Lars Kuchinke

International Psychoanalytic University Berlin · Psychological Methods and Evaluation

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing lockdowns might have had a strong impact on mental health of mothers and their infants/toddlers. For example, families had to deal with health issues and social isolation, which might have affected mental health and parent-child interactions. The aim of this study is to evaluate differences in (1) infantile reg...

Maternal capacity to mentalize (= reflective functioning, RF), secure attachment and emotionally available parenting has an impact on the child’s development. The transmission of mothers’ past attachment experiences gained with both her caregivers in her own childhood and the impact on current mother–child interaction is part of the ‘transmission g...

Maternal capacity to mentalize (= reflective functioning, RF), secure attachment and emotional available parenting has an impact on the child’s development. The transmission of past attachment experiences of mother’s made with both her caregivers in her own childhood and the impact on current mother-child interaction is part of the ‘transmission ga...

Map information, especially volunteered geographic information (VGI) is prone to spatial inaccuracies. Due to their use as spatial reference points, spatially inaccurate landmark representations in maps might affect the ability to match maps to the represented 3D space and might compromise self-localization and orientation. Based on a map matching...

Objectives Large-scale panel data suggest that older people tend to be less neurotic, extraverted and open-minded, but more agreeable and conscientious. In this study, the relationships between age and the Big Five dimensions were examined for 324 German psychotherapists. Methods A model uncertainty and robustness approach was applied to evaluate...

Though there is a strong consensus that word length and frequency are the most important single-word features determining visual-orthographic access to the mental lexicon, there is less agreement as how to best capture syntactic and semantic factors. The traditional approach in cognitive reading research assumes that word predictability from senten...

Though there is a strong consensus that word length and frequency are the most important single-word features determining visual-orthographic access to the mental lexicon, there is less agreement as how to best capture syntactic and semantic factors. The traditional approach in cognitive reading research assumes that word predictability from senten...

Background Psychotherapy of mother-child dyads is an intervention which was developed to prevent maltreatment and negative children’s development. There is a lack of good-quality research investigating psychotherapeutic interventions and social care for mothers at high-risk living in Mother-Child Facilities in Germany. The present randomized contro...

The Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common mental disorder in childhood and adolescence. However, it is a very heterogeneous disorder with subgroups of patients with mild symptoms and others with severe and complex impairments. Patients suffering from complex ADHD are usually characterized by multiple developmental disorders an...

Purpose The postnatal period is a vulnerable time for parents and children but epidemiological and health care utilisation data for Germany on parental mental health during early childhood is scarce. This protocol describes the rationale, aim and study design of a population-based cohort study to assess the occurrence and determinants of psychosoci...

Even though effects of emotion and motivation on cognition are well documented, the interaction of all three factors is rarely investigated. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to examine the effects of self-determined choice—as an experimental manipulation of intrinsic motivation - and emotional stimulus content on task preparation and enga...

Background The first years of life are a significant period for child development, when children are particularly sensitive and prone to crises. This early phase lays the foundation for healthy growth. Clinical assessment of psychological symptoms in early infancy and adequate treatment are both important in improving the diagnostic outcome and pre...

After the birth of a child, parents may experience episodes of stress and psychological strain. Some infants show psychological or somatic stress in the form of early regulatory disorders. While the close connection between parental psychological stress, early regulatory disorders, and the development of the parent–child relationship is well docume...

This paper examines the impact of fixed-term employment on the affective and cognitive well-being of employees operationalized by the subjective frequency of the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, fear and anger as well as life satisfaction. Longitudinal effects were analysed across 10 waves of sampling from the Socio-Economic Panel, an annual r...

Landmarks, salient spatial elements, are often argued to play an important role in the formation of mental representations of space. They are likely to be perceived due to their salience and they can be used as spatial reference points to memorize the locations of other spatial elements. In maps, landmarks are often represented as pictograms. Simil...

Background: After the birth of a child, many mothers and fathers experience postpartum mental disorders like depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, stress or other illnesses. This endangers the establishment of a secure attachment between the children and their primary caregivers. Early problems in parent-child interaction can have ad...

