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Introduction
I am a psychologist and neuroscientist. My research focuses on social motives (empathy, reciprocity, collectivism etc) and their impact on actual behavior. Current projects investigate how different social motives interact, and how they are shaped by learning and psychiatric conditions. Our methods include fMRI, computational modeling, and paradigms from psychology and behavioral economics.
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Publications
Publications (105)
Humans’ approach behavior and impressions are biased towards individuals from their own group (ingroup) compared to different groups (outgroup). There is evidence that learning from specific interactions with ingroup and outgroup members can reduce these ingroup biases, but it is yet unclear if learning from non-social reinforcers such as financial...
According to recent research, self-reported Big Five personality traits are associated with preferences for faces that are representative of certain Big Five traits. Previous research has primarily focused on either preference for distinct prototypical personality faces or the accuracy of trait ratings for these faces. However, the underlying neura...
Impressions of individuals from their own and different groups are shaped by culture and learning. While previous evidence suggests stronger ingroup biases in collectivistic compared to individualistic cultures, the effect of such cultural differences on learning-related changes in intergroup impressions remains poorly understood. Here we use reinf...
Impressions of individuals from their own and different groups are shaped by culture and learning. While previous evidence suggests stronger ingroup biases in collectivistic compared to individualistic cultures, the effect of such cultural differences on learning-related changes in intergroup impressions remains poorly understood. Here we use reinf...
In this study, we investigated the motivations behind punishing individuals who exploit common resources, a phenomenon crucial for resource preservation. While some researchers suggest punishment stems from concern for the common good, others propose it is driven by anger toward free riders. To probe these motivations, we developed a modified publi...
Background
Social support is a multidimensional construct encompassing emotional support as well as pain-focused care and attention, also known as solicitous support. One the one hand, social support is widely believed to positively influence pain symptoms, their intensity, and the ability to cope and influence pain. On the other hand, social suppo...
Background
Mental health in adolescence is critical in its own right and a predictor of later symptoms of anxiety and depression. To address these mental health challenges, it is crucial to understand the variables linked to anxiety and depression in adolescence.
Methods
Here, we analyzed data of 278 adolescents that were collected in a nation-wid...
In contrast to rational choice theory predicting humans to optimize expected utilities of choices, humans deviate from rational behavior in decision-making paradigms. Hewig et al. (2011) explored affective correlates of decision-making in the ultimatum game (UG) and the dictator game (DG). They found that feedback-related negativity (FRN), subjecti...
Post-COVID syndrome (PCS) describes a persistent complex of symptoms following a COVID-19 episode, lasting at least 4 to 12 weeks, depending on the specific criteria used for its definition. It is often associated with moderate to severe impairments of daily life and represents a major burden for many people worldwide. However, especially during th...
Empathy toward suffering individuals serves as potent driver for prosocial behavior. However, it remains unclear whether prosociality induced by empathy for another person’s pain persists once that person’s suffering diminishes. To test this, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing a binary social decision task...
Background: Social support is widely believed to positively influence pain symptoms, their intensity, and the ability to cope and influence pain. Social support is a multidimensional construct encompassing emotional support as well as pain-focused care and attention, also known as solicitous support. On the other hand, social support can be negativ...
Pain is a biopsychosocial phenomenon, resulting from the interplay between physiological and psychological processes and social factors. Given that humans constantly interact with others, the effect of social factors is particularly relevant. Documenting the significance of the social modulation of pain, an increasing number of studies have investi...
Humans need social closeness to prosper. There is evidence that empathy can induce social closeness. However, it remains unclear how empathy-related social closeness is formed and how stable it is as time passes. We applied an acquisitionextinction paradigm combined with computational modeling and fMRI, to investigate the formation and stability of...
Post-COVID syndrome (PCS) describes a persistent complex of symptoms following a COVID-19 episode, lasting at least 4 to 12 weeks, depending on the specific criteria used for its definition. It is often associated with moderate to severe impairments of daily life and represents a major burden for many people worldwide. However, especially during th...
Climate change is one of, if not the greatest, global challenges of this century, as its consequences can have a wide range of impacts on society, the environment, and the personal lives of many individuals. Consequently, many people experience severe psychological burdens in the form of fears, anxieties, or worries, elicited by one, some, or all t...
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated countermeasures had an immensely disruptive impact on people’s lives. Due to the lack of systematic pre-pandemic data, however, it is still unclear how individuals’ psychological health has been affected across this incisive event. In this study, we analyze longitudinal data from two healthy samples (N = 307) to...
