Michael Rapp

Universität Potsdam · Department Sport- und Gesundheitswissenschaften

Alcohol consumption (AC) is a leading risk factor for death, morbidity, and disability worldwide. Gender-specific differences in AC and its moderators, which may serve as markers for preventing severe alcohol use disorders (AUD), showed inconsistent results. Additionally, the impact of COVID-19-related lockdowns on these differences remains unclear...

Alcohol consumption (AC) and its repercussions present considerable health hazards both globally and on a personal level. The use of alcohol ranks among the top causes of preventable fatalities. Conventional retrospective self-reporting techniques frequently do not adequately reflect the intricate and variable nature of drinking habits in those wit...

Zusammenfassung: Hintergrund: Mit Beginn der Covid-19-Pandemie im März 2020 kam es zu zahlreichen Veränderungen im beruflichen Alltag von medizinischem Fachpersonal. Fragestellung: Da bisher das Augenmerk vor allem auf dem Klinikpersonal lag, ist es wichtig auch die Pflegesituation in den Alten- und Pflegeheimen zu betrachten. In dieser Studie wurd...

Importance The development of an alcohol use disorder in adolescence is associated with increased risk of future alcohol dependence. The differential associations of risk factors with alcohol use over the course of 8 years are important for preventive measures. Objective To determine the differential associations of risk-taking aspects of personal...

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are seen as a continuum ranging from goal‐directed and hedonic drug use to loss of control over drug intake with aversive consequences for mental and physical health and social functioning. The main goals of our interdisciplinary German collaborative research centre on Losing and Regaining Control over Drug Intake (Re...

The debate on the neural basis of multitasking costs evolves around neural overlap between concurrently performed tasks. Recent evidence suggests that training-related reductions in representational overlap in fronto-parietal brain regions predict multitasking improvements. Cognitive theories assume that overlap of task representations may lead to...

Objective: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) constitutes a critical public health issue and has sex-specific characteristics. Initial evidence suggests that progesterone and estradiol might reduce or increase alcohol intake, respectively. However, there is a need for a better understanding of how the menstrual cycle in females and the ratio of progestero...

Background Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide and a significant contributor to the global burden of disease. Altered leptin levels are known to be associated with depressive symptoms, however discrepancies in the results of increased or decreased levels exist. Due to various limitations associated with commonly used antidepressan...

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a major contributor to global disability and mortality. Cross-sectional studies linked AUD to reduced cognitive control and heightened risky decision-making. However, the temporal direction of these effects remains unknown: are cognitive-behavioral alterations a consequence or a precursor of drinking? Here, for the fir...

Background Health workers play a vital role in response to outbreaks under pandemic circumstances, but are also highly vulnerable to stress-related mental health issues (e.g., due to pandemic workload). There are knowledge gaps regarding temporal development of the emergence of depressive symptoms among health workers during the COVID-19 pandemic a...

Binge drinking behavior in early adulthood can be predicted from brain structure during early adolescence with an accuracy of above 70 %. We investigated whether this accurate prospective prediction of alcohol misuse behavior can be explained by psychometric variables such as personality traits or mental health comorbidities in a data-driven approa...

Background: Healthcare workers (HCW) are at high risk to develop mental health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic because of additional work load, perceived stress, and exposure to patients with COVID-19. Currently, there are few studies on change over time in the prevalence of depressive symptoms during pandemic start among HCW. Thus, the aims...

Einleitung: Bisher liegen in Deutschland wenig empirische Ergebnisse zu den Auswirkungen der COVID- 19 Pandemie auf die seelische Gesundheit von Beschäftigten im Gesundheitswesen vor. In dieser Studie wird die zeitliche Entwicklung depressiver Symptome und der Zusammenhang mit a) der Stresswahrnehmung, b) der eigenen COVID-19-Infektion und c) der a...

Binge drinking behavior in early adulthood can be predicted from brain structure during early adolescence with an accuracy of above 70%. We investigated whether this accurate prospective prediction of alcohol misuse behavior can be explained by psychometric variables such as personality traits or mental health comorbidities in a data-driven approac...

Importance: Climate change, pollution, urbanization, socioeconomic inequality, and psychosocial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have caused massive changes in environmental conditions that affect brain health during the life span, both on a population level as well as on the level of the individual. How these environmental factors influence the b...

