Dirk Adolph

Ruhr-Universität Bochum | RUB · Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy

Here, we investigated the association of different emotion regulation (ER) indices with symptom severity across a large transdiagnostic sample of patients with emotional disorders (cross-sectional approach) and the predictive validity these ER indices have for the outcome of routine care CBT (longitudinal approach). We assessed the trait-like use o...

Anxiety disorders (AD) are associated with altered connectivity in large-scale intrinsic brain networks. It remains uncertain how much these signatures overlap across different phenotypes due to a lack of well-powered cross-disorder comparisons. We used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) to investigate differences in funct...

Here, we assessed resting respiratory sinus arrythmia (rRSA) and RSA reactivity (ΔRSA) as common and distinct emotion-adjustment mechanisms for affective and anxiety disorders and their treatments. We recruited samples of healthy controls and patients with anxiety and affective disorders, assessed rRSA during baseline and ΔRSA as RSA-change from ba...

Anxiety disorders (AD) are associated with altered connectivity in large-scale intrinsic brain networks. The extent to which these signatures are shared across different phenotypes remains unclear, as well-powered transdiagnostic comparisons are still largely missing. We used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) to investiga...

According to the bio-informational theory of emotion by Lang, mental imagery of fearful stimuli activates physiological and behavioural response systems, even in the absence of sensory input. We investigated whether instructed mental imagery of pain-associated (not painful) interoceptive sensations entails a threat value and elicits increased start...

This descriptive study examined patient characteristics, treatment characteristics, and short-term outcomes among patients with Anorexia Nervosa (AN) and Bulimia Nervosa (BN) in routine clinical care. Results for patients receiving full-time treatment were contrasted with results for patients receiving ambulatory treatment. Data of a clinical trial...

Background Interpretation biases (IBs) are central in panic disorder, and there is rich evidence showing that these are correlated with and predictive of panic-relevant symptomatology. However, experimental studies are needed to examine the potential causal effects of IBs, as predicted by cognitive models. Methods Panic-related IBs were manipulate...

In the current study, we test for the specificity of deficits in fear acquisition and extinction for the anxiety disorders spectrum. We compared fear acquisition and fear extinction learning between a group of patients with either an anxiety disorder (n = 93) or depression (n = 103) attending for treatment in our outpatient center and a sample of h...

Background: Interpretation biases (IBs) are central in panic disorder (PD), and there is a great body of evidence showing that these are correlated with and predictive of panic-relevant symptomatology. However, experimental studies are needed to examine the potential causal effects of IBs on symptoms of PD predicted by cognitive models.Methods: Pan...

It is hypothesized that the ability to discriminate between threat and safety is impaired in individuals with high dispositional negativity, resulting in maladaptive behavior. A large body of research investigated differential learning during fear conditioning and extinction protocols depending on individual differences in intolerance of uncertaint...

It is hypothesized that the ability to discriminate between threat and safety is impaired in individuals with high dispositional negativity, resulting in maladaptive behavior. A large body of research investigated differential learning during fear conditioning and extinction protocols depending on individual differences in intolerance of uncertaint...

The number of studies on fear conditioning in children and adolescents has increased in recent years. Most of these studies exclusively focus on data of completers while dropout rates, reasons for dropout, and specific characteristics of non-completers are underreported. This study systematically investigated data of 283 children and adolescents be...

Reduced physical activity is considered a key feature of major depressive disorder (MDD). However, research directly comparing non-depressed controls and patients yielded mixed findings. In contrast to most previous research, this study compared objective as well as subjective activity levels of individuals with MDD with non-depressed controls and...

Here, we tested the feasibility of a new paradigm developed to investigate the mechanisms of exposure-therapy. The protocol was previously developed for the use with adults and optimized to closely model the mechanisms underlying exposure, i.e. extinction learning. We adapted this paradigm for the use with children, and tested its feasibility in ch...

Background Previous laboratory findings suggest deviant gait characteristics in depressed individuals (i.e., reduced walking speed and vertical up-and-down movements, larger lateral swaying movements, slumped posture). However, since most studies to date assessed gait in the laboratory, it is largely an open question whether this association also h...

