K. Roelofs

Radboud University | RU · Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour And Behavioural Science Institute

Fearful avoidance is a hallmark of anxiety disorders and often comes at a cost. It reduces the probability of threat and of obtaining rewards. Theoretical models predict that threat-induced psychophysiological states, such as freezing-related bradycardia, facilitate arbitration of approach-avoidance decisions. We indeed show that bradycardia states...

Time ambiguity—that is, having partially/fully incomplete information about when an outcome will occur—is common in everyday life. A recent study showed that participants preferred options with time‐exact delays over options with time‐ambiguous delays, a phenomenon they called time‐ambiguity aversion. However, the empirical robustness and boundarie...

Avoidance behavior is a major causal and maintaining factor in anxiety. As anxious individuals avoid social situations, their fear cannot be extinguished and context-appropriate behavior cannot be learned. It has been shown that successful emotion control over social approach-avoidance actions relies on theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling between...

Social avoidance has been associated with more persistent social anxiety disorder (SAD) symptoms and low testosterone levels in individuals with SAD. We tested whether pre-treatment avoidance tendencies moderate the efficacy of testosterone-augmented exposure therapy. Fifty-five females with SAD received two exposure sessions during which fear leve...

Animal studies show that early life environmental factors, such as stress and trauma, can have a significant impact on a variety of bodily processes, including cellular aging and brain development. However, whether cellular wear-and-tear effects are also associated with individual differences in brain structures in humans, remains unknown. In this...

Anxious individuals consistently fail in controlling emotional behavior, leading to excessive avoidance, a trait that prevents learning through exposure. Although the origin of this failure is unclear, one candidate system involves control of emotional actions, coordinated through lateral frontopolar cortex (FPl) via amygdala and sensorimotor conne...

Background Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is an effective treatment for depression that has been proposed to work via the enhancement of cognitive control. Cognitive control training (CCT) can also alleviate depression by relying on DLPFC activation. As the additive effects of rTMS...

There is accumulating evidence for positive effects of green spaces on mental and brain health. Here we investigated whether differentiating the types of green spaces may be relevant. On longitudinal data of children ( N = 95) from the Netherlands, we quantified the link between green space exposure at home from birth onwards and MRI brain structur...

Background: Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a substantial burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies for the prevention and treatment of mental disorders requires a better understanding of their risk and resilience factors. This multicenter study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psychol...

A paradox of testosterone effects is seen in adolescents versus adults in social emotional approach-avoidance behavior. During adolescence, high testosterone levels are associated with increased anterior prefrontal (aPFC) involvement in emotion control, whereas during adulthood this neuro-endocrine relation is reversed. Rodent work shows that, duri...

Alterations in associative threat learning have been thought to underlie the aetiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Recent insights into the facilitatory role of parasympathetic arousal for threat coping have raised the question whether individual differences in parasympathetic versus sympathetic dominance during threat learning may explai...

Despite increasing interest in emotional processes in cognitive science, theories on emotion regulation have not consistently emphasized the importance of action-selection. However, recent neurocognitive evidence suggests that early emotion regulation may involve sensorimotor control in addition to other emotion-regulation processes. We propose an...

Stereotypes can exert a powerful influence on our interactions with others, potentially leading to prejudice when factual evidence is ignored. Here, we identify neuroanatomical and developmental factors that influence the real-time integration of stereotypes and factual evidence during live social interactions. The study uses precisely quantified c...

Emotion regulation is essential to survive in a world full of challenges with rapidly changing contextual demands. The ability to flexibly shift between different emotional control strategies is critical to successfully deal with these demands. Recently, decision neuroscience has shown the importance of monitoring alternative control strategies. Ho...

Evolutionary threats (ETs), such as predatory animals and heights, elicit stronger fear responses and are more often the subject of specific phobias, as compared to modern threats (MTs, such as guns and motorcycles). Since processing of ET depends on lower-order, phylogenetically conserved neural fear circuits, it may be less susceptible to higher-...