Digital maps are known as reliable media for communicating spatial information. People use maps to make themselves familiar with new environments and to form cognitive representations of spatial configurations and additional semantic information that are coupled with locational information. Since the mid-1990s, cartographers have explored auditory...

In the era of smartphones, route-planning and navigation is supported by freely and globally available web mapping services, such as OpenStreetMap or Google Maps. These services provide digital maps, as well as route planning functions that visually highlight the suggested route in the map. Additionally, such digital maps contain landmark pictogram...

Background: After the birth of a child, many mothers and fathers experience postpartum mental disorders like depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, stress or other illnesses. This endangers the establishment of attachment between the children and their primary caregivers. Early problems in parent-child interaction can have adverse long...

Background: After the birth of a child, many mothers and fathers experience postpartum mental disorders like depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, stress or other illnesses. This endangers the establishment of a secure attachment between the children and their primary caregivers. Early problems in parent-child interaction can have adv...

Der Übergang aus der Familie in die Kindertagesbetreuung bedeutet für Kinder eine besondere Herausforderung. Die neue Umgebung, fremde Erwachsene und Kinder sowie ein veränderter Tagesablauf erzeugen für junge Kinder meist Stress. Hinzu kommt die stundenweise Trennung von der Mutter oder vom Vater. Diese emotionalen Belastungen können auf ein Minim...

The goal of this study was to replicate findings of diffusion model parameters capturing emotion effects in a lexical decision task and investigating whether these findings extend to other tasks of implicit emotion processing. Additionally, we were interested in the stability of diffusion model parameters across emotional stimuli and tasks for indi...

Rationale Modafinil is increasingly used by healthy humans as a neuroenhancer in order to improve cognitive functioning. Research on the effects of modafinil on cognition yielded most consistent findings for complex tasks relying on the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Objectives The present randomized placebo-controlled double-blind crossover study aimed...

The Poster presents the preliminary results of the MuKi-Study wich explores the impact of Parent-Infant-Psychotherapy (PIP) on the Parent to Infant Relationship in shared Living facilities in Germany.

Reading spatial information from topographic maps to form mental representations that guide spatial orientation and navigation is a rather complex cognitive process. Perceptual and knowledge-driven processes interact to support the map reader in building these mental representations. The resulting cognitive maps are not one-to-one mappings of the s...

When people use maps to plan and memorize a route, they commonly look for landmark representations in the form of pictograms that can be used as reference points for orientation (Anacta et al., 2017; Bestgen et al., 2016; Steck & Mallot, 2000). During navigation, matching the positions of landmark pictograms with the positions of the represented ob...

Landmarks, objects in the environment used for orientation, navigation and the formation of cognitive maps are often represented in maps as pictograms. In order to support these tasks effectively and efficiently, landmark pictograms also need to be salient, as the map user needs to identify and process them quickly and easily. Two additional releva...

Previous ERP research revealed emotion effects on visual word processing in early time windows (P1) and during later evaluative processing (LPC). In both time windows interactions with word familiarity measures have been reported. Using an evaluative conditioning paradigm participants learned to associate meaningless pseudowords with neutral or neg...

Die physiologische Ebene der Emotionen bezieht sich auf diejenigen Vorgänge im zentralen sowie im autonomen Nervensystem, die mit emotionalen Phänomenen in Zusammenhang stehen. Das zentrale Nervensystem (ZNS) besteht aus Gehirn und Rückenmark, es integriert Afferenzen, koordiniert Motorik und reguliert innerorganische Vorgänge. Über das autonome Ne...

Map-based navigation is a diverse task that stands in contradiction to the goal of completeness of web mapping services. As each navigation task is different, it also requires and can dispense with different map information to support effective and efficient wayfinding. Task-oriented reduction of the elements displayed in a map may therefore suppor...

The omnipresence of orientation, wayfinding and navigation tasks in everyday life calls for high-quality cartographic media that help people to solve their tasks in the best possible way. Modern maps should not only consider modern visualization techniques and design approaches but also knowledge on the map user’s cognitive processing. Previous stu...

In various every day contexts, maps are used as media supporting orientation, wayfinding, and navigation tasks. To create highly accurate and reliable maps, cartographers must be aware of cognitive effects that occur when people process map information. Interdisciplinary research from cognitive psychologists showed that map graphics lead to spatial...

