Jochen Weber

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center | MSKCC · Hauppauge Dermatology Section

Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to classify melanoma are dependent on their training data, which limits generalizability. The objective of this study was to compare the performance of an AI model trained on a standard adult-predominant dermoscopic dataset before and after the addition of additional pediatric training images. The performance...

Background Dermoscopy is commonly used for the evaluation of pigmented lesions, but agreement between experts for identification of dermoscopic structures is known to be relatively poor. Expert labeling of medical data is a bottleneck in the development of machine learning (ML) tools, and crowdsourcing has been demonstrated as a cost- and time-effi...

Introduction: In image interpretation education, many educators have shifted away from traditional methods that involve passive instruction and fragmented learning to interactive ones that promote active engagement and integrated knowledge. By training pattern recognition skills in an effective manner, these interactive approaches provide a promis...

Introduction: Efficient interpretation of dermoscopic images relies on pattern recognition, and the development of expert-level proficiency typically requires extensive training and years of practice. While traditional methods of transferring knowledge have proven effective, technological advances may significantly improve upon these strategies an...

Background Previous studies of artificial intelligence (AI) applied to dermatology have shown AI to have higher diagnostic classification accuracy than expert dermatologists; however, these studies did not adequately assess clinically realistic scenarios, such as how AI systems behave when presented with images of disease categories that are not in...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00879-x.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00865-3.

There is optimism that artificial intelligence (AI) will result in positive clinical outcomes, which is driving research and investment in the use of AI for skin disease. At present, AI for skin disease is embedded in research and development and not practiced widely in clinical dermatology. Clinical dermatology is also undergoing a technological t...

Prior skin image datasets have not addressed patient-level information obtained from multiple skin lesions from the same patient. Though artificial intelligence classification algorithms have achieved expert-level performance in controlled studies examining single images, in practice dermatologists base their judgment holistically from multiple les...

Prior skin image datasets have not addressed patient-level information obtained from multiple skin lesions from the same patient. Though artificial intelligence classification algorithms have achieved expert-level performance in controlled studies examining single images, in practice dermatologists base their judgment holistically from multiple les...

Mindfulness training ameliorates clinical and self-report measures of depression and chronic pain, but its use as an emotion regulation strategy - in individuals who do not meditate - remains understudied. As such, whether it (a) down-regulates early affective brain processes and (b) depends on cognitive control systems remains unclear. We exposed...

Human memory is strongly influenced by brain states occurring before an event, yet we know little about the underlying mechanisms. We found that activity in the cingulo-opercular network (including bilateral anterior insula [aI] and anterior prefrontal cortex [aPFC]) seconds before an event begins can predict whether this event will subsequently be...

Human memory is strongly influenced by brain states occurring before an event, yet we know little about the underlying mechanisms. We found that activity in the cingulo-opercular network (including bilateral anterior insula and anterior prefrontal cortex) seconds before an event begins can predict whether this event will subsequently be remembered....

Background Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an effective treatment for many patients suffering from major depressive disorder (MDD), but predictors of treatment outcome are lacking, and little is known about its neural mechanisms. We recently identified longitudinal changes in neural correlates of conscious emotion regulation that scaled with...

Background Dysregulated autobiographical recall is observed in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). However, it is unknown whether people with MDD show abnormalities in memory-, emotion- and control-related brain systems during reactivity to and regulation of negative autobiographical memories. Methods We used fMRI to identify neural mechanisms underl...

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is effective for a substantial minority of patients suffering from major depressive disorder (MDD), but its mechanism of action at the neural level is not known. As core techniques of CBT seek to enhance emotion regulation, we scanned 31 MDD participants prior to 14 sessions of CBT using functional magnetic resona...

With depictions of others facing threats common in the media, the experience of vicarious anxiety may be prevalent in the general population. However, the phenomenon of vicarious anxiety—the experience of anxiety in response to observing others expressing anxiety—and the interpersonal mechanisms underlying it have not been fully investigated in pri...