Theories of moral development propose that empathy is transmitted across individuals. However, the mechanisms through which empathy is socially transmitted remain unclear. Here, we combine computational learning models and functional MRI to investigate whether, and if so, how empathic and non-empathic responses observed in others affect the empathy...
Background
Despite the high prevalence and major disability associated with fatigue and cognitive deficits after SARS-CoV-2 infection, little is known about long-term trajectories of these sequelae. We aimed to assess long-term trajectories of these conditions and to identify risk factors for non-recovery.
Methods
We analyzed longitudinal data fro...
Previous research on racial ingroup bias in empathy for pain focused on neural responses to a single person’s suffering. It is unclear whether empathy for simultaneously perceived multiple individuals’ pain (denoted as collective empathy in this study) is also sensitive to perceived racial identities of empathy targets. We addressed this issue by r...
Background: Depression and fatigue are commonly observed sequelae following viral diseases such as COVID-19. Identifying symptom constellations that differentially classify post-COVID depression and fatigue may be helpful to individualize treatment strategies. Here, we investigated whether self-reported post-COVID depression and post-COVID fatigue...
Individuals have different preferences to interact with other persons. These preferences may vary depending on the personality of a person and the perceived personality of their interaction partner(s). Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), we tested whether the perception of personality traits in others predicts participants’ preferences for...
UNSTRUCTURED
Pain is a biopsychosocial phenomenon, resulting from the interplay between physiological and psychological processes and social factors. Given that humans constantly interact with others, the effect of social factors is particularly relevant. Documenting the significance of the social modulation of pain, an increasing number of studies...
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated countermeasures had an immensely disruptive impact on people’s lives. Due to the lack of systematic pre-pandemic data, however, it is still unclear how individuals’ psychosocial health has been affected across this incisive event. In this study, we analyze longitudinal data from two healthy samples ( N = 307) to...
Psychosocial factors affect mental health and health-related quality of life (HRQL) in a complex manner, yet gender differences in these interactions remain poorly understood. We investigated whether psychosocial factors such as social support and personal and work-related concerns impact mental health and HRQL differentially in women and men durin...
Fairness norms and resulting behaviours are an important prerequisite for cooperation in human societies. At the same time, financial incentives are commonly used to motivate social behaviours, yet it remains unclear how financial incentives affect fairness-based behaviours. Combining a decision paradigm from behavioural economics with hierarchical...
Social buffering, a phenomenon where social presence can reduce anxiety and fear-related autonomic responses, has been studied in numerous laboratory settings. The results suggest that the familiarity of the interaction partner influences social buffering while also providing some evidence for gender effects. In the laboratory, however, it is diffi...
Humans need social closeness to prosper. There is evidence that empathy can induce social closeness. However, it remains unclear how empathy-related social closeness is formed and how stable it is as time passes. Here we applied an acquisition-extinction paradigm, combined with computational modelling and fMRI, to investigate the formation and stab...
Anonymization has the potential to foster the sharing of medical data. State-of-the-art methods use mathematical models to modify data to reduce privacy risks. However, the degree of protection must be balanced against the impact on statistical properties. We studied an extreme case of this trade-off: the statistical validity of an open medical dat...
Valence framing effects refer to inconsistent choice preferences in response to positive versus negative formulation of mathematically equivalent outcomes. Here, we manipulate valence framing in a two-alternative forced choice dictator game using gains and losses as frames to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying valence framing. We appli...
Despite its negative reputation, egoism – the excessive concern for one’s own welfare – can incite prosocial behavior. So far, however, egoism-based prosociality has received little attention. Here, we first provide an overview of the conditions under which egoism turns into a prosocial motive, review the benefits and limitations of egoism-based pr...
Social buffering, a phenomenon where social presence can reduce anxiety and fear-related autonomic responses, has been studied in numerous laboratory settings. The results suggest that the familiarity of the interaction partner influences social buffering, while also providing some evidence for gender effects. In the laboratory, however, it is diff...
Background:
The onset of mental illness such as depression and anxiety disorders in pregnancy and postpartum period is common. The coronavirus induced disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the resulting public policy responses represent an exceptional situation worldwide and there are hints for adverse psychosocial impact, hence, the study of psych...
Financial incentives are commonly used to motivate behaviors. However, there is also evidence that incentives can impede the behavior they are supposed to foster, for example, documented by a decrease in blood donations if a financial incentive is offered. Based on these findings, previous studies assumed that prosocial motivation is shaped by ince...
Humans form impressions toward individuals of their own social groups (ingroup members) and of different social groups (outgroup members). Outgroup-focused theories predict that intergroup impressions are mainly shaped by experiences with outgroup individuals, while ingroup-focused theories predict that ingroup experiences play a dominant role. Her...