Contrary to the well-documented link between parental and offspring clinical anxiety, little is known about the relationship between parental everyday-life anxieties (e.g., concerning family, finances, health) and offspring anxieties. To close this gap, we assessed the frequency of parental symptoms of DSM-IV anxiety disorders and everyday-life anx...

This study examined the consequences of media exposure to thin ideals compared to pictures of landscapes in healthy young women and women with eating and mixed mental disorders and investigated whether appearance-related cognitive factors and cognitive distortions moderate the effects. Two hundred seventy-five women in a multisite laboratory trial...

Associative learning can be observed from the neonatal period onward, providing opportunities to examine changes in basic learning and memory abilities. One method that is suitable to study associative learning is classical eyeblink conditioning (EBC) which is dependent on the cerebellum. Extinction learning can be systematically investigated in th...

The retrieval of personal mastery experiences has been linked to adaptive functions, such as increased perceived self-efficacy and coping capability. Successful exposure leads to an increased mastery experience with respect to anxiety provoking situations, possibly due to a violation of expected negative outcomes. We investigated whether the reacti...

Introduction:. Fear of pain seems to be a key factor in the development and maintenance of chronic pain and pain-related disability. Interoceptive fear conditioning is assumed to constitute an important mechanism in the origins and maintenance of fear of pain. If conditioned stimuli such as internal bodily sensations are repeatedly paired with pain...

Low levels of high frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) have been shown to be associated with suicidal ideation and behavior in students and depressed patients. The goal of the present study was to examine associations between suicide ideation and resting HF-HRV as well as HF-HRV reactivity in a diagnostically heterogeneous sample of adult out...

Background Difficulties in emotion regulation have been related to psychological and physiological stress responses such as lower mood and lower parasympathetic activation (HF-HRV) under resting condition, but evidence on the potential link to the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis functioning and to physiological stress responses during a s...

There is considerable interindividual variation in response to psychotherapeutical intervention. In order to realize the long-term goal of personalised treatment approaches, it is important to identify behavioural and biological moderators and mediators of treatment responses. Here, we tested the predictive value of experimental fear extinction eff...

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is characterised by dysfunctional appraisals of the trauma and its consequences including one’s own symptoms. Experimental studies have shown that Cognitive Bias Modification—Appraisal (CBM-App) training can reduce dysfunctional interpretations and analog trauma symptoms. One important question is how to enhance...

Background Previous research indicates that body image disturbance is transmitted from mother to daughter via modeling of maternal body-related behaviors and attitudes (indirect transmission) and via maternal body-related feedback (direct transmission). So far, the transmission of body-related attentional biases, which according to cognitive-behavi...

The approach-withdrawal model of hemispheric activation suggests that left frontal cortical areas mediate approach, while right frontal cortical areas mediate withdrawal motivation. Within this framework, the present study investigates the association of frontal cortical asymmetry with attentional and emotional responses toward approach- and withdr...

Relatively larger resting right frontal cortical brain activation has been labeled as a risk factor for emotion-related disorders. In light of this framework, the present studies’ aim was twofold. First, we wanted to determine whether a relationship between symptoms of anxiety and depression and frontal asymmetry does already manifest in a sample o...

The development of eating disorders is associated with a body-related attentional bias. Although eating disorders are especially prevalent in adolescence, so far, no study has analyzed gaze patterns and state body image in response to viewing one’s own body in youth. To fill this gap, the present study aimed to examine a body-related attentional bi...

Psychophysiological responses indicating the preparation of defensive behaviour, such as heart rate (HR)-increase and startle-response (SR) potentiation, have often been reported amongst individuals suffering from phobic disorders when exposed to phobia-related information. Although exposure is widely considered the 'gold standard' for treatment of...

The agreement of subjective and genital sexual response, also referred to as sexual concordance, shows substantial variability between women. Identifying predictors of sexual arousal and sexual concordance is important to improve our understanding of female sexual response and its relationship to sexual function or dysfunction. The aim of this stud...

