Fritz Renner

Fritz Renner
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Fritz verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Verified
Fritz verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
University of Freiburg | Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg · Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy

PhD

About

65
Publications
29,706
Reads
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2,070
Citations
Introduction
I am a junior research group leader at the department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at the University of Freiburg. I am an experimental psychologist and my research is on the impact of mental imagery on behaviour with a focus on developing experimental interventions that target behavioural aspects of depression. My research group is gratefully supported by the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research. Our current research investigates the relationship between mental imagery and behaviour. Understanding how mental imagery can impact behaviour can help inform the development of new interventions, for example for depression by targeting behavioural aspects of depression.
Additional affiliations
February 2015 - April 2018
University of Cambridge
Position
  • PostDoc Position
April 2018 - present
University of Freiburg
Position
  • PostDoc Position
October 2009 - October 2014
Maastricht University
Position
  • PhD Student
Education
October 2009 - October 2014
Maastricht University
Field of study
  • Experimental Psychopathology
January 2009 - July 2009
University of Pennsylvania
Field of study
  • Research Internship
October 2008 - December 2008
University Hospital Cologne
Field of study
  • Clinical Internship

Publications

Publications (65)
Article
Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is one of the most common psychiatric diagnoses in the world. Common evidence-based treatments for OCD are pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. The participants were 40 adults between 18 and 70 years old, recruited through self-referrals, professional and clinic referrals, and hospital advertisements. Participants...
Preprint
Previous work has suggested that mental imagery may represent a useful strategy for improving prospection and may also help to motivate goal-directed behaviours. Given depressed individuals have difficultly engaging with pleasurable activities, this study aimed to explore the effect of motivational mental imagery on behavioural engagement in non-de...
Book
In der Psychotherapie lassen sich imaginative Techniken störungsübergreifend auf vielfältige Weise diagnostisch und therapeutisch einsetzen. Das Buch beschreibt verschiedene, primär verhaltenstherapeutisch orientierte imaginative Techniken und stellt den aktuellen Forschungsstand zur Indikation und Wirksamkeit imaginativer Techniken praxisnah dar....
Article
Encouraging engagement in rewarding or pleasant activities is one of the most important treatment goals for depression. Mental imagery exercises have been shown to increase the motivation for planned behaviour in the lab but it is unclear whether this is also the case in daily life. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the effect of mental imagery ex...
Article
Full-text available
Background Behavioral activation (BA) is an effective and efficacious treatment for depression. Activity scheduling is the central treatment component of BA and involves planning of potentially enjoyable and rewarding activities. Evidence from non-clinical studies suggests that mental imagery simulations of planned activities can increase motivatio...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is one of the most common psychiatric diagnoses in the world. Common evidence-based treatments for OCD are pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. Aims To examine cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) with and without pharmacotherapy for treating of OCD. Methods Participants were 40 adults between 18 and 70 ye...
Article
Episodic imagery has been shown to amplify emotion more than abstract verbal representations. This may prove useful for clinical interventions aiming to motivate adaptive behaviours. However, most findings rely on self-report measures and verbal control conditions not designed to actively prevent automatic engagement in episodic imagery. We thus in...
Article
Full-text available
Background To improve psychological treatments for major depressive disorder (MDD), a better understanding on how symptoms ameliorate during treatment is essential. In cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), it is unclear whether procedures focused on the acquisition of CBT skills play a causal role in the improvement of CBT skills. In this randomized...
Article
Craving for high-calorie foods predicts consumption of high-calorie foods thereby contributing to unhealthy eating habits and, potentially in the long term, to the development of overweight, obesity, and eating disorder pathology. Thus, effective interventions tackling craving for unhealthy foods and motivating healthy eating behavior are needed. T...
Article
Full-text available
Positively imagined activities may capture visual attention due to an increase in positive value. Increasing attention toward activities, in turn, may prove useful for clinical interventions aiming to motivate behavioral engagement. Employing a within-subject experimental design, we examined the effect of positive imagery on attention using a visua...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives: The covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for psychological interventions for depression that can be delivered remotely to older adults. Pellas et al. (2022) conducted a pilot trial on the preliminary effectiveness of a four-week telephone-delivered Behavioral Activation with Mental Imagery (BA-MI) intervention to N= 38 adults 65...
Article
Full-text available
Background Disease burden and unsatisfactory treatment outcomes call for innovation in treatments of depression. Prospective mental imagery, i.e. future-directed voluntary imagery-based thought, about potentially-rewarding activities may offer a mechanistically-informed intervention that targets deficits in reward processing, a core clinical featur...
Article
Full-text available