A variety of factors contribute to the degree to which a person feels lonely and socially isolated. These factors may be particularly relevant in contexts requiring social distancing, e.g., during the COVID-19 pandemic or in states of immunodeficiency. We present the Loneliness and Isolation during Social Distancing (LISD) Scale. Extending existing...
In dieser Podcast-Folge vereinen wir zwei sehr unterschiedliche Themen, die aber dennoch einen gemeinsamen Kern haben: mental health. Um psychische Gesundheit geht es sowohl im Interview mit der Professorin für Translationale Soziale Neurowissenschaften, Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Grit Hein, als auch mit der Psychologin und Podcasterin Jessica Kathmann (1...
Background
There is evidence that extraversion and associated frequent personal and digital social contacts are associated with mental health, reflected in reduced risk for anxiety or depression. However, excessive social media use (SMU) has been related to a decrease of mental health. We test how extraversion moderates the effect of SMU on anxiety...
Our decade is characterised by global challenges such as environmental changes and a worldwide pandemic. Meeting these challenges requires prosociality and cooperation that transcends borders and ethnicities. Prosocial behaviour between different groups has been investigated in social psychology for a long time, and, more recently, in social neuros...
The presence of a partner can attenuate physiological fear responses, a phenomenon known as social buffering. However, not all individuals are equally sociable. Here we investigated whether social buffering of fear is shaped by sensitivity to social anxiety (social concern) and whether these effects are different in females and males. We collected...
Pain relief is defined as the ease of pain and is thus highly relevant for clinical applications and everyday life. Given that pain relief is based on the cessation of an aversive pain experience, it is reasonable to assume that pain relief learning would also be shaped by factors that alter subjective and physiological pain responses, such as soci...
Motives motivate human behavior. Most behaviors are driven by more than one motive, yet it is unclear how different motives interact and how such motive combinations affect the neural computation of the behaviors they drive. To answer this question, we induced two prosocial motives simultaneously (multi-motive condition) and separately (single moti...
Background
The onset of mental illness such as depression and anxiety disorders in pregnancy and postpartum period is common. The coronavirus induced disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the resulting public policy responses represent an exceptional situation worldwide and there are hints for adverse psychosocial impact, hence, the study of psychol...
A variety of factors contribute to the degree to which a person feels lonely and socially isolated. These factors may be particularly relevant in times requiring social distancing, e.g., during the COVID-19 pandemic. We present the Loneliness and Isolation during Social Distancing (LISD) Scale. Extending existing trait measures, the LISD scale asse...
Living in multicultural societies, humans form impressions towards individuals of their own social groups (ingroup members) and of different social groups (outgroup members). Some psychological theories predict that intergroup impressions are mainly shaped by experiences with outgroup individuals ("outgroup focused theories"), while other theories...
Pain relief is defined as the ease of pain and is thus highly relevant for clinical applications and everyday life. Given that pain relief is based on the cessation of an aversive pain experience, it is reasonable to assume that pain relief learning would also be shaped by factors that alter subjective and physiological pain responses, such as soci...
Background:
Research of SARS-CoV-2 has so far largely focused on symptomatic cases. The STAAB-COVID study therefore examined the seroprevalence of COVID-19 in the general population and the psychosocial effects of the pandemic.
Methods:
From June-October 2020, a sub-study was conducted within the "Characteristics and Course of Heart Failure Stag...
Emotion-motivation models propose that behaviors, including health behaviors, should be predicted by the same variables that also predict negative affect since emotional reactions should induce a motivation to avoid threatening situations. In contrast, social cognitive models propose that safety behaviors are predicted by a different set of variabl...
Background: The study aimed to assess the mental well-being of healthcare professionals at a German department of anesthesiology and critical care with a specialized ICU for treatment of COVID-19 patients during the first two peaks of the 2020 pandemic, and identifying risk and protective factors.
Methods: A single-center longitudinal, online-based...
Physical and mental well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic is typically assessed via surveys, which might make it difficult to conduct longitudinal studies and might lead to data suffering from recall bias. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) driven smartphone apps can help alleviate such issues, allowing for in situ recordings. Implementing suc...
In human interactions, the facial expression of a bargaining partner may contain relevant information that affects prosocial decisions. We were interested in whether facial expressions of the recipient in the dictator game influence dictators’ behavior. To test this, we conducted an online study (n = 106) based on a modified version of a dictator g...
Physical and mental well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic is typically assessed via surveys, which might make it difficult to conduct longitudinal studies and might lead to data suffering from recall bias. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) driven smartphone apps can help alleviate such issues, allowing for in situ recordings. Implementing suc...