The objective of this study was to test a time-efficient screening instrument to assess clinically relevant and everyday-life (e.g., economic, political, personal) anxieties. Furthermore, factors influencing these anxieties, correlations between clinical and everyday anxieties and, for the first time, anxiety during different stages of life were as...

A large group one-session exposure treatment (LG-OST) based on indirect modeled exposure strategies was carried out to investigate its feasibility and effectiveness in a sample of highly spider fearful individuals (N = 78). The stability of LG-OST-effects was assessed at 8-month follow-up (FU). Furthermore, a second sample (N = 30) of highly spider...

Cortisol release in a stressful situation can be beneficial for memory encoding and memory consolidation. Stimuli, such as odors, related to the stressful episode may successfully cue memory contents of the stress experience. The current investigation aimed at testing the potency of stress to influence startle responsivity 24 hr later and to implic...

Smoking leads to the development of automatic tendencies that promote approach behavior toward smoking-related stimuli which in turn may maintain addictive behavior. The present study examined whether automatic approach tendencies toward smoking-related stimuli can be measured by using an adapted version of the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT). Given...

Avoidance is considered as a central hallmark of all anxiety disorders. The acquisition and expression of avoidance, which leads to the maintenance and exacerbation of pathological fear is closely linked to Pavlovian and operant conditioning processes. Changes in conditionability might represent a key feature of all anxiety disorders but the exact...

The aim of this review is to summarize research on the emerging role of episodic memories in the context of anxiety disorders (AD). The available literature on explicit, autobiographical, and episodic memory function in AD including neuroimaging studies is critically discussed. We describe the methodological diversity of episodic memory research in...

During emotion perception, context is an important source of information. Whether contextual cues from modalities other than vision or audition influence the perception of social emotional information has not been investigated. Thus, the present study aimed at testing emotion perception and regulation in response to fearful facial expressions prese...

The present study assessed emotion regulation in response to chemosensory and visual stimuli. Using cognitive reappraisal, 40 female participants regulated their emotions in response to disgusting pictures and odors, while the startle reflex was elicited and emotion ratings were assessed. Participants reported feeling less negative, and less arouse...

We examined if emotional faces elicit physiological responses similar to pictures of emotional scenes. Forty one students viewed emotional scenes (negative, neutral, and positive) and emotional faces (angry, neutral, and happy). Heart rate, orbicularis oculi and electrodermal activity were measured continuously, and the startle reflex was elicited....

In vertebrates, chemosensory signals of competition are communicated between conspecifics, eliciting behavioral and physiological adaptations in the perceiving animal. The current study investigates, whether chemosensory signals of competition are also communicated between humans, and whether they elicit physiological changes in the perceiver. It i...

Facial expressions are often used in emotion research. Although they may differ in several relevant features such as the intensity of the facial expressions, the picture sets have not been compared systematically. Because the intensity of expressions is thought to determine the level of emotional arousal induced by the stimulus, the first aim of th...

Episodic memory is that part of our memory which enables us to memorize a personal event (what) in terms of place (where) and time (when). It is expressed on verbal and behavioral level. In this report we describe a novel method to induce de novo episodic memories in humans for unique events in the laboratory and measure them with standardized rati...

The present study aimed to investigate whether withdrawal related behavior is activated in the context of chemosensory anxiety signals. Moreover, it was examined whether chemosensory perception of social stress is modulated by the degree of social anxiety. Axillary sweat was collected from students, awaiting an oral examination at the university (a...

Fear of heights results in the experience of dizziness and measurable body sway. We investigated the relationship between fear, dizziness, and body sway during height exposure 16 m above ground. Thirty five healthy participants stood on a force-plate to measure sway before, during, and after exposure and an ECG was recorded. Self-report measures we...

Changes in the German hospital system like the introduction of the DRG compensation system suggest the usefulness of considering the modification of inpatient psychosomatic treatment options. Patients in a university hospital underwent diagnosis-related psychosomatic treatment in the wards of other departments after instituting the allocated bed mo...