Philipp Kanske

Technische Universität Dresden | TUD · Department of Psychology

The relationship between empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) as mental capacities enabling dynamicinformation processing in social interactions is complex and situation-specific. Reductionistapproaches and oversimplified measures of these capacities in the lab do not do this complexityjustice. While there is a long-standing research tradition studying...

Social neuroscience has often been criticized for approaching the investigation of the neural processes that enable social interaction and cognition from a passive, detached, third-person perspective, without involving any real-time social interaction. With the emergence of second-person neuroscience, investigators have uncovered the unique complex...

I made a video summarizing two papers on how to do #exploration of data. https://youtu.be/z1_ECwOXRZo Papers: https://open.lnu.se/index.php/metapsychology/article/view/2837 https://open.lnu.se/index.php/metapsychology/article/view/3270 #statistics #openscience

Socioeconomic status (SES), a concept related to an individual's economic and social position relative to others, can shape social interactions like altruistic behaviors. However, little is known about the exact neurocognitive mechanisms that link SES with altruism. Our study aimed to provide a comprehensive account of the sociocognitive and neural...

Introduction Traumatic event exposure is an important risk factor for the development and maintenance of psychopathology. Social-affective responses to trauma exposure (e.g. shame, guilt, revenge, social alienation) could moderate this relationship, but little is known about their relevance for different types of psychopathology. Moreover, the inte...

Transparent exploration in science invites novel discoveries by stimulating new or modified claims about hypotheses, models, and theories. In this second article of two consecutive parts, we outline how to explore data patterns that inform such claims. Transparent exploration should be guided by two contrasting goals: comprehensiveness and efficien...

The human brain supports social cognitive functions, including Theory of Mind, empathy, and compassion, through its intrinsic hierarchical organization. However, it remains unclear how the learning and refinement of social skills shapes brain function and structure. We studied if different types of social mental training induce changes in cortical...

The human brain supports social cognitive functions, including Theory of Mind, empathy, and compassion, through its intrinsic hierarchical organization. However, it remains unclear how the learning and refinement of social skills shapes brain function and structure. We studied if different types of social mental training induce changes in cortical...

The human brain supports social cognitive functions, including Theory of Mind, empathy, and compassion, through its intrinsic hierarchical organization. However, it remains unclear how the learning and refinement of social skills shapes brain function and structure. We studied if different types of social mental training induce changes in cortical...

The human brain supports social cognitive functions, including Theory of Mind, empathy, and compassion, through its intrinsic hierarchical organization. However, it remains unclear how the learning and refinement of social skills shapes brain function and structure. We studied if different types of social mental training induce changes in cortical...

Introduction: Though empathy, compassion, and Theory of Mind (ToM) are related, they have been distinguished conceptually and empirically across behavioural and neuroimaging experiments. The EmpaToM task was the first realistic paradigm developed for use in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which can reliably detect and distinguish thre...

Relationship closeness determines the propensity to spontaneously reproduce another's emotional and physiological stress response. We investigated whether psychosocial stress in mothers is causally linked to such empathic stress in children. Mothers (N = 76) completed either a standardized laboratory stressor or a stress-free control task, while th...

Background: Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies on emotion processing in patients with bipolar disorder (BD) show hyperactivity of limbic-striatal brain areas and hypoactivity in inferior frontal areas compared to healthy participants. However, heterogeneous results in patients with different disease states and different valences of emot...

Repeated hospitalizations are a characteristic of severe disease courses in patients with affective disorders (PAD). To elucidate how a hospitalization during a nine-year follow-up in PAD affects brain structure, a longitudinal case-control study (mean [SD] follow-up period 8.98 [2.20] years) was conducted using structural neuroimaging. We investig...

Objective: There is little knowledge about which types of meditation-based training are effective for alleviating which facets of psychological distress. We investigated shared and specific effects of three meditation-based training programs on distress. Method: 332 healthy adults were assigned to a retest control cohort or to one of three 3-mon...

Practicing mindfulness is associated with stress reduction and with positive effects in the context of learning and teaching. Although effects on student populations have been studied extensively, there are few studies implementing mindfulness exercises in university courses directly. For this reason, we aimed to investigate whether the use of a br...

