Kati RoesmannUniversität Osnabrück | UOS · Institute of Psychology
Kati Roesmann
Dr. rer. nat, Dipl.-Psych., Psychotherapist - CBT - Children/Adolescents/Adults
About
70
Publications
11,352
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Introduction
I am interested in the neurocognitive basis of fear, anxiety and anxiety disorders across different age groups. Particularly, I seek to better understand how neural reflections of emotional perception and learning processes are associated with responses to psychotherapy, especially behavioral exposure. Thereby, I take advantage of different methods, such as magnetoencephalography (MEG), electroencephalograpy (EEG) and neurostimulation techniques .
Additional affiliations
December 2019 - July 2021
September 2016 - November 2019
August 2015 - July 2016
Education
September 2016 - March 2018
Gesellschaft für Angewandte Psychologie und Verhaltensmedizin mbH (APV)
Field of study
- Clinical Psychology (CBT) - Children and Adolescents
October 2010 - October 2014
Institute for Psychological Psychotherapy (IPP)
Field of study
- Clinical Psychology (CBT)
May 2010 - October 2014
Otto Creutzfeld Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neurosciences
Field of study
- Psychology, Neuroscience
Publications
Publications (70)
Emotional words-as symbols for biologically relevant concepts-are preferentially processed in brain regions including the visual cortex, frontal and parietal regions, and a corticolimbic circuit including the amygdala. Some of the brain structures found in functional magnetic resonance imaging are not readily apparent in electro- and magnetoencepha...
Altered memory processes are thought to be a key mechanism in the etiology of anxiety disorders, but little is known about the neural correlates of fear learning and memory biases in patients with social phobia. The present study therefore examined whether patients with social phobia exhibit different patterns of neural activation when confronted w...
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a key role in the modulation of affective processing. However, its specific role in the regulation of neurocognitive processes underlying the interplay of affective perception and visual awareness has remained largely unclear. Using a mixed factorial design, this study investigated effects of inhibit...
Acquired fear responses often generalize from conditioned stimuli (CS) towards perceptually similar, but harmless generalization stimuli (GS). Knowledge on similarities between CS and GS may be explicit or implicit. Employing behavioral measures and whole-head magnetoencephalography, we here investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning i...
Background
In recent years, internet- and mobile-based interventions (IMIs) have become increasingly relevant in mental health care and have sparked societal debates. Psychotherapists’ perspectives are essential for identifying potential opportunities for improvement, facilitating conditions, and barriers to the implementation of these intervention...
The visual processing of morphologically complex words has been studied for decades now. One influential account proposes initial sublexical parsing, based on surface structure, before semantic information comes in (form-first models; Rastle & Davis, 2008, Morphological decomposition based on the analysis of orthography. Language and Cognitive Proc...
Body image disturbance is a key symptom of anorexia nervosa (AN). AN patients report body dissatisfaction and overestimate their own body size in several tasks. This study aimed to clarify whether this overestimation arises from deficits in visual perception. To this end, 36 adolescent restrictive-type AN patients and 42 matched healthy controls pe...
Anxiety disorders (AD) are associated with altered connectivity in large-scale intrinsic brain networks. It remains uncertain how much these signatures overlap across different phenotypes due to a lack of well-powered cross-disorder comparisons. We used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) to investigate differences in funct...
The functional neuropeptide S receptor 1 (NPSR1) gene A/T variant (rs324981) is associated with fear processing. We investigated the impact of NPSR1 genotype on fear processing and on symptom reduction following treatment in individuals with spider phobia. A replication approach was applied [discovery sample: Münster (MS) nMS = 104; replication sam...
BACKGROUND
Guided mobile-based interventions may mitigate symptoms of anxiety disorders such as panic disorder (PD), agoraphobia (AG), or social anxiety disorder (SAD). With exposure therapy being efficacious in traditional treatments for these disorders, recent advancements have introduced 360° videos to deliver virtual reality exposure therapy (V...
Although highly effective on average, exposure-based treatments do not work equally well for all patients with anxiety disorders. The identification of pre-treatment response-predicting patient characteristics may enable patient stratification. Preliminary research highlights the relevance of inhibitory fronto-limbic networks as such. We aimed to i...