The presence of a partner can attenuate physiological fear responses, a phenomenon known as social buffering. However, not all individuals are equally sociable. Here we investigated whether social buffering of fear is shaped by sensitivity to social anxiety (social concern) and whether these effects are different in females and males. We collected...
Financial incentives are commonly used to motivate behaviours. There is also evidence that incentives can decline the behaviour they are supposed to foster, for example, documented by a decrease in blood donations if a financial incentive is offered. Based on these findings, previous studies assumed that prosocial motivation is shaped by incentives...
Objective: Emotion-motivation models propose that behaviors, including compliance with safety behaviors, should be predicted by the same variables that also predict negative affect since emotional reactions should induce a motivation to avoid threatening situations. In contrast, social cognitive models propose that safety behaviors are predicted by...
Background
Deficits in social communication and interaction are among the core symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Intention understanding in particular has been shown to be impaired in ASD. However, only one previous study has explicitly assessed the understanding of communicative intentions in ASD. Thus, the aim of the present study was t...
Humans are less likely to learn from individuals belonging to a different group (outgroup) than from individuals of their own group (ingroup), yet the source of this societally relevant deficit has remained unclear. Here we used neuroimaging and computational modeling to investigate how people learn from observing the actions and outcomes of ingrou...
Social animals show reduced physiological responses to aversive events if a conspecific is physically present. Although humans are innately social, it is unclear whether the mere physical presence of another person is sufficient to reduce human autonomic responses to aversive events. In our study, participants experienced aversive and neutral sound...
Motives motivate human behavior. Most behaviors are driven by more than one motive, yet it is unclear how different motives interact and how such motive combinations affect the neural computation of the behaviors they drive. To answer this question, we induced two prosocial motives simultaneously (multi-motive condition) and separately (single moti...
Empathic neural responses to others' suffering are subject to both social and biological influences. The present study tested the hypothesis that empathic neural responses to others' pain are more flexible in an intergroup context in G/G than A/A carriers of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) (rs53576). We recorded event-related brain potentials to...
Pain feels different in different social contexts, yet the mechanisms behind social pain modulation remain poorly understood. To elucidate the impact of social context on pain processing, we investigated how group member- ship, one of the most important social context factors, shapes pain relief behaviourally and neurally in humans undergoing funct...
Im Folgenden werden die Ziele, Methoden und Hauptfragestellungen eines relativ jungen Forschungsfeldes dargestellt, das als Neurowissenschaftliche Sozialpsychologie oder häufig auch als Soziale Neurowissenschaft bezeichnet wird. Es nutzt neurowissenschaftliche Methoden, um das menschliche Sozialverhalten zu untersuchen. Zentrale Forschungsfragen um...
Altruism is a puzzling phenomenon, especially for Biology and Economics. Why do individuals reduce their chances to provide some of the resources they own to others? The answer to this question can be sought at ultimate or proximate levels of explanation. The Social Neurosciences attempt to specify the brain mechanisms that drive humans to act altr...
Zusammenfassung
Altruismus ist ein verblüffendes Phänomen, vor allem aus Sicht der Biologie und der Ökonomie. Warum geben Individuen anderen etwas von ihren Ressourcen ab und verringern damit ihre eigenen Möglichkeiten? Die Antwort auf diese Frage kann auf ultimater oder proximater Ebene gesucht werden. Die Sozialen Neurowissenschaften versuchen, d...
Sensitivity to injustice inflicted on others is a strong motivator of human social behavior. There are, however, enormous individual differences in vicarious injustice sensitivity. Some people are strongly affected when witnessing injustice, while others barely notice it, but the factors behind this heterogeneity are poorly understood. Here we exam...
Brain activity shows underlying motives
In humans, two completely different motives may nevertheless lead to exactly the same behavior. Because we can't directly observe motives, modern economists often completely disregard them. However, Hein et al. , using fMRI, show that different human motives can yield observable responses in the brain (see th...
Significance
Deficits in empathy for out-group members are pervasive, with negative societal impact. It is therefore important to ascertain whether empathy toward out-groups can be learned and how learning experiences change empathy-related brain responses. We used a learning intervention during which participants experienced help from a member of...
Significance
How do selfish and prosocial brains function differently with regard to valuing the welfare of others? The present study addresses this question by combining neuroimaging, computational modeling, and an instrumental conditioning paradigm. Contrary to the conventional notion of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) implicated in me...
The processing of audiovisual information is an important aspect of object recognition since many objects are characterized by visual and auditory features. The images and sounds of everyday life objects are often associated with positive or negative emotions. There is evidence that emotional valence modulates the neural processing of object images...