Die Vereinbarkeit von Wissenschaft und Familie ist für Eltern im Allgemeinen und Frauen im Besonderen eine große Herausforderung. Tagungsteilnahmen sind wichtige Karrierebausteine und eine organisatorische Herausforderung für Eltern. In diesem Positionspapier wird ein Stimmungsbild zu familienfreundlicheren Kongressgestaltung in der Fachgruppe (FG)...
Preprint
Positively imagined activities may capture visual attention due to an increase in positive value. Increasing attention toward activities, in turn, may prove useful for clinical interventions aiming to motivate behavioral engagement. Employing a within-subject experimental design, we examined the effect of positive imagery on attention using a visua...
Article
Background Recently, we showed that twice weekly sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) for depression lead to better and faster treatment outcomes compared to once weekly sessions (Bruijniks et al., 2020). The present study investigated which pathways of change may account for the effects of different...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives: To shield vulnerable persons, particularly the eldery, during the Covid-19 pandemic governments around the world have adviced to use social distancing and self-isolation. Social isolation might put older adults at an increased risk for mental health problems such as depression. There is a need for brief, easy-accessible psychological t...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background To improve and innovate psychological treatments for major depressive disorder (MDD), a better understanding on how symptoms ameliorate during treatment is essential. In cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), one of the most investigated treatments for MDD, a prominently hypothesized key therapy process to reduce depressive symptoms is the...
Article
Full-text available
Background Mental imagery has long been part of cognitive behavioural therapies. More recently, a resurgence of interest has emerged for prospective mental imagery, i.e. future-directed imagery-based thought, and its relation to reward processing, motivation and behaviour in the context of depression. Method We conducted a selective review on the...
Article
Background Previous research suggests a relationship between measurement frequency of selfreported depressive symptoms and change in depressive symptom scores for the Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II). The goal of the current study was to investigate the differential effects of weekly and monthly completion of the BDI-II and Quick Inventory of...
Preprint
Full-text available
Objectives To shield vulnerable persons, particularly the eldery, during the Covid-19 pandemic governments around the world have adviced to use social distancing and self-isolation. Social isolation might put older adults at an increased risk for mental health problems such as depression. There is a need for brief, easy-accessible psychological tre...
Preprint
Background: Previous research suggests a relationship between measurement frequency of self-reported depressive symptoms and change in depressive symptom scores for the Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II). The goal of the current study was to investigate the differential effects of weekly and monthly completion of the BDI-II and Quick Inventory o...
Article
Full-text available
To date, few studies have examined stress responses during or shortly after potentially traumatic events in real-time. In this study, a prospective Virtual Reality analogue trauma paradigm was used to assess peri- and post-traumatic stress responses in healthy individuals (N = 80). Here we compared a range of peri-traumatic psychophysiological resp...
Article
Full-text available
Facilitating engagement in rewarding activities is a key treatment target in depression. Mental imagery can increase engagement in planned behaviours, potentially due to its special role in representing emotionally salient experiences. The present study tested the hypothesis that mental imagery promotes motivation and engagement when planning pleas...
Article
Objective Mental imagery is more strongly related to emotions than verbal cognitions. Binge eating is associated with dysfunctional emotional regulation. However, cognitive therapy techniques have focused on verbal cognitions. This proof‐of‐concept study compares a traditional cognitive therapy technique, cognitive restructuring (CR), with imagery...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Peri- and post-traumatic factors predict the differential development of stress-associated mental disorders. Prospective designs assessing these risk factors in real-time under controlled experimental conditions can overcome limitations of retrospective designs. Therefore, we aimed to investigate multi-sensory, experimental analogues o...
Article
Aims: A popular belief is that alcohol improves the ability to speak in a foreign language. The effect of acute alcohol consumption on perceived foreign language performance and actual foreign language performance in foreign language learners has not been investigated. The aim of the current study was to test the effects of acute alcohol consumpti...
Article
Background and objectives The underlying mechanisms of symptom change in schema therapy (ST) for chronic major depressive disorder (cMDD) have not been studied. The aim of this study was to explore the impact of two potentially important mechanisms of symptom change, maladaptive schemas (proxied by negative idiosyncratic core-beliefs) and the thera...
Article
Full-text available
Depression is associated with decreased engagement in behavioural activities. A wide range of activities can be promoted by simulating them via mental imagery. Mental imagery of positive events could thus provide a route to increasing adaptive behaviour in depression. The current study tested whether repeated engagement in positive mental imagery l...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives Mental imagery abnormalities occur across psychopathologies and are hypothesized to drive emotional difficulties in bipolar disorder (BD). A comprehensive assessment of mental imagery in BD is lacking. We aimed to test whether (i) mental imagery abnormalities (abnormalities in cognitive stages and subjective domains) occur in BD relative...
Article