Objectives
Inhibitory control deficits are considered a key pathogenic factor in anxiety disorders. To assess inhibitory control, the antisaccade task is a well-established measure that assesses antisaccade performance via latencies and error rates. The present study follows three aims: (1) to investigate inhibitory control via antisaccade latencie...
Humans are subject to a variety of cognitive biases, such as the framing-effect or the gambler's fallacy, that lead to decisions unfitting of a purely rational agent. Previous studies have shown that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) plays a key role in making rational decisions and that stronger vmPFC activity is associated with attenuate...
The ability to cope with threats is crucial in today's troubling times, especially for young people who are still developing coping mechanisms. Psychopathology and the development of anxiety disorders can be viewed as a failure to adapt to changing demands. We draw on a study by Klein et al. (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2023), which...
A crucial skill, especially in rapidly changing environments, is to be able to learn efficiently from prior rewards or losses and apply this acquired knowledge in upcoming situations. Often, we must weigh the risks of different options and decide whether an option is worth the risk or whether we should choose a safer option. The ventromedial prefro...
Objectives: Inhibitory control deficits are considered a key pathogenic factor in anxiety disorders. To assess inhibitory control, the antisaccade task is a well-established measure, assessing antisaccade performance via latencies and error rates. The present study follows three aims: (1) to investigate inhibitory control via antisaccade latencies...
Machine-learning prediction studies have shown potential to inform treatment stratification, but recent efforts to predict psychotherapy outcomes with clinical routine data have only resulted in moderate prediction accuracies. Neuroimaging data showed promise to predict treatment outcome, but previous prediction attempts have been exploratory and r...
Introduction
Studies suggest an involvement of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in reward prediction and processing, with reward-based learning relying on neural activity in response to unpredicted rewards or non-rewards (reward prediction error, RPE). Here, we investigated the causal role of the vmPFC in reward prediction, processing, an...
BACKGROUND
In recent years, internet- and mobile-based interventions gained relevance in mental health care. Psychotherapists' perspectives are crucial in identifying potential improvements as well as barriers to the implementation of these interventions.
OBJECTIVE
This study aimed to explore psychotherapists’ perspectives on the barriers and faci...
Body image disturbance is a key symptom of anorexia nervosa (AN), as AN patients typically report body dissatisfaction and overestimate their own body size. This study aimed to clarify whether this overestimation arises from deficits in visual perception. To this end, 36 adolescent restrictive-type AN patients and 42 matched healthy controls perfor...
Background/Objective
Most studies investigating the neural correlates of threat learning were carried out using an explicit Pavlovian conditioning paradigm where declarative knowledge on contingencies between conditioned (CS) and unconditioned stimuli (US) is acquired. The current study aimed at understanding the neural correlates of threat conditi...
The framing-effect is a bias that affects decision-making depending on whether the available options are presented with positive or negative connotations. Even when the outcome of two choices is equivalent, people have a strong tendency to avoid the negatively framed option. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is crucial for rational decisio...
Background
Fear generalization is pivotal for the survival-promoting avoidance of potential danger, but, if too pronounced, it promotes pathological anxiety. Similar to adult patients with anxiety disorders, healthy children tend to show overgeneralized fear responses.
Objective
This study aims to investigate neuro-developmental aspects of fear ge...
Successful psychotherapy for anxiety disorders is thought to be linked to functional neural changes in prefrontal control areas and fear-related limbic regions. Thus, discovering such therapy-associated neural changes might point to relevant mechanisms of action. Using AES-SDM, we conducted a coordinate-based meta-analysis of 22 whole-brain dataset...
Angst ist eine überlebenswichtige Emotion. Im Folgenden geben wir einen Überblick über basale Defensivmechanismen und furchtbezogene Lernprozesse und zeigen, wie ein biologisch-evolutionäres Verständnis gesunder und pathologischer defensiver Reaktivität Betroffenen helfen kann, Angstsymptome zu begreifen und ein expositionsbasiertes Behandlungsrati...
