Peter Kirsch

Central Institute of Mental Health | CIMH · Department of Clinical Psychology

Humans are highly social, typically without this ability requiring noticeable efforts. Yet, such social fluency poses challenges both for the human brain to compute and for scientists to study. Over the last few decades, neuroscientific research in human sociality has witnessed a shift in focus from single-brain analysis to complex dynamics occurri...

Background Delay discounting describes the devaluation of future outcomes over time and is a popular behavioral construct in addiction research. Prior studies show modest yet consistent associations between problematic alcohol use and delayed reward discounting (DRD). However, the potential confounding influence of socioeconomic status (SES, e.g.,...

Humans are highly social, typically without this ability requiring noticeable efforts. Yet, such social fluency poses challenges both for the human brain to compute and for scientists to study. Over the last few decades, neuroscientific research in human sociality has witnessed a shift in focus from single-brain analysis to complex dynamics occurri...

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...

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...

Declarative memory retrieval is thought to involve reinstatement of neuronal activity patterns elicited and encoded during a prior learning episode. Furthermore, it is suggested that two mechanisms operate during reinstatement, dependent on task demands: individual memory items can be reactivated simultaneously as a clustered occurrence or, alterna...

Declarative memory retrieval is thought to involve reinstatement of neuronal activity patterns elicited and encoded during a prior learning episode. Furthermore, it is suggested that two mechanisms operate during reinstatement, dependent on task demands: individual memory items can be reactivated simultaneously as a clustered occurrence or, alterna...

Declarative memory retrieval is thought to involve reinstatement of neuronal activity patterns elicited and encoded during a prior learning episode. Furthermore, it is suggested that two mechanisms operate during reinstatement, dependent on task demands: individual memory items can be reactivated simultaneously as a clustered occurrence or, alterna...

Belief, defined by William James as the mental state or function of cognizing reality, is a core psychological function with strong influence on emotion and behavior. Furthermore, strong and aberrant beliefs about the world and oneself play important roles in mental disorders. The underlying processes of belief have been the matter of a long debate...

Rationale Cue-exposure therapy (CET) consists of exposing patients to the cause of their affliction in a controlled environment and after psychological preparation. Ever since it was conceived, it has been suggested as a treatment for different types of behavioural impairments, from anxiety disorders to substance abuse. In the field of addictive be...

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...

Declarative memory retrieval is thought to involve reinstatement of the neuronal activity patterns elicited and encoded during a prior learning episode. Recently, it has been suggested that two mechanisms operate during reinstatement, dependent on task demands: individual memory items can be reactivated simultaneously as a clustered occurrence or,...

Declarative memory retrieval is thought to involve reinstatement of the neuronal activity patterns elicited and encoded during a prior learning episode. Recently, it has been suggested that two mechanisms operate during reinstatement, dependent on task demands: individual memory items can be reactivated simultaneously as a clustered occurrence or,...

The importance of amygdala, hippocampus, and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) for the integration of neural, endocrine, and affective stress processing was shown in healthy participants and patients with stress-related disorders. The present manuscript which reports on one study-arm of the LawSTRESS project, aimed at investigating the predictive val...

Frontal functional asymmetry (FA) has been proposed as a potential target for neurofeedback (NFB) training for mental disorders but most FA NFB studies used electroencephalography while the investigations of FA NFB in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are rather limited. In this study, we aimed at identifying functional asymmetry effects...

Pre-registration for Systematic Review and Mega-Analysis.

Background Belief processing as well as self-referential processing have both been consistently associated with cortical midline structures. In addition, seminal neuroimaging papers have implicated cortical regions such as the vmPFC in general belief processing. However, the neural correlates of self-referential belief are yet to be investigated in...

Declarative memory retrieval is thought to involve reinstatement of the neuronal activity patterns elicited and encoded during a prior learning episode. Recently, it has been suggested that two mechanisms operate during reinstatement, dependent on task demands: individual memory items can be reactivated simultaneously as a clustered occurrence or,...

Introduction Alcohol dependence is characterized by a gradual reduction in cognitive control and inflexibility to contingency changes. The neuroadaptations underlying this aberrant behavior are poorly understood. Using an animal model of alcohol use disorders (AUD) and complementing diffusion-weighted (dw)-MRI with quantitative immunohistochemistry...

Rumination has been proposed as an important risk factor for depression, whereas mindful attention is considered a protective form of self-focusing. Experimental studies have demonstrated differential effects of these modes when induced in the lab. However, their impact on daily life processes is poorly understood, particularly in individuals vulne...

In view of the remarkable differences between persons who tend to self-empowerment in the areas of Corona and climate, the chapter introduces the distinction between instrumental and expressive self-empowerment. Instrumental self-empowerment describes deviant behaviour of persons who are positive towards democracy, who try to support their politica...

This chapter uses regression analysis to examine the inclination of respondents from two representative population surveys to societal self-empowerment, that is, norm-violating behavior with regard to the German strategy for combating the Corona pandemic. For this purpose, an aggregated index is used which combines the self-reported compliance with...

