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35
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
February 2016 - May 2016
April 2012 - January 2016
October 2008 - October 2011
Publications
Publications (35)
Across childhood, emotion perception from facial expressions has traditionally been studied with event-related potentials (ERP). Here, we explored the novel fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) EEG approach to provide information about how brief changes in facial expressions are processed implicitly in young children’s brains. Employing two FPVS...
The study examined processing differences for facial expressions (happy, angry, or neutral) and their repetition with early (P1, N170) and late (P3) event-related potentials (ERPs) in young children ( N = 33). EEG was recorded while children observed sequentially presented pairs of facial expressions, which were either the same (repeated trials) or...
Although much research has shown that mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) can reduce psychological stress, it is less clear if effects generalize to everyday social situations, which range among the largest stress triggers. Furthermore, mechanisms of MBIs have not been fully established. Emotion regulation (ER) has been suggested as one key mech...
Background: While witnessing the suffering of other people results in personal distress, it is not clear whether regulating others’ emotions in such situations also comes at an emotional cost for the observer.
Methods: this novel study included 62 subjects and used a newly developed functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) paradigm to investiga...
Atypicalities in processing of social rewards have been suggested to lie at the root of social difficulties in autism spectrum conditions (ASC). While evidence for atypical reward function in ASC is mounting, it remains unclear whether it manifests specifically in hypo- or hyper-responsiveness, and whether it appears only in the social domain or mo...
The development of socio-emotional competencies (SEC) has proven key for school and life success as well as for preventing mental illness. Digital SEC trainings create new ways to strengthen children’s mental health especially in times of disrupted childcare and subsequent increase of mental health problems due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the...
Observing familiar (known, recognisable) and socially relevant (personally important) faces elicits activation in the brain’s reward circuit. Although smiling faces are often used as social rewards in research, it is firstly unclear whether familiarity and social relevance modulate the processing of faces differently, and secondly whether this proc...
The faces of those most personally relevant to us are our primary source of social information, making their timely perception a priority. Recent research indicates that gender, age and identity of faces can be decoded from EEG/MEG data within 100 ms. Yet, the time course and neural circuitry involved in representing the personal relevance of faces...
This study aimed to expand the understanding of the neural-temporal trajectories ofemotion processing in preschoolers using electrophysiological measures. In particular, welooked at neural responses to the repetition of emotional faces. EEG was recorded whilechildren observed sequentially presented pairs of faces. In some trials, the pair of faces...
Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have been linked to aberrant reward processing, but it remains unclear whether it is a general dysfunction or limited to social stimuli, and whether it affects both phases of reward processing, namely anticipation and reception. We used event-related brain potentials and a population-based approach to investigate re...
Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have been linked to aberrant reward processing, but it remains unclear whether it is a general dysfunction or limited to social stimuli, and whether it affects both phases of reward processing, namely anticipation and reception. We used event-related brain potentials and a population-based approach to investigate re...
Faces are a primary source of social information, but little is known about the sequence of neural processes that extract information from highly personally relevant faces, such as those of our loved ones. We applied representational similarity analyses to EEG-fMRI measurement of neural responses to faces of personal relevance to participants - the...
Associated stimulus valence affects neural responses at an early processing stage. However, in the field of written language processing, it is unclear whether semantics of a word or low-level visual features affect early neural processing advantages. The current study aimed to investigate the role of semantic content on reward and loss associations...
Emotion effects in event-related potentials (ERPs) during reading have been observed at very short latencies of around 100 to 200 ms after word onset. The nature of these effects remains a matter of debate: First, it is possible that they reflect semantic access, which might thus occur much faster than proposed by most reading models. Second, it is...
Associated stimulus valence affects neural responses at an early processing stage. However, in the field of written language processing, it is unclear whether semantics of a word or low-level visual features affect early neural processing advantages. The current study aimed to investigate the role of semantic content on reward and loss associations...
Emotion effects in event-related potentials (ERPs) during reading have been observed at very short latencies of around 100 to 200 ms after word onset. The nature of these effects remains a matter of debate: First, it is possible that they reflect semantic access, which might thus occur much faster than proposed by most reading models. Second, it is...