Background: Cognitive behavioral therapy is the first-line treatment for patients with panic disorder (PD) and agora-phobia (AG). Yet, many patients remain untreated due to limited treatment resources. Digital self-guided short-term treatment applications may help to overcome this issue. While some therapeutic applications are already supported by...
Background
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a highly prevalent mental disorder associated with enormous stress and suffering. Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is the first-line treatment for SAD, yet its accessibility is often constrained with long waiting times. Digital therapeutic applications, including psychoeducation and self-guided behavioral...
Background
Models of anxiety disorders and the rationale of exposure therapy (ET) are grounded on classical fear conditioning. Yet, it is unclear whether lower fear ratings of conditioned safety versus threat cues and corresponding neural markers of safety-learning and/or fear inhibition assessed before treatment would predict better outcomes of be...
The framing-effect is a bias that affects decision-making depending on whether the available options are presented with positive or negative connotations. Even when the outcome of two choices is equivalent, people have a strong tendency to avoid the negatively framed option because losses are perceived about twice as salient as gains of the same am...
The framing-effect is a bias that affects decision-making depending on whether the available options are presented with positive or negative connotations. Even when the outcome of two choices is equivalent, people have a strong tendency to avoid the negatively framed option because losses are perceived about twice as salient as gains of the same am...
Zusammenfassung
In den letzten Jahren sind durch die Fortschritte der Digitalisierung neue psychotherapeutische Behandlungsmöglichkeiten und Unterstützungsangebote entstanden. Während sich bestimmte Innovationen wie die Videotherapie im letzten Jahr stark verbreitet haben, sind andere Formate wie z. B. Psychotherapieanwendungen in der Virtuellen Re...
Recent studies indicate differential involvement of the centromedial amygdala (CM) and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) during processing (anticipation and confrontation) of threat stimuli. Here, temporal predictability was shown to be a relevant factor. In this study, we want to investigate the relevance of these effects, which were...
The use of pupillometry to track emotional learning processes in humans is generating an increasing interest. Here, we provide a first systematic review and meta-analysis on the value of pupil dilation as a marker of Pavlovian conditioning, focusing on the roles of UCS valence (aversive vs. appetitive), the time course across trials and response in...
Background
Overgeneralization of fear is a pathogenic marker of anxiety and stress-related disorders and has been linked with perceptual discrimination deficits, reduced fear inhibition, and prefrontal hypo-reactivity to safety signaling stimuli.
Objective
We aimed to examine whether behavioral and neural patterns of fear generalization are influe...
Background
Patients with specific phobia (SP) show altered brain activation when confronted with phobia-specific stimuli. It is unclear whether this pathogenic activation pattern generalizes to other emotional stimuli. This study addresses this question by employing a well-powered sample while implementing an established paradigm using nonspecific...
While being highly effective on average, exposure-based treatments are not equally effective in all patients. The a priori identification of patients with a poor prognosis may enable the application of more personalized psychotherapeutic interventions. We aimed at identifying sociodemographic and clinical pre-treatment predictors for treatment resp...
Background
As overgeneralization of fear is a pathogenic marker of anxiety disorders, we investigated whether pre-treatment levels of fear generalization in spider-phobic patients are related to their response to exposure-based treatment, in order to identify pre-treatment moderators of treatment success.
Methods
Ninety patients with spider phobia...
Background:
It remains unclear to what extent reduced nutritional intake in anorexia nervosa (AN) is a consequence of a reduced motivational response to food. Although self-reports typically suggest AN patients have a reduced appetitive response, behavioral and neurophysiological measures have revealed evidence for both increased and reduced atten...
As overgeneralization of fear is a pathogenic marker of anxiety disorders, we investigated whether pre-treatment levels of fear generalization in spider-phobic patients are associated with their response to exposure-based treatment, in order to identify pre-treatment correlates of treatment success. Ninety patients with spider phobia completed pre-...
Although acute aerobic exercise benefits different aspects of emotional functioning, it is unclear how exercise influences the processing of emotional stimuli and which brain mechanisms support this relationship. We assessed the influence of acute aerobic exercise on valence biases (preferential processing of negative/positive pictures) by performi...