When choosing between sooner-smaller and later-larger rewards (i.e., intertemporal choices), adults typically prefer later-larger rewards more often than children. Intertemporal choice preferences have been implicated in various impulsivity-related psychopathologies, making it important to understand the underlying mechanisms not only in terms of h...

Timely recovery from stress is crucial in the prevention of various stress-related disorders. Music listening is often used by adults and teenagers to reduce stress. However, while music listening seems to be a promising way to promote effective recovery from stress, current research has given little attention to the explanatory mechanisms underlyi...

There is limited convergence in neuroimaging investigations into volumes of subcortical brain regions in social anxiety disorder (SAD). The inconsistent findings may arise from variations in methodological approaches across studies, including sample selection based on age and clinical characteristics. The ENIGMA-Anxiety Working Group initiated a gl...

Emotional cues draw attention, thereby enabling enhanced processing. Electrophysiological brain research in humans suggests that increased gamma band activity and decreased alpha band activity over posterior brain areas is associated with the allocation of attention. However, emotional events can alternate quickly, like rapidly changing news items...

Neuroimaging studies point to neurostructural abnormalities in youth with anxiety disorders. Yet, findings are based on small-scale studies, often with small effect sizes, and have limited generalizability and clinical relevance. These issues have prompted a paradigm shift in the field towards highly powered (i.e., big data) individual-level infere...

Introduction Police are at risk of trauma and related mental health outcomes. Sleep disturbances and fatigue predict poor mental health in other populations, thus it is critical we determine whether they represent risk factors for mental health problems in first responders. We examined if pre-trauma sleep and fatigue experienced by police recruits...

A paradox of testosterone effects is seen in adolescents vs. adults in social emotional approach-avoidance behavior. During adolescence, high testosterone levels are associated with increased anterior prefrontal (aPFC) involvement in emotion control, whereas during adulthood this neuro-endocrine relation is reversed. Rodent work shows that, during...

A compelling amount of animal and human research has shown that perceived maternal stress during pregnancy can affect the neurodevelopment of the offspring. Prenatal maternal cortisol is frequently proposed as the biological key mechanism underlying this link; however, literature that investigates the effects of prenatal cortisol on subsequent neur...

One of the hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is abnormalities in the HPA-axis. This includes alterations in its negative feedback regulation. Although altered glucocorticoid receptor (GR) mRNA expression is thought to play a crucial role herein, direct longitudinal evidence in humans is lacking to support this assumption. The curre...

Background The freezing response is a universal response to threat, linked to attentive immobility and action preparation. It is relevant for acute stress coping in animals and humans, and subtle deviations in toddler freezing duration (absence of, or excessively long reactions) have been linked to higher risk for internalizing symptoms in adolesce...

Effective stress recovery is crucial to prevent the long-term consequences of stress exposure. Studies have suggested that listening to music may be beneficial for stress reduction. Thus, music listening stands to be a promising method to promote effective recovery from exposure to daily stressors. Despite this, empirical support for this opinion h...

Temperament involves stable behavioral and emotional tendencies that differ between individuals, which can be first observed in infancy or early childhood and relate to behavior in many contexts and over many years.1 One of the most rigorously characterized temperament classifications relates to the tendency of individuals to avoid the unfamiliar a...

Animals have sophisticated mechanisms for coping with danger. Freezing is a unique state that, upon threat detection, allows evidence to be gathered, response possibilities to be previsioned and preparations to be made for worst-case fight or flight. We propose that — rather than reflecting a passive fear state — the particular somatic and cognitiv...

Threatening situations ask for rapid and accurate perceptual decisions to optimize coping. Theoretical models have stated that psychophysiological states, such as bradycardia during threat-anticipatory freezing, may facilitate perception. However, it’s unclear if this occurs via enhanced bottom-up sensory processing or by relying more on prior expe...

BACKGROUND Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a significant burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies of their treatment and prevention requires knowledge about risk and resilience. This multi-center study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psychological resilience in healthy, but vulnerabl...

Background Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a substantial burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies for the prevention and treatment of mental disorders requires a better understanding of their risk and resilience factors. This multicenter study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psycholo...