Background Against the background of missing culturally sensitive mental health care services for refugees, we developed a group intervention (Empowerment ) for refugees at level 3 within the stratified Stepped and Collaborative Care Model of the project Mental Health in Refugees and Asylum Seekers (MEHIRA). We aim to evaluate the effectiveness of...

Background: Refugees and asylum seekers (RAS) in Germany need tailored and resource-oriented mental healthcare interventions. Aims: To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of group psychotherapy for RAS with moderate depressive symptoms. Method: This is a post hoc cost-effectiveness analysis of Empowerment group psychotherapy that was embedded in a...

Background Anxiety and depressive disorders share common features of mood dysfunctions. This has stimulated interest in transdiagnostic dimensional research as proposed by the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) approach by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) aiming to improve the understanding of underlying disease mechanisms. The purpose o...

Aim of the study: In a nationwide comparison, the state of Brandenburg has one of the highest morbidity and mortality rates of ischemic heart disease. Access to medical care infrastructure is considered to be one possible explanation for regional health inequalities. Accordingly, the study aims to calculate the distances to different types of card...

Urban-living individuals are exposed to many environmental factors that may combine and interact to influence mental health. While individual factors of an urban environment have been investigated in isolation, no attempt has been made to model how complex, real-life exposure to living in the city relates to brain and mental health, and how this is...

Introduction While a growing body of research is adopting Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)-related methods and constructs, there is still a lack of comprehensive reviews on the state of published research on Positive Valence Systems (PVS) and Negative Valence Systems (NVS) in mood and anxiety disorders consistent with the RDoC framework. Methods Fi...

Introduction: Despite the growing numbers of physicians in outpatient care, continuing discussion about the planning of physician requirements suggests remaining problems in this field, which could be due to focussing on the ratio of physician to population rather than on morbidity-based evaluations. Against this background, this paper tries to de...

Objective: Investigation of the association of concern about own infection or infection of friends, family and care recipients with Covid-19 and burnout symptoms of caregivers in Brandenburg full inpatient geriatric care facilities. Methods: Cross-sectional survey of nursing staff (n=195) in Brandenburg nursing homes between August and December...

Background: Deficits in cognition like working memory (WM) are highly prevalent symptoms related to major depressive disorder (MDD). Neuroimaging studies have described frontoparietal abnormalities in patients with MDD as a basis for these deficits. Based on research in healthy adults, it is hypothesized that increased physical fitness might be a...

Background: Elective surgeries are among the most common health stressors in later life and put a significant risk at functional and mental health, making them an important target of research into healthy aging and physical resilience. Large-scale longitudinal research mostly conducted in non-clinical samples provided support of the predictive valu...

Adolescent refugees and asylum seekers (ARAS) are highly vulnerable to mental health problems. Stepped care models (SCM) and culturally sensitive therapies offer promising treatment approaches to effectively provide necessary medical and psychological support. To our knowledge, we were the first to investigate whether a culturally sensitive SCM wil...

Background The association of frailty based on the accumulation of deficits with postoperative delirium (POD) has been poorly examined. We aimed to analyze this association in older patients undergoing elective surgery. Methods Preoperative data was used to build a 30-item frailty index (FI) for participants of the PAWEL-study. Delirium was define...

Pavlovian cues can influence ongoing instrumental behaviour via Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) processes. While appetitive Pavlovian cues tend to promote instrumental approach, they are detrimental when avoidance behaviour is required, and vice versa for aversive cues. We recently reported that susceptibility to interference between Pavlo...

Satisfaction and frustration of the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, as assessed with the 24-item Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale (BPNSFS), have been found to be crucial indicators of individuals’ psychological health. To increase the usability of this scale within a clinical and health services research...

Research within the framework of Basic Psychological Need Theory (BPNT) finds strong associations between basic need frustration and depressive symptoms. This study examined the role of rumination as an underlying mechanism in the association between basic psychological need frustration and depressive symptoms. A cross-sectional sample of N = 221 a...

Background: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a critical public health issue with sex-specific characteristics and the need for a better mechanistic understanding. Initial evidence suggests that progesterone can reduce alcohol intake, while estradiol leads to an increase. However, we lack knowledge about how progesterone relative to estradiol influence...

Self-regulation, the ability to guide behavior according to one’s goals, plays an integral role in understanding loss of control over unwanted behaviors, for example in alcohol use disorder (AUD). Yet, experimental tasks that measure processes underlying self-regulation are not easy to deploy in contexts where such behaviors usually occur, namely o...