Significance statement: Everyone experiences stressors, but how we respond to them can range from protracted disability to resilience and growth. One key process underlying this variability is the agentic decision to exert control over emotional responses. We present an fMRI-based model predicting decisions to control emotion, finding that activit...

The demands of social life often require categorically judging whether someone's continuously varying facial movements express "calm" or "fear," or whether one's fluctuating internal states mean one feels "good" or "bad." In two studies, we asked whether this kind of categorical, "black and white," thinking can shape the perception and neural repre...

Neuroimaging research has identified systems that facilitate minimizing negative emotion, but how the brain is able to transform the valence of an emotional response from negative to positive is unclear. Behavioral and psychophysiological studies suggest a distinction between minimizing reappraisal, which entails diminishing the arousal elicited by...

The present neuroimaging study investigated two aspects of difficulties with emotion associated with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): affective lability and difficulty regulating emotion. While these two characteristics have been previously linked to BPD symptomology, it remains unknown whether individual differences in affective lability and...

Significance As Harper Lee tells us in To Kill a Mockingbird , “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb in his skin and walk around in it.” Classic theories in social psychology argue that this purported process of social simulation provides the foundations for self-regulation. In light...

Understanding how and why affective responses change with age is central to characterizing typical and atypical emotional development. Prior work has emphasized the role of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex (PFC), which show age-related changes in function and connectivity. However, developmental neuroimaging research has only recently begun to un...

Emotion regulation is a critical life skill that develops throughout childhood and adolescence. Despite this development in emotional processes, little is known about how the underlying brain systems develop with age. This study examined emotion regulation in 112 individuals (aged 6–23 years) as they viewed aversive and neutral images using a reapp...

Suicidal behavior and difficulty regulating emotions are hallmarks of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). This study examined neural links between emotion regulation and suicide risk in BPD. 60 individuals with BPD (all female, mean age = 28.9 years), 46 of whom had attempted suicide, completed a fMRI task involving recalling aversive personal m...

The present neuroimaging study investigated two aspects of difficulties with emotion associated with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): affective lability and difficulty regulating emotion. While these two characteristics have been previously linked to BPD symptomology, it remains unknown whether individual differences in affective lability and...

Background: Many individuals with alcohol-use disorders who had experienced alcohol craving before joining Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) report little or no craving after becoming long-term members. Their use of AA prayers may contribute to this. Neural mechanisms underlying this process have not been delineated. Objective: To define experiential an...

Significance In virtually all human groups, differences in popularity induce social status and shape interactions. How do we recognize that certain individuals are popular—highly liked by the group—even when this collective preference differs from our own? Our results suggest that group members’ popularity is tracked by activity in neural valuation...

On a daily basis, we place our lives into the hands of strangers. From dentists to pilots, we make inferences about their competence to perform their jobs and consequently to keep us from harm. Here we explore whether the perceived competence of others can alter one's anticipation of pain. In two studies, participants (Receivers) believed their cha...

Despite significant advances in understanding how brain networks support working memory (WM) and cognitive control, relatively little is known about how these networks respond when cognitive capabilities are overtaxed. We used a fine-grained manipulation of memory load within a single trial to exceed WM capacity during functional magnetic resonance...

The ability to experience pleasant or unpleasant feelings or to represent objects as "positive" or "negative" is known as representing hedonic "valence." Although scientists overwhelmingly agree that valence is a basic psychological phenomenon, debate continues about how to best conceptualize it scientifically. We used a meta-analysis of 397 functi...

This study used functional MRI (fMRI) to examine a novel aspect of emotion regulation in adolescent development: whether age predicts differences in both the concurrent and lasting effects of emotion regulation on amygdala response. In the first, active regulation, phase of the testing session, fMRI data were collected while 56 healthy individuals...

