption is thought to contribute to psychiatric diseases like schizophrenia. High-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a noninvasive tool to increase local excitability of neurons and induce short-time functional reorganization...

Background Somatic symptom attributions are of central importance in cognitive-behavioral models of the development, maintenance and treatment of hypochondriasis. However, the mode of symptom attribution has rarely been systematically investigated in these patients. Is a somatic mode of symptom attribution indeed specific for hypochondriasis and fu...

Electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have been used to study the neural correlates of reward anticipation, but the interrelation of EEG and fMRI measures remains unknown. The goal of the present study was to investigate this relationship in response to a well established reward anticipation paradigm using si...

Background: Health anxiety (HA) is defined as the objectively unfounded fear or conviction of suffering from a severe illness. Predominant attention allocation to illness-related information is regarded as a central process in the development and maintenance of HA, yet little is known about the neuronal correlates of this attentional bias. Method...

Deficits in social cognition seem to present an intermediate phenotype for schizophrenia, and are known to be associated with an altered amygdala response to faces. However, current results are heterogeneous with respect to whether this altered amygdala response in schizophrenia is hypoactive or hyperactive in nature. The present study used functio...

Patients with schizophrenia show deficits in motivation, reward anticipation and salience attribution. Several functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigations revealed neurobiological correlates of these deficits, raising the hypothesis of a common basis in midbrain dopaminergic signaling. However, investigations of drug-naïve first-epi...

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) have severe problems in social interactions that might be caused by deficits in social cognition. Since the findings about social-cognitive abilities in BPD are inhomogeneous, ranging from deficits to superior abilities, we aimed to investigate the neuronal basis of social cognition in BPD. We app...

Even more than in cognitive research applications, moving fMRI to the clinic and the drug development process requires the generation of stable and reliable signal changes. The performance characteristics of the fMRI paradigm constrain experimental power and may require different study designs (e.g., crossover vs. parallel groups), yet fMRI reliabi...

Since emotion is nonselective, emotional evaluation of object may also be nonselective. In particular, attractiveness of an attended object may be affected by that of “neglected” surrounds. We reported such an implicit leakage of attractiveness from surrounding faces (FCs) to an attended geometric figure(GF) (VSS'10 (1)), or from the “neglected” FC...

Preference and gaze interact in a positive feedback loop to produce a phenomenon known as the ‘gaze cascade’ effect. In the few seconds before a decision is made, a gaze bias occurs toward the stimulus that is eventually chosen. This gaze cascade is especially robust in tasks that involve face preference decisions. Autism is a pervasive development...

If you go to a car show, cars are presented by beautiful women. It has been known that positive social stimuli seem to affect attractiveness perception of non-social stimuli. Moreover, such a leakage of attractiveness can be against the observer's intention (VSS'10 (1) and (2), VSS'11 (3)). However, will standing by a gorgeous sports car make them...

Characterizing the brain connectome using neuroimaging data and measures derived from graph theory emerged as a new approach that has been applied to brain maturation, cognitive function and neuropsychiatric disorders. For a broad application of this method especially for clinical populations and longitudinal studies, the reliability of this approa...

Background / Purpose: Attractiveness of an attended object is affected by that of “neglected” surrounds (“leakage”). Implicit leakage of attractiveness from surrounding faces (FCs) to an attended geometric figure (GF) occurs from the “neglected” FC to the hair attached.This year, we explore effects of emotional expression of the FCs, instructions...

Background: Preference and gaze interact in a positive feedback loop to produce a phenomenon known as the ‘gaze cascade’ effect (Shimojo, Simion, Shimojo, & Scheier, 2003). When observers are shown stimulus pairs and instructed to choose which of the two they find more attractive, their gaze is equally likely to be on either picture. However, in th...

Problems with mentalizing, also called Theory of Mind (ToM), are a hallmark of schizophrenia. Here we show that activation during mentalizing of emotions in healthy controls is modulated by a genetic risk variant for psychosis.

Zusammenfassung Störungen sozialer Kognitionen wie der Theory of Mind (ToM) werden in den letzten Jahren verstärkt hinsichtlich ihrer Bedeutung für das Auftreten von Einschränkungen des sozialen Funktionsniveaus bei schizophrenen Erkrankungen diskutiert. ToM beschreibt die Fähigkeit, eigene und fremde Zustände mental zu repräsentieren, auf deren Ba...

During recent years, there is an increasing interest in the relation between impairment of social cognition like Theory of Mind (ToM) and reduced social functioning in schizophrenia. ToM is the ability to mentally represent one's own and others mental states which is necessary to understand other people's intentions. Therefore ToM is an essential p...

To gain further insight into interpersonal dysfunction in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) we investigated the effects of emotional cues and the fairness of a social partner on the ability to infer other peoples' intentions in a virtual social exchange. 30 BPD patients and 30 nonpatients were asked to play a multiround trust game with four vir...

In the social neuroscience of face processing, multiple roles are attributed to amygdala: signalling of fear/threat-stimuli, of emotional expression, and general salience. The current study aimed at a direct comparison of amygdala activation attributable to these conditions by contrasting amygdala responses to matched emotional (threatening and non...

Schizophrenia out-patients have deficits in affective theory of mind (ToM) but also on more basal levels of social cognition, such as the processing of neutral and emotional expressions. These deficits are associated with changes in brain activation in the amygdala and the superior temporal sulcus (STS). However, until now there have been no studie...

Alterations of connectivity are central to the systems-level pathophysiology of schizophrenia. One of the best-established genome-wide significant risk variants for this highly heritable disorder, the rs1344706 single nucleotide polymorphism in ZNF804A, was recently shown to modulate connectivity in healthy carriers during working memory (WM) in a...

Genome-wide association studies are a powerful tool for unravelling the genetic background of complex disorders such as major depression. We conducted a genome-wide association study of 604 patients with major depression and 1364 population based control subjects. The top hundred findings were followed up in a replication sample of 409 patients and...

This study was conducted to explore the relationship between emotion recognition and affective Theory of Mind (ToM). Forty subjects performed a facial emotion recognition and an emotional intention recognition task (affective ToM) in an event-related fMRI study. Conjunction analysis revealed overlapping activation during both tasks. Activation in s...

Schizophrenia is associated with marked deficits in theory of mind (ToM), a higher-order form of social cognition representing the thoughts, emotions and intentions of others. Altered brain activation in the medial prefrontal cortex and temporo-parietal cortex during ToM tasks has been found in patients with schizophrenia, but the relevance of thes...