Simultaneous execution of memory retrieval and cognitively demanding interventions alter the subjective experience of aversive memories. This principle can be used in treatment to target traumatic memories. An often-used interpretation is that cognitive demand interferes with memory reconsolidation. Laboratory models applying this technique often d...

Studies have suggested that listening to music may be beneficial for stress reduction. Despite this, empirical support for this opinion has been largely equivocal. To clarify the current literature, we conducted a systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized, controlled experimental studies investigating the effects of music listening on stre...

SKORA, L.I., J.J.A. LIVERMORE and K. Roelofs. The functional role of cardiac activity in perception and action. NEUROSCI BIOBEHAV REV X(X) XXX-XXX, 2022. Patterns of cardiac activity continuously vary with environmental demands, accelerating or decelerating depending on circumstances. Simultaneously, cardiac cycle affects a host of higher-order pro...

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic might affect mental health. Data from population-representative panel surveys with multiple waves including pre-COVID data investigating risk and protective factors are still rare. Methods: In a stratified random sample of the German household population (n = 6684), we conducted survey...

Substantial individual differences exist in how acute stress affects large-scale neurocognitive networks, including salience (SN), default mode (DMN), and central executive networks (CEN). Changes in the connectivity strength of these networks upon acute stress may predict vulnerability to long-term stress effects, which can only be tested in prosp...

It is widely recognized that police performance may be hindered by psychophysiological state changes during acute stress. To address the need for awareness and control of these physiological changes, police academies in many countries have implemented Heart-Rate Variability (HRV) biofeedback training. Despite these trainings now being widely delive...

Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a significant burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies of their treatment and prevention requires knowledge about risk and resilience. This multi-center study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psychological resilience in healthy, but vulnerable young adu...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0260952.].

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic might affect mental health. Data from population-representative panel surveys with multiple waves including pre-COVID data investigating risk and protective factors are still rare.Methods: In a stratified random sample of the German household population (n=6,684), we conducted survey-weighted multiple linear regres...

It is widely recognized that police performance may be hindered by psychophysiological state changes during acute stress. To address the need for awareness and control of these physiological changes, police academies in many countries have implemented Heart-Rate Variability (HRV) biofeedback training. Despite these trainings now being widely delive...

The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate emerging adults’ mental health before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and whether social support from mothers, fathers, and best friends moderated the change in mental health. Participants were 98 emerging adults (46% men) who were assessed prior to COVID-19 (Mage = 20.60 years) and during the...

The anticipation of threat facilitates innate defensive behaviours including freezing reactions. Freezing in humans is characterised by reductions in body sway and heart rate. Limited evidence suggests that individual differences in freezing reactions are associated with predictors of anxiety-related psychopathology including trait anxiety and hypo...

Individuals with a social anxiety disorder (SAD) show hypofunctioning of the hypothalamus–pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis, which is linked to social fear and avoidance behavior. As testosterone administration has been shown to facilitate social-approach behavior in this population, it may enhance the effectiveness of exposure treatment. In this proof-...

Regulating social emotional actions is essential for coping with life stressors and is associated with control by the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) over the amygdala. However, it remains unclear to what extent prefrontal emotion regulation capacities contribute to resilience against developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Her...

Substantial individual differences exist in how acute stress affects large-scale neurocognitive networks, including Salience (SN), Default Mode (DMN) and Central Executive Networks (CEN). These network-level changes upon acute stress may predict vulnerability to long-term stress effects, which can only be tested in prospective longitudinal studies....

Successful responding to acutely threatening situations requires adequate approach–avoidance decisions. However, it is unclear how threat-induced states—like freezing-related bradycardia—impact the weighing of the potential outcomes of such value-based decisions. Insight into the underlying computations is essential, not only to improve our models...

Over the past three decades, functional MRI (fMRI) has become key to study how cognitive processes are implemented in the human brain. However, the question of whether participants recruited into fMRI studies differ from participants recruited into other study contexts has received little to no attention. This is particularly pertinent when effects...

Freezing to impending threat is a core defensive response. It has been studied primarily using fear-conditioning in non-human animals, thwarting advances in translational human anxiety-research. Here we examine postural freezing as a human conditioning-index for translational anxiety-research. We show (n=28) that human freezing is highly sensitive...