The chapter sheds light on societal self-empowerment from a legal perspective and structures the subject matter. It is then shown that legal justification grounds (e.g. self-defense, emergency, self-help), fundamental rights (including the right of resistance under Art. 20 para. 4 GG) or also state-philosophical considerations (e.g. Radbruch’s form...

This chapter uses ordinal logistic regression to examine the propensity of respondents from two representative population surveys to self-empowerment in connection with the climate school strikes of the Fridays-for-Future movement. An aggregated index is used that combines three items: own participation or participation of a relative in the protest...

Based on two representative population surveys, the chapter discusses the extent of societal self-empowerment in Germany in 2020. It turns out that almost two thirds of the respondents are willing to break the law in exceptional situations in order to follow their conscience. If, on the other hand, one asks whether one is allowed to take the law in...

The chapter sketches the range of political and social phenomena that can be subsumed under the term “societal self-empowerment” and defines it as the conscious violation of legal and non-legal norms for political, idealistic and ethical reasons. The course of the argumentation of the book is then outlined.

The chapter summarizes the empirical findings of the book and discusses in which ways expressive self-empowerment can be counteracted. Both a policy of punishment and deterrence and social exclusion of self-empowering persons are assessed as counterproductive—both are likely to further increase alienation from the political system. The hope for a p...

Love is probably the most fascinating feeling that a person ever experiences. However, little is known about what is happening in the brains of a romantic couple -the central and most salient relationship during adult age- while they are particularly tender and exchanging loving words with one another. To gain insight into nearly natural couple int...

Background Cue reactivity, the enhanced sensitivity to conditioned cues, is associated with habitual and compulsive alcohol consumption. However, most previous studies in alcohol use disorder (AUD) compared brain activity between alcohol and neutral conditions, solely as cue-triggered neural reactivity. Objective This study aims to find the neural...

Introduction Interpretable latent variable models that probabilistically link behavioral observations to an underlying latent process have increasingly been used to draw inferences on cognition from observed behavior. The latent process usually connects experimental variables to cognitive computation. While such models provide important insights in...

Pluralism has become the defining characteristic of many modern societies. Not only a plurality of individual and social claims and activities gain impacts on societal life. A creative pluralism of institutions and their norms profoundly shape our moral commitments and character – notably the family, the market, the media, and systems of law, relig...

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...

Background Males consume more alcohol than females, and alcohol use disorder (AUD) is more prevalent in males than females. However, females progress faster to AUD. Sex differences in neural alcohol cue reactivity were previously observed in young social drinkers, indicating a role of hypersensitivity to alcohol-related cues in very early stages of...

In studying mental processes, we often rely on quantifying not directly observable latent constructs. Interpretable latent variable models that probabilistically link observations to the underlying construct have increasingly been used to draw inferences from observed behavior. However, these models are far more powerful than that. By formally embe...

Background: Education outside the classroom (EOtC) is considered beneficial to children's physical and mental health. Especially, stress resilience has been linked to nature experience. Aims: This study experimentally explored the effects of pupils' autonomy support (AUT) and physical activity (PA) on their biological stress responses and brain...

Aim Delay discounting (DD) has often been investigated in the context of decision making whereby individuals attribute decreasing value to rewards in the distant future. Less is known about DD in the context of negative consequences. The aim of this pilot study was to identify commonalities and differences between reward and loss discounting on the...

Background The tendency to devaluate future options as a function of time, known as delay discounting, is associated with various factors such as psychiatric illness and personality. Under identical experimental conditions, individuals may therefore strongly differ in the degree to which they discount future options. In delay discounting tasks, thi...

Love is probably the most fascinating feeling that a person ever experiences. However, little is known about what is happening in the brains of a romantic couple –the central and most salient relationship during adult age– while they are particularly tender and exchanging loving words with one another. To gain insight into nearly natural couple int...

The LawSTRESS project is a controlled prospective-longitudinal study on psychological, endocrine, central nervous and genetic predictors of responses to long-lasting academic stress in a homogenous cohort. In this first project report, we focused on the association between daily life stress and the cortisol awakening response (CAR). The CAR, a dist...

Advances in social neuroscience have made neural signatures of social exchange measurable simultaneously across people. This has identified brain regions differentially active during social interaction between human dyads, but the underlying systems-level mechanisms are incompletely understood. This paper introduces dynamic causal modelling and Bay...

Real-time fMRI neurofeedback (rt-fMRI NF) is a promising non-invasive technique that enables volitional control of usually covert brain processes. While most rt-fMRI NF studies so far have demonstrated the ability of the method to evoke changes in brain activity and improve symptoms of mental disorders, a recently evolving field is network-based fu...

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) has been linked to interpersonal trust. While initial behavioral studies demonstrated a facilitating effect of OXT on trusting behavior, more recently these findings have been challenged. In this chapter we review the literature reporting two approaches that are used to evaluate OXT’s effects: exogenous OXT administr...

