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Introduction
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August 2014 - June 2016
March 2002 - December 2007
October 2013 - July 2014
Publications
Publications (340)
The conscious engagement with neutral and symptom-related bodily signals (i.e., interoceptive sensibility) is an important transdiagnostic factor whose assessment remains challenging. In two studies, we examined the psychometric properties and the validity of the German Interoceptive Sensitivity and Attention Questionnaire (ISAQ) assessing two conv...
Background: Although meta-analyses suggest comparable efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in older adults compared to working-age adults, little is known about its effectiveness in naturalistic settings across different age groups. Hence, this study compared symptom change, attrition rates, and treatment duration in outpatient CBT betwee...
Regardless of their cause, persistent physical symptoms are distressing somatic complaints that occur on most days for at least several months. They are common in patients with somatic diseases, functional somatic disorders, mental disorders, and undiagnosed medical conditions and are often associated with significant impairment and medical costs....
Mit der Reform des Gesetzes über den Beruf der Psychotherapeutin und des Psychotherapeuten (PsychThG) wurde die staatliche Prüfung zur Erlangung der Approbation neu konzipiert. Die anwendungsorientierte Parcoursprüfung (aoPP) als bundeseinheitliche Staatsprüfung stellt dabei ein Novum dar. Ausgehend von den Vorgaben der Approbationsordnung für Psyc...
Background
Cluster headache (CH) can lead to high disability and reduced quality of life (QoL). QoL should be assessed as an important outcome both in research and in clinical care. The 28-item Cluster Headache Quality of Life Scale (CH-QoL) is a valid self-report questionnaire to assess disease-specific QoL. A German version is lacking. This study...
Randomized controlled trials are routinely used to assess the efficacy of psychotherapy. To date, our knowledge about how patients experience participation in such a trial is scant. Therefore, the present analysis aims at an in-depth exploration of patients’ perspectives on how a trial environment affects them. This study was conducted within the f...
Health anxiety is an intricate part of illness anxiety and somatic symptom disorder. Based on convenience samples, two out of three available studies indicate that it is a dimensional rather than a categorical construct. Using two representative datasets, this study investigates whether previous results can be clarified. Conventional taxometric ana...
Zusammenfassung: Theoretischer Hintergrund: Der Klimawandel beeinflusst die mentale Gesundheit, auch durch Klimaangst. Ob Klimaangst eine adaptive Reaktion auf die Klimakriese darstellt, wird gegenwärtig diskutiert. Fragestellung: Die vorliegende Studie untersucht Zusammenhänge zwischen Klimaangst und Depressivität/Ängstlichkeit. Ferner wird überpr...
Das Lehrbuch stellt die zentralen Inhalte des reformierten Masterstudiengangs Klinische Psychologie und Psychotherapie dar. Eingegangen wird dabei auf alle psychotherapeutischen Richtlinienverfahren, also die Kognitive Verhaltenstherapie, die Systemische Therapie, die Tiefenpsychologisch fundierte Therapie und die Analytische Psychotherapie, sowie...
The Body Perception Questionnaire-Short Form (BPQ-SF) is one of the most used questionnaires to assess interoception. Although the BPQ-SF has been translated into different languages, there is no validated German questionnaire adaptation so far. Furthermore, empirical evidence outlining how the BPQ-SF relates to novel theories of interoception that...
The study demonstrates that institution effects (IE) are a relevant contributor to symptom change, treatment duration, and dropout probability in psychological therapies. Neglecting the institution level can lead to an overestimation of the therapist effect (TE). Therefore, future research should consider the inclusion of institution-level variable...
Objective
This study is part of the ODIN‐migraine (Optimization of Diagnostic Instruments in migraine) project. It is a secondary, a priori analysis of previously collected data, and aimed to assess the psychometric properties and factor structure of the Cogniphobia Scale for Headache Disorders (CS‐HD). We aimed to construct a German‐language versi...
Objective: Interoceptive accuracy, meaning accurately detecting and discriminating internal bodily signals, has been proposed as a factor of high relevance to mental health. Nevertheless, studies focusing on the assessment of interoceptive accuracy in children are scarce. Method: The present study addresses this gap by using questionnaire-based mea...
Objective
In clinical practice, persistent somatic symptoms are regularly explained using a cognitive-behavioral model (CBM). In the CBM, predisposing, perpetuating, and precipitating factors are assumed to interact and to cause the onset and endurance of somatic symptoms. However, these models are rarely investigated in their entirety.
Methods
We...