Although recent research has begun to describe the neural and genetic processes underlying variability in responses to trauma, less is known about how these processes interact. We addressed this issue by using functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the relationship between posttraumatic stress symptomatology (PTSS), a common genetic polym...

Although one third of children and adolescents are overweight or obese, developmental changes in food craving and the ability to regulate craving remain poorly understood. We addressed this knowledge gap by examining behavioral and neural responses to images of appetizing unhealthy foods in individuals ages 6 through 23 years. On close trials (asse...

The ability to use cognitive reappraisal to regulate emotions is an adaptive skill in adulthood, but little is known about its development. Because reappraisal is thought to be supported by linearly developing prefrontal regions, one prediction is that reappraisal ability develops linearly. However, recent investigations into socio-emotional develo...

One of the most effective strategies for regulating emotional responses is cognitive reappraisal. While prior work has made great strides in characterizing reappraisal’s neural mechanisms and behavioral outcomes, the key issue of how regulation varies as a function of emotional intensity remains unaddressed. We compared the behavioral and neural co...

Schizophrenia is characterized by an abnormal dopamine system, and dopamine blockade is the primary mechanism of antipsychotic treatment. Consistent with the known role of dopamine in reward processing, prior research has demonstrated that patients with schizophrenia exhibit impairments in reward-based learning. However, it remains unknown how trea...

While numerous neuroimaging studies have examined what happens when individuals are instructed to regulate their emotions, we rarely receive such instruction in everyday life. The present study sought to examine what underlies uninstructed modulation of negative affect by examining neural responses when "responding naturally" to negative stimuli -...

In recent years, an explosion of neuroimaging studies has examined cognitive reappraisal, an emotion regulation strategy that involves changing the way one thinks about a stimulus in order to change its affective impact. Existing models broadly agree that reappraisal recruits frontal and parietal control regions to modulate emotional responding in...

Expectations about an upcoming emotional event have the power to shape one’s subsequent affective response for better or worse. Here, we used mediation analyses to examine the relationship between brain activity when anticipating the need to cognitively reappraise aversive images, amygdala responses to those images and subsequent success in diminis...

Background: The ability to self-report on affective experience is essential to both our everyday communication about emotion and our scientific understanding of it. However, the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms for how people construct statements even as simple as "I feel bad!" remain unclear. We examined whether the neural architecture...

SOCIAL COGNITION IS FUNDAMENTALLY INTERPERSONAL: individuals' behavior and dispositions critically affect their interaction partners' information processing. However, cognitive neuroscience studies, partially because of methodological constraints, have remained largely "perceiver-centric": focusing on the abilities, motivations, and goals of social...

Human neuroimaging offers a powerful way to connect animal and human research on emotion, with profound implications for psychological science. However, the gulf between animal and human studies remains a formidable obstacle: human studies typically focus on the cortex and a few subcortical regions such as the amygdala, whereas deeper structures su...

The ability to use cognitive reappraisal to regulate emotions is an adaptive skill in adulthood, but little is known about its development. Because reappraisal is thought to be supported by linearly developing prefrontal regions, one prediction is that reappraisal ability develops linearly. However, recent investigations into socio-emotional develo...

Many philosophical and contemplative traditions teach that "living in the moment" increases happiness. However, the default mode of humans appears to be that of mind-wandering, which correlates with unhappiness, and with activation in a network of brain areas associated with self-referential processing. We investigated brain activity in experienced...

How a visual stimulus is initially categorized as a face by the cortical face-processing network remains largely unclear. In this study we used functional MRI to study the dynamics of face detection in visual scenes by using a paradigm in which scenes containing faces or cars are revealed progressively as they emerge from visual noise. Participants...

The "self-reference effect" describes better memory for material someone has related to one's self previously. Schizophrenia can affect aspects of the inner self such as own thoughts or actions. Schizophrenia symptoms, therefore, might not only have an influence on the self-concept, including the self-attribution of positive or negative personality...

