Hans Menning

University of Zurich | UZH · Psychiatry Research

In the last few decades, there has been an increase of experimental research on automatic unconscious processes concerning the evaluation of the self and others. Previous research investigated implicit aspects of romantic attachment using self-report measures as explicit instruments for assessing attachment style. There is a lack of experimental pr...

Posttraumatische Belastungsstörungen gehören zu den Angststörungen und habe als einzige ein bestimmtes Ereignis als Ursprung: das Trauma. In den ersten Minuten und Stunden nach einem Trauma werden oft schon die Weichen für die Entstehung oder Nicht-Entstehung einer Belastungsstörung gelegt. Wie in unmittelbarer zeitlicher und räumlicher Nähe zum Tr...

We studied an effect of predictability in an audio-visual apparent motion task using magnetoencephalography. The synchronous sequences of audio-visual stimuli were self-triggered by subjects. The task was to detect the direction of the apparent motion in experimental blocks in which the motion either started from the side selected by subjects (pred...

Mismatch Negativity (MMN) is yet poorly understood in the context of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD, e.g. [Morgan 3rd, C.A., Grillon, C., 1999. Abnormal mismatch negativity in women with sexual assault-related posttraumatic stress disorder. Biol. Psychiatry 45, 827–832.]). PTSD symptoms like hyperarousal, emotional pressure and avoidance may i...

The human central-auditory system exhibits distinct lateralization effects (speech, space) and encompasses different processing pathways (where, what, who). Using spatialized pseudoword utterances, attentional modulation of the networks bound to sound source localization ('where'), voice recognition ('who'), and the encoding of phonetic-linguistic...

Using whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG), audiovisual (AV) interactions during speech perception (/ta/- and /pa/-syllables) were investigated in 20 subjects. Congruent AV events served as the 'standards' of an oddball design. The deviants encompassed incongruent /ta/-/pa/ configurations differing from the standards either in the acoustic or th...

Ab wann ist ein Trauma ein Trauma? Und ab wann sind die Auswirkungen des Traumas behandlungsbedürftig? Ist die Erkrankung an Krebs oder AIDS oder an der Alzheimer-Demenz ein traumatisches Ereignis? Die Wahrnehmung und Bewertung eines Ereignisses als „traumatisch” spielt dabei eine wichtige Rolle. Erst die psychische Reaktion macht aus einem Ereigni...

We translated, modified, and extended a cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT) protocol by Blanchard and Hickling (2003) for the purpose of treating survivors of MVA with full or subsyndromal posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) whose native language is German. The treatment manual included some additional elements, e. g. cognitive procedures, imagin...

Previous studies have shown that cross-modal processing affects perception at a variety of neuronal levels. In this study, event-related brain responses were recorded via whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG). Spatial auditory attention was directed via tactile pre-cues (primes) to one of four locations in the peripersonal space (left and right h...

The onset of pitch within an ongoing noise signal evokes a particular brain activity, the pitch onset response (POR). Using whole-head MEG, PORs to iterated rippled noise (IRN) and Huggins pitch (HP), representing prototypical pitch-in-noise signals, were measured in twenty subjects during a pitch identification task (333 Hz, 400 Hz, randomized). H...

This magnetoencephalographic study tested whether magnetic fields evoked by syntactic and semantic errors differ in their time course and magnitude from fields evoked by phonemic differences. An oddball design, using German sentences with embedded critical words was applied: The error condition (with the standard word RASEN, lawn, in 70% of the tri...

In dieser Dissertation wird der Frage nachgegangen, ob intensives Diskriminationslernen plastische Veränderungen im auditorischen Kortex bewirkt. Im 1. Experiment wurde daher die Wirkung eines dreiwöchigen Frequenzdiskrimi-nationstrainings untersucht. Zwei magnetoenzephalographische (MEG) Messungen definierten die ?normalen? MMN-Amplituden, eine Me...

In this magnetoencephalographic (MEG) study, we examined with high temporal resolution the traces of learning in the speech-dominant left-hemispheric auditory cortex as a function of newly trained mora-timing. In Japanese, the "mora" is a temporal unit that divides words into almost isochronous segments (e.g., na-ka-mu-ra and to-o-kyo-o each compri...

Introduction Does learning of non-native speech features lead to a reorganization of language-specific areas in the human brain? It is well known that we perceive and produce speech through the filter of our native language. While infants are able to discriminate most phonetic categories in the first months of life, they already develop prototypica...

The slow auditory evoked (wave N1m) and mismatch field (MMF) elicited by sequences of pure tones of 1000 Hz and deviant tones of 1050, 1010 and 1005 Hz were measured before, during and 3 weeks after subjects were trained at frequency discrimination for 15 sessions (over 3 weeks) using an odd-ball procedure. The task of the subject was to detect dev...