Research over the past decades has revealed a variety of beneficial effects of meditation training. These beneficial effects span the levels of health and well-being, cognition, emotion, and social behavior. Around the same time, sociologists have shown that traits and outcomes on the individual level have the potential to spread in communities ove...

Objectives: To elucidate the relationship between the course of bipolar disorder (BD) and structural brain changes across the life span, we conducted a systematic review of longitudinal imaging studies in adolescent and adult BD-patients. Methods: Eleven studies with 329 BD-patients and 277 controls met our PICOS-criteria (participants, interven...

Empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) have classically been studied as separate social functions, however, recent advances demonstrate the need to investigate the two in interaction: naturalistic settings often blur the distinction of affect and cognition and demand the simultaneous processing of such different stimulus dimensions. Here, we investigate...

Mimicry, the spontaneous imitation of an interaction partner, is an important part of everyday communication, as it has been shown to foster relationships and increase closeness. People with affective disorders often have problems in their interpersonal lives. In this review, we pursue the question if these problems are linked to differences in mim...

Abstract Background After stressful event exposure, higher perceived social support is a well-established correlate of decreased risk for psychological symptoms, including depressive, anxiety and posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms. However, longitudinal data on the direction of this association and the stability of perceived social support are sca...

Data exploration has enormous potential to modify and create hypotheses, models, and theories. Harnessing the potential of transparent exploration replaces the common, flawed purpose of intransparent exploration: to produce results that appear to confirm a claim by hiding steps of an analysis. For transparent exploration to succeed, however, method...

In a world with rapidly increasing population that competes for the earth’s limited resources, cooperation is crucial. While research showed that empathizing with another individual in need enhances prosociality, it remains unclear whether correctly inferring the other’s inner, mental states on a more cognitive level (i.e., mentalizing) elicits hel...

Social neuroscience has often been criticized for approaching the investigation of the neural processes that enable social interaction and cognition from a passive, detached, third-person perspective, with participants acting as mere observers of others’ behavior and making judgements based on their observations, without involving any real time soc...

Background: Acrophobia is a specific phobia characterized by a severe fear of heights. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the efficacy of two therapies that may ameliorate symptoms of acrophobia and anxiety sensitivity, i.e., virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy wi...

Through the long-term activation of sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, chronic psychosocial stress can compromise mental and bodily health. Psychosocial stress is determined by the perception of social interactions as ego-threatening, and thus strongly influenced by individual social processing capacities. In the cu...

Social interactions are dynamic, context-dependent, and reciprocal events that influence prospective strategies and require constant practice and adaptation. This complexity of social interactions creates several research challenges. We propose a new framework encouraging future research to investigate not only individual differences in capacities...

Background Individuals with high sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) (“highly sensitive persons”) are thought to be easily excitable and overwhelmed, highly attentive to aesthetic impressions, and particularly sensitive to sensory stimulation. Public discourse suggests that those who describe themselves as highly sensitive see themselves as fundam...

Stimuli that evoke emotions are salient, draw attentional resources, and facilitate situationally appropriate behavior in complex or conflicting environments. However, negative and positive emotions may motivate different response strategies. For example, a threatening stimulus might evoke avoidant behavior, whereas a positive stimulus may prompt a...

Background After stressful event exposure, higher perceived social support is a well-established correlate of decreased risk for psychological symptoms, including depressive, anxiety and posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms. However, longitudinal data on the direction of this association and the stability of perceived social support are scarce and h...

Physical distancing measures during the coronavirus pandemic are associated with increased psychological distress, especially in people with mental disorders. We investigated which social risk and resilience factors influence distress over time in people with pre-existing mental disorders. We conducted a longitudinal online survey with weekly follo...

Transparent exploration opens the door for scientific novelty through stimulating new or modified claims about hypotheses, models, and theories. In this second article of two consecutive parts, we outline how to plan exploration, discuss the goals of exploratory analyses and means of conducting these. We outline how background knowledge may guide e...

Over the past 150 years of neuroscientific research, the field has undergone a tremendous evolution. Starting out with lesion-based inference of brain function, functional neuroimaging, introduced in the late 1980s, and increasingly fine-grained and sophisticated methods and analyses now allow us to study the live neural correlates of complex behav...