People are better able to empathize with others when they are given information concerning the context driving that person's experiences. This suggests that people draw on prior memories when empathizing, but the mechanisms underlying this connection remain largely unexplored. The present study investigates how variations in episodic information sh...

The notion that word recognition is an automatic process has been repeatedly challenged. To revisit this issue, we investigated the semantic Stroop effect with the single letter colouring (SLC) procedure in which a target letter was cued and the spaces between the letters were filled with special characters. Furthermore, we recorded continuous elec...

This article first deals with the theoretical conceptualization of psychodynamic defense mechanisms and discusses their current clinical relevance. While defense analysis is a useful tool in both individual and group therapy in order to work on previously hidden conflicts, there has only been little empirical research in order to transfer this know...

Psychotherapeutenjournal In Deutschland besteht eine Unterversorgung bei psychiatrisch-psychotherapeutischen Behandlungsangeboten für Eltern-Kind-Paare in den ersten Lebensjahren. Ein multizentrisches vom Innovationsfonds des Gemeinsamen Bundesausschusses gefördertes Forschungsvorhaben (SKKIPPI) unter Federführung der International Psychoanalytic...

This study examines the processing of visual information by the olfactory system in humans. Recent data point to the processing of visual stimuli by the piriform cortex, a region mainly known as part of the primary olfactory cortex. Moreover, the piriform cortex generates predictive templates of olfactory stimuli to facilitate olfactory processing....

Knowing the correct location of a specific object learned from a (topographic) map is fundamental for orientation and navigation tasks. Spatial reference systems, such as coordinates or cardinal directions, are helpful tools for any geometric localization of positions that aims to be as exact as possible. Considering modern visualization techniques...

Anonymized raw data of 36 participants. (SAV)

Anonymized raw data of 32 participants. (SAV)

This study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive...

This study was designed to explore the electrophysiological correlates of the diffusion models drift rate parameter in cognitive decision making. Eighty-two participants completed a lexical decision task while their stimulus-dependent event-related potentials (ERP) and theta frequency band power were measured. A mass univariate approach was applied...

Findings of empirical studies of spatial memory using maps are direct responses to the successful transfer and processing of map information. The memory performance of map users is an important indication of the quality of a map design. Studies of spatial memory have mainly relied on recall performances, but maps can be used in various ways dependi...

Self-report inventories enable efficient assessment of mental attributes in large representative surveys. However, an inventory can be administered in several ways whose equivalence is largely untested. In the present study, we administered thirteen psychological questionnaires assessing positive and negative aspects of mental health. The questionn...

Emotion regulation is essential for adaptive behavior and mental health. Strategies applied to alter emotions are known to differ in their impact on psychological and physiological aspects of the emotional response. However, emotion regulation outcome has primarily been assessed via self-report, and studies comparing regulation strategies with rega...

Narrative movies can create powerful emotional responses. While recent research has advanced the understanding of neural networks involved in immersive movie viewing, their modulation within a movie's dynamic context remains inconclusive. In this study, 24 healthy participants passively watched sad scene climaxes taken from 24 romantic comedies, wh...

In order to be successful in spatial orientation tasks, people need to recall locations and configurations of spatial objects from their memory. This understanding of geographic space often arises from experience with cartographic media representing topographic and topological information by graphic symbols. Learning spatial information from graphi...

The construction and modulation of cognitive maps relies on spatial information. Their analysis is essential to understand the orientation and navigation behavior in humans. Empirical studies within the interdisciplinary cooperation of Professor Dickmann at Ruhr-University Bochum and Professor Kuchinke at the International Psychoanalytical Universi...

Modafinil is becoming increasingly popular as a cognitive enhancer. Research on the effects of modafinil on cognitive function have yielded mixed results, with negative findings for simple memory and attention tasks and enhancing effects for more complex tasks. In the present study we examined whether modafinil, due to its known effect on the dopam...

This study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive...

Grid lines and visual detail in topographic maps support the encoding and recognition of object locations. Perception-based and knowledge-based functions are discussed to contribute to these effects, but little is known about how participants process such map elements. An eye-tracking study was conducted where participants were asked to learn objec...