Background Demographic changes are leading to growing care needs of older people and creating a challenge for healthcare systems worldwide. Nursing homes (NHs) need to provide care for growing numbers of residents while ensuring a high-quality care. We aimed to examine an innovative NH in Germany and apply a theory of change (ToC) approach to devel...

This study examines whether climate change-associated environmental stressors, including air and noise pollution, local heat levels, as well as a lack of surrounding greenspace, mediate the effects of local poverty on mental health, using the 28-item General Health Questionnaire. We recruited 478 adults who were representative of eleven of Berlin’s...

Background Research on outcome predictors in the field of transcultural treatment for refugees and asylum seekers (RAS) is scarce. We aimed to evaluate predictors of outcome of a group intervention (Empowerment) for RAS with affective disorders which were incorporated at level three of the stratified stepped-care model within the Mental Health in R...

Background Children's health and development are strongly linked to their living situation, including their family's socioeconomic position (SEP) and living region. However, research on the impact of the living region on children's development beyond family SEP is scarce. This study evaluated whether rurality and regional socioeconomic deprivation...

Hintergrund und Stand (inter)nationaler Forschung: Der demografische Wandel führt zu wachsendem Pflegebedarf älterer Menschen und Herausforderungen für das deutsche Gesundheitssystem. Parallel dazu gefährdet der Fachkräftemangel die Qualität der stationären Altenpflege. Fragestellung und Zielsetzung: In unserer Studie haben wir ein Altenpflegeheim...

The mechanisms underlying increased dual-task costs in the comparison of modality compatible stimulus-response mappings (e.g., visual-manual, auditory-vocal) and modality incompatible mappings (e.g., visual-vocal, auditory-manual) remain elusive. To investigate whether additional control mechanisms are at work in simultaneously processing two modal...

Background Many patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) remain untreated or do not respond to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Physical exercise shows antidepressive effects and may serve as an effective augmentation treatment. However, research on combining exercise with CBT is sparse in MDD and underlying mechanisms of exercise are not w...

Background The association of frailty with postoperative delilrium (POD) is not well known. We therefore analysed this association in older patients undergoing elective surgery. Methods Preoperative data was used to build a 30-item frailty index (FI) for participants of the PAWEL-study. Delirium was defined by a combination of I-CAM and chart revi...

Importance: Alcohol consumption (AC) leads to death and disability worldwide. Ongoing discussions on potential negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on AC need to be informed by real-world evidence. Objective: To examine whether lockdown measures are associated with AC and consumption-related temporal and psychological within-person mechanis...

Background The Covid-19 pandemic led to increased work-related strain and psychosocial burden in nurses worldwide, resulting in high prevalences of mental health problems. Nurses in long-term care facilities seem to be especially affected by the pandemic. Nevertheless, there are few findings indicating possible positive changes for health care work...

A mechanism known as Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) describes a phenomenon by which the values of environmental cues acquired through Pavlovian conditioning can motivate instrumental behavior. PIT may be one basic mechanism of action control that can characterize mental disorders on a dimensional level beyond current classification system...

Self-regulation, the ability to guide behavior according to one’s goals, plays an integral role in understanding loss of control behaviors a pertinent example being substance use disorders (SUD). Yet, experimental tasks that measure processes underlying self-regulation are not easy to deploy in contexts where such behaviors often occur, namely in r...

This study aimed to build on the relationship of well-established self-report and behavioral assessments to the latent constructs positive (PVS) and negative valence systems (NVS), cognitive systems (CS), and social processes (SP) of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework in a large transnosological population which cuts across DSM/ICD-10 di...

Background Current evidence points towards a high prevalence of psychological distress in refugee populations, contrasting with a scarcity of resources and amplified by linguistic, institutional, financial, and cultural barriers. The objective of the study is to investigate the overall effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a Stepped Care and Coll...

Objectives: Even low to moderate levels of alcohol consumption can have detrimental health consequences, especially in older adults (OA). Although many studies report an increase in the proportion of drinkers among OA, there are regional variations. Therefore, we examined alcohol consumption and the prevalence of hazardous alcohol use (HAU) among m...

Alcohol misuse during adolescence (AAM) has been associated with disruptive development of adolescent brains. In this longitudinal machine learning (ML) study, we could predict AAM significantly from brain structure (T1-weighted imaging and DTI) with accuracies of 73 - 78% in the IMAGEN dataset (n ~1182). Our results not only show that structural d...