Objective: Previous research indicates positive effects of feedback based on rational or empirical decision rules in psychotherapy. The implementation of these usually session-to-session-based feedback systems into clinical practice, however, remains challenging. This study aims to evaluate decision rules based on routine outcome monitoring with re...
Objective
People with functional somatic symptoms have difficulties in various stages of the emotion regulation (ER) process (1). As an adaptive and flexible use of ER strategies is a core tenet of emotional health, having difficulties in this area is often assumed to be the key mechanism behind functional somatic symptoms. Following a dimensional...
Psychotherapy is an effective treatment for anxiety disorders (AD), yet a vast majority of patients do not respond to therapy, necessitating the identification of predictors to enhance outcomes. Several studies have explored the relationship between stress response and treatment outcome, as a potential treatment mechanism. However, the latter remai...
Objective: (Cardiac) interoception was long considered a key mechanism behind symptom perception in persistent somatic symptoms (PSS). In this study, we aimed to extend earlier findings to clarify this potential interoceptive mechanisms of PSS.
Methods: A cross-sectional sample of 251 participants (23.1% with self-reported functional somatic syndr...
Background: Negative affect, attention processes, and predisposing traits (such as health anxiety) can influence an individual’s symptom perception. In this study, we used the Affective Picture Paradigm (APP, Bogaerts et al., 2010) to induce symptoms using affective picture stimuli while varying the frequency of symptom queries and assessing health...
Alterations in interoception have been linked to psychopathology. Recent findings suggest that both the attention to and the accuracy of, interoceptive perceptions may be oppositely related to subclinical symptomatology. Thus, providing well-validated tools that tap into these interoceptive processes is crucial for understanding the relation betwee...
Introduction
Chronic back pain is a widespread medical condition associated with high socioeconomic costs and increasing prevalence. Despite the advanced implementation of multidisciplinary approaches, providing a satisfactory treatment offer for those affected is often not possible. Exposure therapy (EXP) promises to be an effective and economical...
Aktuelle Klassifikationssysteme für psychische Störungen wie das DSM-5 und ICD-11 stehen zunehmend in der Kritik, die Komplexität psychischer Probleme nicht adäquat abzubilden. Ungünstig sind insbesondere die implizite Orientierung am medizinischen Krankheitsmodell, die mangelnde strukturelle Validität sowie die kategoriale Abgrenzung zu psychische...
High levels of somatic symptom distress represent a core component of both mental and physical illness. The exact aetiology and pathogenesis of this transdiagnostic phenomenon remain largely unknown. The Affective Picture Paradigm (APP) represents an innovative experimental paradigm to study somatic symptom distress. Based on the HiTOP framework an...
Objective
Knowledge about predictors of early response (ER) remains limited. This study examined patient, process, and therapist variables to predict ER in a naturalistic setting.
Research Design and Methods
Data from 493 psychotherapy outpatients were analysed. ER was defined by a ≥25% reduction in general psychological distress ( ER percent ) an...
Background : Placebos being prescribed with full honesty and disclosure (i.e., open-label placebo = OLP) have been shown to reduce symptom burden in a variety of conditions. With regard to allergic rhinits, previous research provided inconclusive evidence for the effects of OLP, possibly related to a separate focus on either symptom severity or sym...
Background
Health scares are highly publicised threats to health that increase public concern and protective behaviours but are later shown to be unfounded. Although health scares have become more common in recent times, they have received very little research attention. This is despite the fact that health scares often have negative outcomes for i...
In vivo exposure is a highly effective but rarely implemented treatment for agoraphobia. Most of the patients receive medication or cognitive therapy without exposure because of a high expenditure of money and time for in vivo exposure. Exposure in virtual reality (VR) is easier to implement but the effectiveness of stimulating fear compared to in...
Exposure in vivo is a highly effective treatment for anxiety disorders and acrophobia in particular. Nevertheless, it is rarely implemented in outpatient treatment. Exposure in virtual reality (VR) might be an alternative but its effect on subjective symptom burden and physiological parameters is questionable. Therefore, in this study, N = 33 parti...
Background
The post-COVID-19 condition describes the persistence or onset of somatic symptoms (e.g. fatigue) after acute COVID-19. Based on an existing cognitive-behavioral treatment protocol, we developed a specialized group intervention for individuals with post-COVID-19 condition. The present study examines the feasibility, acceptance, and effec...
Background: Grief is a multi-faceted experience including emotional, social, and physical reactions. Research in ICD-11 prolonged grief disorder (PGD) in different cultural contexts has revealed different or potentially missing grief symptoms that may be relevant.