Background: The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of sad mood on default mode network (DMN) resting-state connectivity in persons with chronic major depressive disorder (cMDD). Methods: Participants with a diagnosis of cMDD (n=18) and age, gender and education level matched participants without a diagnosis of depression (n=18) und...
Article
Full-text available
Mental imagery is an experience like perception in the absence of a percept. It is a ubiquitous feature of human cognition, yet it has been relatively neglected in the etiology, maintenance, and treatment of depression. Imagery abnormalities in depression include an excess of intrusive negative mental imagery; impoverished positive imagery; bias fo...
Article
Full-text available
Treatment innovation for bipolar disorder has been hampered by a lack of techniques to capture a hallmark symptom: ongoing mood instability. Mood swings persist during remission from acute mood episodes and impair daily functioning. The last significant treatment advance remains Lithium (in the 1970s), which aids only the minority of patients. Ther...
Article
Full-text available
Background and objectives: The aim of this study was to test the effects of individual schema therapy (ST) for patients with chronic depression. Methods: Using a multiple-baseline single case series design, patients with chronic major depressive disorder (N ¼ 25) first entered a 6e24 weeks baseline phase; this phase functioned as a no-treatment con...
Article
Objectives The goal of the present research was the examination of overlap between 2 research traditions on interpersonal personality traits in major depression. We hypothesized that Blatt's (2004) dimensions of depressive experiences around the dimensions of relatedness (i.e., dependency) and self-definition (i.e., self-criticism) are associated w...
Article
Full-text available
Schematherapie (ST) ist ein integrativer Therapieansatz zur Behandlung chronischer Probleme mit nachgewiesener Effektivität in der Behandlung von Persönlichkeitsstörungen. Dieser Artikel beschreibt die Anwendung der ST bei chronischer Depression. Dazu präsentieren wir eine Literaturübersicht zu Risikofaktoren, die chronischer Depression zugrunde li...
Article
Schematherapie (ST) is een integratieve behandeling voor chronische problemen met een empirisch aangetoonde effectiviteit in de behandeling van persoonlijkheidsstoornissen. In dit artikel wordt de aanpassing van ST voor de behandeling van chronische depressie beschreven, aan de hand van de literatuur over de onderliggende risicofactoren van chronis...
Article
Samenvatting Het doel van deze pilotstudie was het beschrijven van de effecten van een schemagerichte cognitieve gedragstherapie in groepsverband (SCBT-g; Van Vreeswijk & Broersen, 2006) op het actuele fysieke en psychische klachten-niveau bij jongvolwassenen met persoonlijkheidsstoornissen of met kenmer-ken van een persoonlijkheidsstoornis. Tevens...
Article
Background Emotional eating is associated with overeating and the development of obesity. Yet, empirical evidence for individual (trait) differences in emotional eating and cognitive mechanisms that contribute to eating during sad mood remain equivocal. Aim The aim of this study was to test if attention bias for food moderates the effect of self-r...
Article
Patients with depression often report impairments in social functioning. From a patient perspective, improvements in social functioning might be an important outcome in psychotherapy for depression. Therefore, it is important to examine the effects of psychotherapy on social functioning in patients with depression. We conducted a meta-analysis on s...
Article
Dispositional optimism has been related to positive physical and mental health outcomes, increased positive mood ratings and cognitions about the future. In order to determine the causal relation between optimism and mood and cognitions optimism should be manipulated experimentally. The current study tested the effects of a best-possible-self menta...
Article
Background: One reason for the decision to delay the introduction of an Attenuated Psychosis Syndrome in the main text of the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was the concern that attenuated psychotic symptoms (APS) might in fact be common features in adolescents and youn...
Article
Full-text available
Schema therapy (ST) is an integrative treatment approach to chronic lifelong problems with an established effectiveness for treating personality disorders. This article describes the adaptation of ST to chronic depression by reviewing the literature on the underlying risk factors to chronic depression. A model of chronic depression is presented, de...
Article
Background: The personality dimensions neuroticism and extraversion likely represent part of the vulnerability to depression. The stability over longer time periods of these personality dimensions in depressed patients treated with psychological treatment or medication and in untreated persons with depression in the general population remains uncl...
Article
Background: Behavioural activation might be a viable alternative to antidepressant medication for major depressive disorder. Aims: To compare the effectiveness of behavioural activation and treatment as usual (TAU, antidepressant medication) for major depressive disorder in routine clinical practice in Iran. Method: Patients with major depress...
Article
The degree to which interpersonal problems of depressed patients improve over the course of cognitive therapy (CT) and relate to the quality of the therapeutic alliance and to symptom improvement, remains unclear. We analyzed data of adult outpatients (N=523) with major depressive disorder participating in a clinical trial to determine the factor s...
Article
Early maladaptive schemas (EMSs) are hypothesized to be stable, trait-like, enduring beliefs underlying chronic and recurrent psychological disorders. We studied the relation of EMSs with depressive symptom severity and tested the stability of EMSs over a course of evidence-based outpatient treatment for depression in a naturalistic treatment setti...
Article
The aim of this study was to investigate newly formulated schema mode models for cluster-C, paranoid, histrionic and narcissistic personality disorders. In order to assess 18 hypothesized modes, the Schema Mode Inventory (SMI) was modified into the SMI-2. The SMI-2 was administered to a sample of 323 patients (with a main diagnosis on one of the PD...

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