Acutely challenging or threatening situations frequently require approach-avoidance decisions. Acute threat triggers fast autonomic changes that prepare the body to freeze, fight or flee. However, such autonomic changes may also influence subsequent instrumental approach-avoidance decisions. Since defensive bodily states are often not considered in...

As part of the Dutch national science program “Professional Games for Professional Skills” we developed a stress-exposure biofeedback training in virtual reality (VR) for the Dutch police. We aim to reduce the acute negative impact of stress on performance, as well as long-term consequences for mental health by facilitating physiological stress reg...

Social anxiety and psychopathy have conceptually been linked to nearly opposite emotional, behavioral and endocrinological endophenotypes, representing social fearfulness and fearlessness, respectively. Although such a dimensional view has theoretical and practical implications, no study has directly compared social anxiety and psychopathy in terms...

Damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) can cause maladaptive social behavior, but the cognitive processes underlying these behavioral changes are still uncertain. Here, we tested whether patients with acquired VMPFC lesions show altered approach-avoidance tendencies to emotional facial expressions. Thirteen patients with focal VMPFC l...

Successful responding to acutely threatening situations requires adequate approach-avoidance decisions. However, it is unclear how threat-induced states -like freezing-related bradycardia- impact the weighing of the potential outcomes of such value-based decisions. Insight into the underlying computations is essential, not only to improve our model...

Early interventions to improve resilience require the identification of objective risk biomarkers for PTSD symptom development. Although altered hippocampal and amygdala volumes are consistently observed in PTSD, it remains currently unknown whether they represent a predisposing vulnerability factor for PTSD symptom development or an acquired conse...

The aim of this prospective longitudinal study was to examine emerging adults’ mental health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic, while taking into account pre-existing problems as well as social support from close others. Participants were 85 emerging adults (46% boys) who were assessed prior to COVID-19 (February-September 2018; Mage = 20.60 ye...

The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) plays a critical modulatory role in driving fear responses. Part of the so-called extended amygdala, this region shares many functions and connections with the substantially more investigated amygdala proper. In this chapter, we review contributions of the BNST and amygdala to subjective, behavioral, a...

Excessive avoidance behaviour is a cardinal symptom of anxiety disorders. Avoidance is not only associated with the benefits of avoiding threats, but also with the costs of missing out on rewards upon exploration. Psychological and psychophysiological mechanisms contributing to these costly avoidance decisions in prospect of mixed outcomes remain u...

Control over emotional action tendencies is essential for everyday interactions. This cognitive function fails occasionally during socially challenging situations, and systematically in social psychopathologies. We delivered dual-site phase-coupled brain stimulation to facilitate theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling between frontal regions known to...

The short (S) allele of the serotonin transporter-linked promoter region (5-HTTLPR) polymorphism has been linked to reactive aggression in men, but this association is less consistent in females. Reactive aggression has been particularly described as a result of fear-driven defense to threat, but how this interaction between defensive behavior and...

Damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) can cause maladaptive social behavior, but the cognitive processes underlying these behavioral changes are still uncertain. Here, we tested whether patients with acquired VMPFC lesions show altered approach-avoidance tendencies to emotional facial expressions. Thirteen patients with focal VMPFC l...

Control over emotional action tendencies is essential for every-day interactions. This cognitive function can fail during socially challenging situations, and is chronically attenuated in social psychopathologies such as social anxiety and aggression. Previous studies have shown that control over social-emotional action tendencies depends on phase-...

Acute stress induces large‐scale neural reorganization with relevance to stress‐related psychopathology. Here, we applied a novel supervised machine learning method, combining the strengths of a priori theoretical insights with a data‐driven approach, to identify which connectivity changes are most prominently associated with a state of acute stres...

Over the past three decades, MRI has become a key tool to study how cognitive processes are implemented in the human brain. However, the question of whether participants recruited into MRI studies differ from participants recruited into other study contexts has received little to no attention. This is particularly pertinent when effects fail to gen...