Human experiences can be broadly divided into those that are external and related to interaction with the environment, and experiences that are internal and self-related. The cerebral cortex appears to be divided into two corresponding systems: an "extrinsic" system composed of brain areas that respond more to external stimuli and tasks and an "int...

The ability to control craving for substances that offer immediate rewards but whose long-term consumption may pose serious risks lies at the root of substance use disorders and is critical for mental and physical health. Despite its importance, the neural systems supporting this ability remain unclear. Here, we investigated this issue using functi...

Cognitive control mechanisms allow individuals to behave adaptively in the face of complex and sometimes conflicting information. Although the neural bases of these control mechanisms have been examined in many contexts, almost no attention has been paid to their role in resolving conflicts between competing social cues, which is surprising given t...

Prodigies are individuals with exceptional mental abilities. How is it possible that some of these people mentally calculate exponentiations with high accuracy and speed? We examined CP, a mental calculation prodigy, and a control group of 11 normal calculators for moderate mental arithmetic tasks. CP has additionally been tested for exceptionally...

Emotions are generally thought to arise through the interaction of bottom-up and top-down processes. However, prior work has not delineated their relative contributions. In a sample of 20 females, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural correlates of negative emotions generated by the bottom-up perception of aversive ima...

Contralateral sensory deficits in Wallenberg's lateral medullary syndrome suggest bilateral processing of trigeminal afferent input in the human brainstem. On the basis of experiments in rodents and clinical data, the present study addresses the hypothesis of bilateral projection of facial nociceptive input onto the spinal trigeminal nucleus (STN)...

Theories of empathy suggest that an accurate understanding of another's emotions should depend on affective, motor, and/or higher cognitive brain regions, but until recently no experimental method has been available to directly test these possibilities. Here, we present a functional imaging paradigm that allowed us to address this issue. We found t...

For successful interpersonal communication, inferring intentions, goals or desires of others is highly advantageous. Increasingly, humans also interact with computers or robots. In this study, we sought to determine to what degree an interactive task, which involves receiving feedback from social partners that can be used to infer intent, engaged t...

Although the ability to adaptively reflect on negative autobiographical experiences without ruminating is critical to mental health, to our knowledge no research has directly examined the neural systems underlying this process. Sixteen participants were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they focused on negative autobiogr...

The ability to mentalize, i.e. develop a Theory of Mind (ToM), enables us to anticipate and build a model of the thoughts, emotions and intentions of others. It has long been hypothesised that women differ from men in their mentalizing abilities. In the present fMRI study we examined the impact of (1) gender (women vs. men) and (2) game partner (hu...

Alarm substances are airborne chemical signals, released by an individual into the environment, which communicate emotional stress between conspecifics. Here we tested whether humans, like other mammals, are able to detect emotional stress in others by chemosensory cues. Sweat samples collected from individuals undergoing an acute emotional stresso...

Extrastriate, parietal, and frontal brain regions are differentially involved in distinct kinds of body movements and motor cognition. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the observation and mental imagery of meaningful face and limb movements with or without objects. The supplementary motor...

Alarm pheromones are airborne chemical signals, released by an individual into the environment, which transmit warning of danger to conspecifics via olfaction. Using fMRI, we provide the first neurobiological evidence for a human alarm pheromone. Individuals showed activation of the amygdala in response to sweat produced by others during emotional...

Number processing recruits a complex network of multiple numerical representations. Usually the components of this network are examined in a between-task approach with the disadvantage of relying upon different instructions, tasks, and inhomogeneous stimulus sets across different studies. A within-task approach may avoid these disadvantages and acc...

In the present study, we were interested in distinguishing the cortical representations of within-modal and cross-modal divided attention tasks by using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Sixteen healthy male subjects aged between 21 and 30 years underwent two within-modal (auditory/auditory, visual/visual) and one cross-modal (auditory/visual)...