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January 2014 - present
Publications
Publications (313)
People often exhibit intertemporal impatience by choosing immediate small over delayed larger rewards, which has been implicated across maladaptive behaviours and mental health symptoms. In this preregistered study, we tested the role of an intertemporal Pavlovian bias as possible psychological mechanism driving the temptation posed by immediate re...
Background
Up to 30% of pregnant individuals experience high levels of stress. At the same time, 15-20% of new mothers develop postpartum depression, and 25-35% experience postpartum anxiety. Mobile applications have the potential to provide an accessible, scalable solution to these mental health challenges. However, previous evidence indicates tha...
This video, based on a study published in npj Science of Learning, presents an experiment measuring how well people can counteract simple stereotypes in communication. The study explores the hypothesis that early exposure to diverse social environments has a lasting impact on our ability to challenge stereotypes.
Healthy and successful living involves carefully navigating rewarding and threatening situations by balancing approach and avoidance behaviors. Excessive avoidance to evade potential threats often leads to forfeiting potential rewards. However, little is known about how reward and threat information is integrated neurally to inform approach or avoi...
Intertemporal choices constitute a significant topic of interest in both psychological and behavioral-economics research. While many studies focus on decisions with precisely known reward delivery times, real-world situations typically involve only an imprecise knowledge of these timings, i.e., the delivery times are ambiguous. The current study us...
Background: Stress-related disorders present a significant global burden. There is great need for effective, preventive measures. Mobile just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAI) have the potential to be applied in real time and context-specifically, precisely when individuals need them most. However, they have not been widely implemented in the...
People regularly face approach-avoidance dilemmas which require minimization of potential threat whilst maximizing potential reward. Defensive reactions to threat, such as transient states of freezing, influence integration of reward/threat information in the dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (dACC). However, the mechanism of this integration betwee...
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...
Supporting Information to Adamczyk et al. "Emotion Regulation Flexibility: EEG/EMG predictors and consequences of switching between reappraisal and distraction strategies."
https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14646
Flexible use of emotion regulation (ER) strategies is central to mental health. To advance our understanding of what drives adaptive strategy‐switching decisions, in this preregistered study, we used event‐related potentials (late positive potential, LPP and stimulus preceding negativity, SPN) and facial electromyography (EMG corrugator activity) t...
Reorientation of attention to threatening stimuli is a fundamental part of human cognition. Such interaction between cognitive and affective processes is often associated with faster response times. In the present study the role of the right angular gyrus (AG) in reorienting to threat is examined. An exogenous spatial cueing paradigm was adopted wi...
Adequate control over evolutionary engrained bodily stress reactions is essential to avoid23 disproportionate responses during highly arousing situations in police. This regulation can be trained24 via heart rate variability (HRV)-biofeedback, a widely used intervention aiming to improve stress25 regulation, but typically conducted under passive, l...
Avoidance, a hallmark of anxiety-related psychopathology, often comes at a cost; avoiding threat may forgo the possibility of a reward. Theories predict that optimal approach-avoidance arbitration depends on threat-induced psychophysiological states, like freezing-related bradycardia. Here we used model-based fMRI analyses to investigate whether an...
Healthy and successful living involves carefully navigating rewarding and threatening situations by balancing approach and avoidance behaviours. Excessive avoidance to evade potential threats often leads to forfeiting potential rewards. However, little is known about how reward and threat information is integrated neurally to inform either approach...
Appraisal refers to the evaluation of stimuli or situations with respect to an individual’s goals and needs. Stimuli or situations that are appraised as a threat to one’ goals and needs (‘stressors’) induce stress responses (‘stress’). Stressor appraisal occurs on various dimensions, of which the magnitude or cost of a potential adverse outcome, th...
Background: Social anxiety disorder (SAD) has been associated with alterations in amygdala and hippocampal volume but there is mixed evidence for the direction of volumetric alterations. Additionally, little is known about the involvement distinct subfields of these regions in the pathophysiology of SAD. Methods: T1-weighted MRI images from a large...
We often forego a larger future reward in order to obtain a smaller reward immediately, known as impatient intertemporal choice. The current study investigated the role of Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) as a mechanism contributing to impatient intertemporal choice, following a theoretical framework proposing that cues associated with imme...
Neuroanatomical findings on youth anxiety disorders are notoriously difficult to replicate, small in effect size and have limited clinical relevance. These concerns have prompted a paradigm shift toward highly powered (that is, big data) individual-level inferences, which are data driven, transdiagnostic and neurobiologically informed. Here we buil...
Our current understanding of the human stress response and its role in health, resilience, and (psycho)pathology stems largely from acute stress studies in controlled laboratory settings. Comparability of findings across these individual studies is comprised, as sample size are often small, between-individual variation in the stress response is lar...
The Perceptual Control Theory of Emotional Action provides a compelling view of the synergy between action and perception in the context of emotion. In this invited response, we outline three suggestions to further clarify and concretesise the theory in the hope that it can provide a solid basis for the theoretical, empirical, and clinical fields o...
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...
Social avoidance is a hallmark of social anxiety disorder. Difficulties in controlling avoidance behavior are the core maintaining factor of this impairing condition, hampering the efficacy of existing therapies. This preregistered study tested a physiologically-grounded non-invasive enhancement of control over social approach and avoidance behavio...
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-...
Supporting Information to Reappraisal is less effective than distraction in downregulation of neural responses to physical threats-An event-related potential investigation
https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14316
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...
While strong claims have been made that testosterone increases risk-taking, the existing literature is inconclusive. Thus, our experiment aimed at addressing some shortcomings of previous work. First, risk-taking was assessed using the Columbia Card Task, which allows to decompose overt risk-taking into three task factors—gain amount, loss amount,...
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...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0260952.].
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...
The endeavor to understand the human brain has seen more progress in the last few decades than in the previous two millennia. Still, our understanding of how the human brain relates to behavior in the real world and how this link is modulated by biological, social, and environmental factors is limited. To address this, we designed the Healthy Brain...
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...