Atherosclerotic coronary artery disease (CAD) is the leading cause of mortality worldwide.¹ In this context, the burden of CAD shows considerable regional heterogeneity at the national level. For example, age-standardized mortality rates varied between 106 and 178 deaths per 100 000 at the level of German federal states in 2019.² The regional heter...

Background The metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a risk cluster for a number of secondary diseases. The implementation of prevention programs requires early detection of individuals at risk. However, access to health care providers is limited in structurally weak regions. Brandenburg, a rural federal state in Germany, has an especially high MetS prevale...

IntroductionPostoperative delirium (POD) is a common and serious adverse event of surgery in older people. Because of its great impact on patients' safety and quality of life, identification of modifiable risk factors could be useful. Although preoperative medication intake is assumed to be an important modifiable risk factor, the impact of anticho...

Background Depression is one of the key factors contributing to difficulties in one’s ability to work, and serves as one of the major reasons why employees apply for psychotherapy and receive insurance subsidization of treatments. Hence, an increasing and growing number of studies rely on workability assessment scales as their primary outcome measu...

Background From birth to young adulthood, health and development of young people are strongly linked to their living situation, including their family’s socioeconomic position (SEP) and living environment. The impact of regional characteristics on development in early childhood beyond family SEP has been rarely investigated. This study aimed to ide...

Introduction: Over the last decades, our understanding of the cognitive, motivational, and neural processes involved in addictive behavior has increased enormously. A plethora of laboratory-based and cross-sectional studies has linked cognitive-behavioral measures to between-subject differences in drinking behavior. However, such laboratory-based...

Cognitive resources contribute to balance control. There is evidence that mental fatigue reduces cognitive resources and impairs balance performance, particularly in older adults and when balance tasks are complex, for example when trying to walk or stand while concurrently performing a secondary cognitive task. We conducted a systematic literature...

Alcohol misuse during adolescence (AAM) has been linked with disruptive structural development of the brain and alcohol use disorder. Using machine learning (ML), we analyze the link between AAM phenotypes and adolescent brain structure (T1-weighted imaging and DTI) at ages 14, 19, and 22 in the IMAGEN dataset (n~1182). ML predicted AAM at age 22 f...

Background: Prejudices against minorities can be understood as habitually negative evaluations that are kept in spite of evidence to the contrary. Therefore, individuals with strong prejudices might be dominated by habitual or “automatic” reactions at the expense of more controlled reactions. Computational theories suggest individual differences in...

Importance Delirium significantly worsens elective surgery outcomes and costs. Delirium risk is highest in elderly populations, whose surgical health care resource consumption (50%) exceeds their demographic proportion (15% to 18%) in high-resource countries. Effective nonpharmacologic delirium prevention could safely improve care in these vulnerab...

Background Meditation is commonly implemented in psychological therapies since the ‘third wave’ of cognitive–behavioural therapy has increased the focus on mindfulness-based interventions. Although extensive research literature demonstrates its benefits, little is known about potential adverse effects. Aims The aim of this study is to report the p...

Exercise is known for its beneficial effects on preventing cardiometabolic diseases (CMDs) in the general population. People living with the human immunodeficiency virus (PLWH) are prone to sedentarism, thus raising their already elevated risk of developing CMDs in comparison to individuals without HIV. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to...

Background and status of (inter)national research: Postoperative delirium (POD) is a frequent complication after surgery in older adults. POD can be associated with a range of adverse short- and longterm consequences such as higher institutionalization rates, development and more rapid progress of dementia, and increased health care costs. Incidenc...

This was just a presentation of the results, which can be found in 'The associations of Positive and Negative Valence Systems, Cognitive Systems and Social Processes on disease severity in anxiety and depressive disorders' DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1161097

Background Recent research emphasized the role of inflammatory processes in the pathophysiology of depression. Theories hypothesizes that life events (LE) can affect the immune system and trigger depressive symptoms. LE are also considered as one of the best predictors for the onset and course of depressive disorders. Methods Observational study a...

Background The metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a risk cluster for a number of secondary diseases. The implementation of prevention programs requires early detection of individuals at risk. However, access to health care providers is limited in structurally weak regions. Brandenburg, a rural federal state in Germany, has an especially high MetS prevale...