Understanding of emotions and intentions are key processes in social cognition at which serotonin is an important neuromodulator. Its precursor is the essential amino acid tryptophan (TRP). Reduced TRP availability leads to weaker impulse control ability and higher aggression, while TRP supplementation promotes confidence. In a double-blind placebo...

Null hypothesis significance testing is the major statistical procedure in fMRI, but provides only a rather limited picture of the effects in a data set. When sample size and power is low relying only on strict significance testing may lead to a host of false negative findings. In contrast, with very large data sets virtually every voxel might beco...

Abnormal resting-state functional connectivity, as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), has been reported in alcohol use disorders (AUD), but findings are so far inconsistent. Here, we exploited recent developments in graph-theoretical analyses, enabling improved resolution and fine-grained representation of brain networks, to i...

Although women and men differ in psychological and endocrine stress responses as well as prevalence rates of stress-related disorders, knowledge on sex differences regarding stress regulation in the brain is scarce. Therefore, we performed an in-depth analysis of data from 67 healthy participants (31 women, taking oral contraceptives), who were ex...

Null hypothesis significance testing is the major statistical procedure in the field of fMRI, but provides only a rather limited picture of the effects in a data set. When sample size and power is low relying only on strict significance testing may lead to a host of false negative findings. In contrast, with very large data sets virtually every vox...

According to the theory of embodied simulation, mirror neurons (MN) in our brain's motor system are the neuronal basis of all social-cognitive processes. The assumption of such a mirroring process in humans could be supported by results showing that within one person the same region is involved in different social cognition tasks. We conducted an f...

Background & Aims In a placebo controlled study we sought to determine if a four-weeks tryptophan-enriched diet is able to improve age-related depression or social cognitive impairment, depending on polymorphisms located in the promoter region of Solute Carrier Family 6 Member 4 (SLC6A4), also known as serotonin transporter (SERT1) gene. Methods 9...

The essential amino acid tryptophan (TRP) is discussed as a potential protective factor for physical and mental health. Besides positive effects via the microbiota of the gut on many physiological processes, TRP is the precursor of the neurotransmitter serotonin (5-HT) thereby playing a role for affective disorders. The present study investigated i...

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is associated with changes in frontostriatal connectivity, but functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) functional connectivity (FC) approaches are usually not adapted to these circuits. We developed a circuit-specific fMRI analysis approach to detect dynamic changes in frontostriatal FC inspired by medial-ventral-ros...

Recently, it has been observed a relationship between nutrition and social cognition. In this way, several dietary patterns, or even some probiotics, have been reported as social cognition modulators. However,...

Brainstem regions support vital bodily functions, yet their genetic architectures and involvement in common brain disorders remain understudied. Here, using imaging-genetics data from a discovery sample of 27,034 individuals, we identify 45 brainstem-associated genetic loci, including the first linked to midbrain, pons, and medulla oblongata volume...

The serotonergic (5-HT) system is related to affective and cognitive processes and explains behavioral variability in the normal and psychopathological range. For this reason, the hypothesis was put forward that genetic and epigenetic markers related to 5-HT metabolism predict individual differences in social cognitive functioning. Social cognition...

Background Depression is related to default mode network (DMN) connectivity and higher respiration pattern variability (RPV). In addition, DMN connectivity and RPV are interrelated and predict a poorer clinical course of depression. The association of RPV and depression might further be boosted by anxiety levels. Aim of the present study was to inv...

Background: Alcohol Use Disorder is a severe mental disorder affecting the individuals concerned, their family and friends and society as a whole. Despite its high prevalence, novel treatment options remain rather limited. Two innovative interventions used for treating severe disorders are the use of real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging...

The functional connectome is organized into several separable intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) that are thought to be the building blocks of the mind. However, it is currently not well understood how these networks are engaged by emotionally salient information, and how such engagement fits into emotion theories. The current study assessed ho...

Already moderate alcohol consumption has detrimental long-term effects on brain function. However, how alcohol produces its potent addictive effects despite being a weak reinforcer is a poorly understood conundrum that likely hampers the development of successful interventions to limit heavy drinking. In this translational study, we demonstrate wid...

Identifying individual differences in stress reactivity is of particular interest in the context of stress-related disorders and resilience. Previous studies already identified several factors mediating the individual stress response of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA). However, the impact of long-term HPA axis activity on acute stress...

BACKGROUND Understanding the interplay between central nervous system and hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis responses to stress in humans is assumed to be essential to contribute to the central question of stress research, namely how stress can increase disease risk. Therefore, the present study used a neuroimaging stress paradigm to investigate...

Our ability to infer other individuals’ emotions is central for successful social interactions. Based on the theory of embodied simulation, our mirror neuron system (MNS) provides the essential link between the observed facial configuration of another individual and our inference of that emotion by means of common neuronal activation. However, so f...

The functional connectome is organized into several separable intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) that are thought to be the building blocks of the mind. However, it is currently not well understood how these networks are engaged by emotionally salient information, and how such engagement fits into emotion theories. The current study assessed ho...