Objective: This study thus aimed to explore the prevalence of somatic symptom distre...
Altered interoception is thought to be implicated in the development of psychopathology. Recent proposals highlight the need to differentiate between dimensions of interoception to better understand its relation to mental health. Here, we validated a German version of the Interoceptive Accuracy Scale (IAS) and investigated the relationship between...
Background: Feedback is considered one of the most important strategies in psychotherapy training. Objective: We investigated the effect of competence feedback on therapist self-perceived competence, professional self-confidence, and tendency to self-disclosure in supervision. Method: Master-level psychotherapy trainees ( N = 67) were randomly assi...
Background: Somatic symptom experience is modulated by interoception and affect. The Affective Picture Paradigm (APP) measures the effects of negative and neutral pictures on symptom reports, thus shedding light on how affectivity causes the perception of bodily signals.
Purpose: In two studies, we aimed to compare different versions of the Affect...
Objective:
Biased interoception decoupled from physiology might be relevant in the etiology of pathological illness anxiety. Empirical evidence for interoceptive deviations in illness anxiety is scarce but potentially informative to optimize treatments. We hypothesized that persons with pathological illness anxiety differ fundamentally in the clas...
Current approaches to somatic symptom perception conceptualize somatic symptoms partly as somato-visceral or body illusions evoked by an interaction between bottom-up (sensory) and top-down (expectations, attention) processes. Similar processes of multisensory integration are assumed to contribute to the rubber hand illusion (RHI). Findings concern...
Psychological studies with children have difficulty recruiting participants and samples are more often selective. Given parental consent for children’s participation, this study examined parents’ perceived barriers and benefits of participating in studies and associated parental personality and psychopathological characteristics. Since there are ha...
Objective: In clinical practice, persistent somatic symptoms are regularly explained using a cognitive-behavioral model (CBM). In the CBM, predisposing, perpetuating, and precipitating factors are assumed to interact and to cause the onset and endurance of somatic symptoms. However, these models are rarely investigated in their entirety. Methods: W...
Background:
While growing evidence suggests the efficacy of various behavioral approaches to the preventive treatment of migraine, it remains largely unclear which behavioral interventions are indicated for which type of patient. This exploratory study aimed to identify moderators for the outcome between migraine-specific cognitive-behavioral ther...
Objective:
Negative affectivity (NA) is associated with the emergence and persistence of physical symptoms with unclear organic pathology. This study investigated the temporal dynamics of NA and somatic symptom burden using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) in adults with somatic symptom disorder (SSD) and healthy control participants (HC).
M...
Freier Vortrag zur Pilotierung der anwendungsorientierten Parcoursprüfung an vier Standorten mit Schwerpunkt auf die Reliabilität und weitere Testgütekriterien.
Hintergrund: Interozeption, die Wahrnehmung körpereigener Signale, erscheint von zentraler Bedeutung für Prozesse der Emotionsverarbeitung und psychischen Gesundheit. Veränderungen der Interozeption sind mit unterschiedlichsten psychopathologischen Symptomen assoziiert. Erkenntnisse aus der Interozeptionsforschung basieren jedoch mehrheitlich auf a...
Background: Recently developed theoretical frameworks (Murphy et al., 2020) emphasize the need to distinguish between accurate perception and attention to internal processes when people are asked to assess their interoceptive abilities. Earlier findings showed that both aspects seem to be differentially related to the development of psychopathology...
Background: Interoception, the perception and processing of bodily signals, has been posited as a key contributor to persistent somatic symptoms (PSS) or functional disorders (FD). However, there is an ongoing debate about subfacets and structure, as well as how to measure interoception. Despite these unclarities, putative pathways to symptom perce...
Zusammenfassung
Im Kontext von Kopfschmerzerkrankungen beschreibt der Begriff „Attackenangst“ die Furcht vor dem Auftreten einer Kopfschmerzattacke. Ein Übermaß an Attackenangst kann sich ungünstig auf den Krankheitsverlauf bei Migräne auswirken und zu einer Verstärkung der Migräneaktivität führen. Zur Diagnostik von Attackenangst stehen der katego...
Objective:
To examine the association between trust in different sources of information on COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic and the burden of incident persistent symptoms.
Methods:
This prospective study used data from the SAPRIS and SAPRIS-Sérologie surveys nested in the French CONSTANCES population-based cohort. Trust in different inf...
Comorbidity with various health conditions is common in environmental intolerances (EIs), which restricts understanding for what symptoms that are associated with the intolerance per se. The present objectives were to study (i) prevalence of a broad range of specific symptoms in chemical, building-related, electromagnetic field- (EMF) related, and...