The exploratory study investigated individual differences in implicit processing of emotional words in a lexical decision task. A processing advantage for positive words was observed, and differences between happy and fear-related words in response times were predicted by individual differences in specific variables of emotion processing: Whereas m...

Background: fMRI experiments on olfaction offer new insights into the complex, but in contrast to other sensory systems, less studied cognition of odors. To perform these experiments is still a challenge. New method: To address the challenge posed by MR settings, an olfactometer design is presented including specific improvements to the limited...

The temporal pole (TP) has been associated with diverse functions of social cognition and emotion processing. Although the underlying mechanism remains elusive, one possibility is that TP acts as domain-general hub integrating socioemotional information. To test this, 26 participants were presented with 60 empathy-evoking film clips during fMRI sca...

Modern techniques of eye movement registration facilitate a deeper analysis of the processes of the map-based information transfer, which may enrich theory formation in cartography. “Heatmaps” are a specific tool for the visualisation of eye movement data. They support a fast and intuitive analysis of the map user’s viewing behaviour. In heatmaps,...

The present study examined the effect of contextual learning on the neural processing of previously meaningless pseudowords. During an evaluative conditioning session on 5 consecutive days, participants learned to associate 120 pseudowords with either positive, neutral or negative pictures. In a second session, participants were presented all condi...

Affective flanker tasks often present affective facial expressions as stimuli. However, it is not clear whether the identity of the person on the target picture needs to be the same for the flanker stimuli or whether it is better to use pictures of different persons as flankers. While Grose-Fifer, Rodrigues, Hoover & Zottoli (Advances in Cognitive...

It is commonly agreed upon a strong link between emotion and olfaction. Odor-evoked memories are experienced as more emotional compared with verbal, visual, and tactile stimuli. Moreover, the emotional quality of odor cues increases memory performance, but contrary to this, odors are poor retrieval cues for verbal labels. To examine the relation be...

Reading is not only ‚cold’ information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such ‚hot’ reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the...

Cognitive representations of learned map information are subject to systematic distortion errors. Map elements that divide a map surface into regions, such as content-related linear symbols (e.g. streets, rivers, railway systems) or additional artificial layers (coordinate grids), provide an orientation pattern that can help users to reduce distort...

Reading is not only ‚cold’ information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such ‚hot’ reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the...

With the aim to improve the ecological validity when studying real life phenomena, research has increasingly been employing more complex and realistic materials, from pictorial and verbal (e.g., movies vs. pictures, narratives vs. single words), to interactive or virtual settings. is article has the objective to understand the emotional impact of t...

Modern techniques of eye movement registration facilitate a deeper analysis of the processes of map-based information transfer, which may enrich theory formation in cartography. “Heatmaps” are a specific tool for the visualization of eye movement data. They support a fast and intuitive analysis of the map user’s viewing behaviour. In heatmaps, data...

Research from the field of cognitive psychology provides evidence that cognitive representations of space based on maps or map-like sketches are subject to systematic distortion tendencies. These distortions influence the orientation capacity as they represent errors in spatial memory. Map grids are a traditional feature of map graphics that has ra...

The hierarchical emotion model proposed by Panksepp (1998) predicts that affective processing will rely on three functionally and neuroanatomically distinct levels, engaging subcortical networks (primary level), the limbic system (secondary level), and the neocortex (tertiary level). In the present fMRI study, we manipulated happiness and positivit...

The emotional connotation of a word is known to shift the process of word recognition. Using the electroencephalographic event-related potentials (ERPs) approach it has been documented that early attentional processing of high-arousing negative words is shifted at a stage of processing where a presented word cannot have been fully identified. Conte...

Research from the field of cognitive psychology has demonstrated that mental representations based on the processing of map information are not randomly distorted. Distortions can be traced back to systematic and predictable influences. An overlaying construction of artificial grids helps to reduce distortions in the map reader’s processing of the...

To date, it has been shown that cognitive map representations based on cartographic visualisations are systematically distorted. The grid is a traditional element of map graphics that has rarely been considered in research on perception-based spatial distortions. Grids do not only support the map reader in finding coordinates or locations of object...