The speed of visual processing is central to our understanding of face perception. Yet the extent to which early visual processing influences later processing in distributed face processing networks, and the top-down modulation of such bottom-up effects, remains unclear. We used simultaneous EEG-fMRI to investigate cortical activity that showed uni...
Emotional stimuli attract attention and lead to increased activity in the visual cortex. The present study investigated the impact of personal relevance on emotion processing by presenting emotional words within sentences that referred to participants' significant others or to unknown agents. In event-related potentials, personal relevance increase...
Motivationally relevant stimuli benefit from strengthened sensory processing. It is unclear, however, if motivational value of positive and negative valence has similar or dissociable effects on early visual processing. Moreover, whether these perceptual effects are task-specific, stimulus-specific, or more generally feature-based is unknown. In th...
Motivation and attention constitute major determinants of human perception and action. Nonetheless, it remains a matter of debate whether motivation effects on the visual cortex depend on the spatial attention system, or rely on independent pathways. This study investigated the impact of motivation and spatial attention on the activity of the human...
For visual stimuli of emotional content as pictures and written words, stimulus size has been shown to increase emotion effects in the early posterior negativity (EPN), a component of event-related potentials (ERPs) indexing attention allocation during visual sensory encoding. In the present study, we addressed the question whether this enhanced re...
The late positive potential (LPP) elicited by affective stimuli in the event-related brain potential (ERP) is often assumed to be a member of the P3 family. The present study addresses the relationship of the LPP to the classic P3b in a published data set, using a non-parametric permutation test for topographical comparisons, and residue iteration...
Plot suspense is one of the most important components of narrative fiction that motivate recipients to follow fictional characters through their worlds. The present study investigates the dynamic development of narrative suspense in excerpts of literary classics from the 19th century in a multi-methodological approach. For two texts, differing in s...
Emotion effects in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) have previously been reported for a range of visual stimuli, including emotional words, pictures, and facial expressions. Still, little is known about the actual comparability of emotion effects across these stimulus classes. The present study aimed to fill this gap by investigating emotion e...
The late positive complex (LPC), which is one of the event-related brain potential (ERP) components, is often observed in response to emotional stimuli. The LPC is often considered as a member of the P3-family. However, to date no serious attempts have been made to assess the resemblance of the LPC and the P3b. Here we addressed the relationship of...
Event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed effects of emotional meaning on word recognition at distinguishable processing stages, in rare cases even in the P1 time range. However, the boundary conditions of these effects, such as the roles of different levels of linguistic processing or the relative contributions of the emotional valence and arousal...
For emotional pictures with fear-, disgust-, or sex-related contents, stimulus size has been shown to increase emotion effects in attention-related event-related potentials (ERPs), presumably reflecting the enhanced biological impact of larger emotion-inducing pictures. If this is true, size should not enhance emotion effects for written words with...
Emotionale Bedeutung erleichtert die Verarbeitung geschriebener Sprache. Dies zeigt sich sowohl in Verhaltensmaßen als auch in ereigniskorrelierten Potenzialen (EKPs) und resultiert vermutlich aus automatischer Aufmerksamkeitszuweisung auf Grund der hohen intrinsischen Relevanz von emotionalen Reizen. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die Mechanism...
Pupillary responses have been shown to be sensitive to both task load and emotional content. We investigated the interplay of these factors in the processing of single words that varied in emotional valence and arousal. Two tasks of different cognitive load, uninstructed reading and a lexical decision task, were employed, followed by an unannounced...
Effects of emotional word meaning have been studied exclusively for words in isolation but not in the context of sentences. We addressed this question within the framework of two-dimensional models of affect, conceiving emotion as a function of valence and arousal. Negative and neutral target verbs, embedded within sentences, were presented while e...
Projects
Projects (3)
Are autistic traits linked to abnormal sensitivity to rewards? If so, is this limited to social domain (smiles, gestures, etc), or manifested more broadly (monetary rewards, food, informative feedback)? We use event-related brain potentials, pupillary responses and behavioural measurements to shed light on reward responsiveness in connection to autistic traits.
The goal is to determine how empathy develops in preschoolers and if it is possible to train empathy and see changes within neural and behavioral variables.