To survive in our complex environment, we have to adapt to changing contexts. Prior research that investigated how contextual changes are processed in the human brain has demonstrated important modulatory influences on multiple cognitive processes underlying decision-making,
including perceptual judgments, working memory, as well as cognitive and a...
Time course of the skin conductance response for all conditions of Session 1. A) The plot indicates the mean ±2 SEM of a moving window average (1 s Blackman window), and is based on the first half of the trials. The blue vertical lines indicate the time window of 1.5–5 s after cue onset used for the statistical analyses. B) Skin conductance respons...
People show autonomic responses when they empathize with the suffering of another person. However, little is known about how these autonomic changes are related to prosocial behavior. We measured skin conductance responses (SCRs) and affect ratings in participants while either receiving painful stimulation themselves, or observing pain being inflic...
Im Zuge der gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen zu Beginn der 1960er Jahre hielt die ›Glücksfrage‹ Einzug in die Psychologie. In den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten fand dann eine Vermählung zwischen Psychologie und Neurowissenschaften statt. Das Feld der sozialen und der »affektiven Neurowissenschaften« (Dalgleish u.a. 2009) war geboren, und mit ihm die F...
Little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms underlying prosocial decisions and how they are modulated by social factors such as perceived group membership. The present study investigates the neural processes preceding the willingness to engage in costly helping toward ingroup and outgroup members. Soccer fans witnessed a fan of their favor...
The processing of visual and haptic inputs, occurring either separately or jointly, is crucial for everyday-life object recognition, and has been a focus of recent neuroimaging research. Previously, visuohaptic convergence has been mostly investigated with matching-task paradigms. However, much less is known about visuohaptic convergence in the abs...
The attentional blink (AB) documents a particularly strong case of visual attentional competition, in which subjects' ability to identify a second target (T2) is significantly impaired when it is presented with a short SOA after a first target (T1). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the impact of the AB on visual activity...
Several regions in human temporal and frontal cortex are known to integrate visual and auditory object features. The processing of audio-visual (AV) associations in these regions has been found to be modulated by object familiarity. The aim of the present study was to explore training-induced plasticity in human cortical AV integration. We used fun...
The superior temporal sulcus (STS) is the chameleon of the human brain. Several research areas claim the STS as the host brain region for their particular behavior of interest. Some see it as one of the core structures for theory of mind. For others, it is the main region for audiovisual integration. It plays an important role in biological motion...
The ability to share the other's feelings, known as empathy, has recently become the focus of social neuroscience studies. We review converging evidence that empathy with, for example, the pain of another person, activates part of the neural pain network of the empathizer, without first hand pain stimulation to the empathizer's body. The amplitude...
In complex natural environments, auditory and visual information often have to be processed simultaneously. Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies focused on the spatial localization of brain areas involved in audiovisual (AV) information processing, but the temporal characteristics of AV information flow in these regions rem...
After defining “cognitive perspective taking” and “empathy” we will review the main results of neuroscientific studies of the human ability to understand other people's intentions, beliefs, and experiences. We will then present several fMRI studies investigating empathic brain responses elicited by the observation of others in pain and show how the...
The cortical integration of auditory and visual features is crucial for efficient object recognition. Previous studies have shown that audiovisual (AV) integration is affected by where and when auditory and visual features occur. However, because relatively little is known about the impact of what is integrated, we here investigated the impact of s...
Why is it hard to divide attention between dissimilar activities, such as reading and listening to a conversation? We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study interference between simple auditory and visual decisions, independently of motor competition. Overlapping activity for auditory and visual tasks performed in isolation was...
Following up on studies of the "attentional blink," we studied interference between successive target stimuli in visual and auditory modalities. In each experiment, stimuli were two tones and four dots, simultaneously presented for 1,800 msec. Targets were brief intensity changes in either a tone or a dot. Subjects gave unspeeded responses. In four...
Using a classical psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm we investigated whether increased interference between dual-task input processes is one possible source of dual-task deficits in patients with closed-head injury (CHI). Patients and age-matched controls were asked to give speeded motor reactions to an auditory and a visual stimulus. T...
The psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm was used to test whether older participants suffer from input interference in dual-task situations. Young (24 years) and older (57 years) adults gave speeded responses to 2 successively presented stimuli. The results showed increased susceptibility of older participants to input interference. Furth...
Parkinson's disease (PD) has been associated with a general impairment of procedures and with an impairment of syntactic procedures in particular. The present study investigated comprehension processes in PD using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). PD patients and controls listened to sentences that were either correct or syntactically or seman...