Objectives
Embedded in the Collaborative Research Center “Fear, Anxiety, Anxiety Disorders” (CRC‐TRR58), this bicentric clinical study aims at identifying biobehavioral markers of treatment (non‐)response by applying machine learning methodology with an external cross‐validation protocol. We hypothesize that a priori prediction of treatment (non‐)r...
Although Exposure Therapy (ET) is the first-line treatment of Specific Phobia (SP), there is no clear consensus on which factors influence its success, and thus on how to conduct it most efficiently. This review summarizes the current state of research regarding this topic. N = 111 studies were in accordance with our eligibility criteria: participa...
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is known to be specifically involved in the processing of stimuli with pleasant, rewarding meaning to the observer. By the use of non-invasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), it was previously possible to show evidence for this valence specificity and to modulate the impact of the vmPFC on...
Background:
Neuroplastic underpinnings of meditation-induced changes in affective processing are largely unclear.
Methods:
We included healthy older participants in an active-controlled experiment. They were involved a meditation training or a control relaxation training of eight weeks. Associations between behavioral and neural morphometric cha...
The observation of pain in others may enhance or reduce self-pain, yet the boundary conditions and factors that determine the direction of such effects are poorly understood. The current study set out to show that visual stimulus awareness plays a crucial role in determining whether vicarious pain primarily activates behavioral defense systems that...
Evidence indicates meditation facilitates affective regulation and reduces negative affect. It also influences resting-state functional connectivity between affective networks and the posterior cingulate (PCC)/precuneus, regions critically implicated in self-referential processing. However, no longitudinal study employing active control group has e...
Persons suffering from anxiety disorders display facilitated processing of arousing and negative stimuli, such as negative words. This memory bias is reflected in better recall and increased amygdala activity in response to such stimuli. However, individual learning histories were not considered in most studies, a concern that we meet here. Thirty-...
Diffusion tensor imaging revealed that trait anxiety predicts the microstructural properties of a prespecified fiber tract between the amygdala and the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex. Besides this particular pathway, it is likely that other pathways are also affected. We investigated white matter differences in persons featuring an anxious or...
Limbic hyperactivation and an impaired functional interplay between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex are discussed to go along with, or even cause, pathological anxiety. Within the multi-faceted group of anxiety disorders, the highly prevalent social phobia (SP) is characterized by excessive fear of being negatively evaluated. Although there...
MultiCS conditioning is an affective associative learning paradigm, in which affective categories consist of many similar and complex stimuli. Comparing visual processing before and after learning, recent MultiCS conditioning studies using time-sensitive magnetoencephalography (MEG) revealed enhanced activation of prefrontal cortex (PFC) regions to...
The well-established memory bias for arousing-negative stimuli seems to be enhanced in high trait-anxious persons and persons suffering from anxiety disorders. We monitored the emergence and development of such a bias during and after learning, in high and low trait anxious participants. A word-learning paradigm was applied, consisting of spoken ps...
The hedonic meaning of words affects word recognition, as shown by behavioral, functional imaging, and event-related potential (ERP) studies. However, the spatiotemporal dynamics and cognitive functions behind are elusive, partly due to methodological limitations of previous studies. Here, we account for these difficulties by computing combined ele...
Includes table S1 and table S2. Table S1. Description of the stimulus materials used in the experiment. Table S2. Regions of significant activation in the contrast emotional>neutral in the P1 (80–120) and in the EPN (200–300) interval.
(PDF)
The hedonic meaning of words affects word recognition, as shown by behavioral, functional imaging, and event-related potential (ERP) studies. However, the spatiotemporal dynamics and cognitive functions behind are elusive, partly due to methodological limitations of previous studies. Here, we account for these difficulties by computing combined ele...
Several neuroimaging studies underlined the importance of the amygdala and prefrontal brain structures (e.g. dorsolateral prefrontal cortex [DLPFC]) for the processing of emotional stimuli and for emotion regulation. Many studies used visual scenes or faces as emotion-inducing material, and there is evidence that negative or positive words activate...
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