The COVID Stress Scales (CSS) are a new self-report instrument for multidimensional assessment of psychological stress in the context of the pandemic. The CSS have now been translated and validated in over 20 languages, but a validated German version has not yet been available. Therefore, the aim was to develop a German version of the CSS, to test...
Background: In addition to its potentially harmful physical consequences, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) can cause various negative psychological consequences for individuals. One cohort likely to have been affected is university students who have had to return and study from their home cities due to the physical closures of universities. Obje...
Objective:
Symptom perception in pathological illness anxiety (PIA) might be biased so that somatic signals are overreported. In the somatic signal detection task (SSDT), performance in detecting weak tactile stimuli gives information on overreporting or underreporting of stimuli. This task has not yet been applied in PIA.
Methods:
Participants...
The Somatic Symptom Disorder (SSD) was introduced in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Patients with SSD suffer from at least one persistent somatic (i.e., physical) symptom that is accompanied by excessive and dysfunctional cognitive (e.g., catastrophic interpretation of bodily sensations), affec...
Background
Contrary to traditional placebos, open-label placebos (OLP) abstain from deception, i.e., participants are openly informed to receive an inert substance. Studies in clinical and healthy samples evidence the efficacy of OLPs. This study aims to conceptually replicate and expand findings of a recent OLP study in healthy participants while...
For the first time, Jungmann et al. (2020) showed in a randomized controlled trial that using a health app to request health-related information can lead to similar negative emotional and behavioral effects as searching online for health-related information. In 2021, Multmeier and colleagues published a Letter to the Editor referring to these findi...
Background: Only recently has interoception been discussed as a common risk factor for psychopathology. Recent approaches distinguish between the ability to accurately perceive (interoceptive accuracy) and the propensity to attend (interoceptive attention) to internal signals. Objective: To examine the latent structure of self-reported interoceptiv...
The Inhibitory Learning Theory (ILT; Craske et al., 2008) changed the focus of exposure-based treatment from erasing excitatory associations and fear reduction (habituation (HA)) to reinforcing inhibitory associations and fear toleration (inhibitory learning (IL)). Studies which directly compare both approaches, IL versus HA, are scarce. The presen...
Interpretation bias (i.e. the selective negative interpretation of ambiguous stimuli) may contribute to the development and maintenance of health anxiety. However, the strength of the empirical evidence for this association remains a topic of debate. This study aimed to estimate the association between health anxiety and interpretation bias and to...
Background
Personal practice (PP) is often considered as a central component in psychotherapy training aiming to promote personal and therapeutic competences. However, its implementation varies considerably in practice.
Aims
The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the current practice of PP regarding the frequency/occurrence and perce...
Processing of internal bodily signals, also known as interoception, and associated impairments are thought to be implicated in the development of psychopathology. Recent proposals highlight the need to differentiate between dimensions of interoception, in particular between accuracy and attention, to better understand its relation to mental health....
Alterations in interoception - the perception of internal bodily signals - have been repeatedly linked to psychopathology. Recent findings suggest that both the attention devoted to, and the accuracy of, interoceptive perceptions have opposed effects on subclinical symptomatology such as alexithymia. Thus, providing well-validated tools that tap on...
Zusammenfassung. Theoretischer Hintergrund: Das BDI-II ist ein Selbstbeurteilungsinstrument zur Erfassung des Schweregrads einer Depression. Es liegen kaum Analysen mit Modellen aus der Item-Response-Theorie (IRT) vor. Fragestellung: Wie hoch ist die Messgenauigkeit des BDI-II über die unterschiedlichen Ausprägungen des latenten Traits (Depressivit...
The cortisol awakening response (CAR) is a non-invasive biomarker for hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) dysregulation, reflecting accumulated stress over time. In a previous study we reported that a blunted CAR before an inpatient treatment predicted self-reported depressive symptoms six weeks and six months after discharge [Eikeseth, F. F....
Background
Quarantine and physical distancing represent the two most important non-pharmaceutical actions to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Comparatively little is known about possible adverse consequences of these behavioural measures in Germany. This study aimed at investigating potential early adverse effects associated with quarantine and physi...
Exposure to illness-related stimuli is a crucial component of CBT for pathological health anxiety. Modern exposure approaches focus on forming inhibitory associations and provide promising results. An implementation in the treatment of pathological health anxiety is still missing. The present single case series study investigated the applicability...
Objective:
Despite the transdiagnostic importance of emotional dysregulat