Social interactions are dynamic, context-dependent, and reciprocal events that influence prospective strategies and require constant practice and adaptation. This complexity of social interactions creates several research challenges. We propose a new framework encouraging future research to investigate not only individual differences in capacities...

Altruism, defined as costly other-regarding behavior, varies considerably across people and contexts. One prominent context in which people frequently must decide on how to socially act is under stress. How does stress affect altruistic decision-making and through which neurocognitive mechanisms? To address these questions, we assessed neural activ...

While the importance of social affect and cognition is indisputable throughout the adult lifespan, findings of how empathy and prosociality develop and interact across adulthood are mixed and real-life data are scarce. Research using ecological momentary assessment recently demonstrated that adults commonly experience empathy in daily life. Further...

Transparent exploration opens the door for scientific novelty through stimulating new or modified claims about hypotheses, models, and theories. In this second of two consecutive papers, we outline foundations, goals and means of conducting exploration. Transparency in how exploration has been done (through preregistration, open data and open analy...

Positive emotion regulation, that is, upregulating, maintaining, and savoring positive emotions, also bears the potential to counteract and thus mitigate negative affect. In this narrative review, we report on the social emotion of compassion as a particularly efficient form of positive emotion regulation. Compassion emerges as an affiliative respo...

In the present study, we used mouse tracking to investigate two processes underlying prospective memory (PM) retrieval: First, we aimed to explore to what extent spontaneous retrieval of already completed PM intentions is supported by reflexive-associative and discrepancy-plus-search processes. Second, we aimed to disentangle whether costs to an on...

Music is a human universal and has the ability to evoke powerful, genuine emotions. But does music influence our capacity to understand and feel with others? A growing body of evidence indicates that empathy (sharing another's feelings) and compassion (a feeling of concern toward others) are behaviorally and neutrally distinct, both from each other...

Affective disorders, specifically Major Depressive Disorder and Bipolar Disorders, show high prevalence, relapse rates, and a high likelihood to develop a chronic course. For the past two decades, research has investigated the neural correlates of emotion processing and emotion regulation in patients with affective disorders. Putative underlying ca...

While empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) have classically been studied as separate social functions, recent advances demonstrate the need to investigate the two in interaction: Naturalistic settings often blur the distinction of affect and cognition and demand the simultaneous processing of such different stimulus dimensions. Here, we investigate how...

Background Traumatic experiences may result in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is characterized as an exaggerated fear response that cannot be extinguished over time or in safe environments. What are beneficial psychotherapeutic treatment options for PTSD patients? Can oxytocin (OXT), which is involved in the stress response, and safety...

Objective Narcissism can manifest in grandiose and vulnerable patterns of experience and behavior. While largely unrelated in the general population, individuals with clinically relevant narcissism are thought to display both. Our previous studies showed that trait measures of grandiosity and vulnerability were unrelated at low-to-moderate levels o...

Clandestine exploratory analyses are all too common, producing nominally confirmatory results through hidden analytical steps instead of harnessing exploration’s potential to modify and inform hypotheses, models, and theories. For such valuable exploration to evolve, however, methodological guidance, elaboration and implementation in the publicatio...

Background Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by difficulties in social communication and interaction, which have been related to atypical neural processing of rewards, especially in the social domain. Since intranasal oxytocin has been shown to modulate activation of the brain’s reward circuit, oxytocin might ameliorate the processing...

Anticipating population ageing to reach a historically unprecedented level in this century and considering the public goal of promoting well-being until old age, research in many fields has started to focus on processes and factors that contribute to healthy ageing. Since human interactions have a tremendous impact on our mental and physical well-b...

While the importance of social affect and cognition is indisputable throughout the adult lifespan, findings of how empathy and prosociality develop and interact across adulthood are mixed, and real-life data are scarce. Research using ecological momentary assessment recently demonstrated that adults commonly experience empathy in daily life. Furthe...

While the importance of social affect and cognition is indisputable throughout the adult lifespan, findings of how empathy and prosociality develop and interact across adulthood are mixed, and real-life data are scarce. Research using ecological momentary assessment recently demonstrated that adults commonly experience empathy in daily life. Furthe...

Objectives: Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) often suffer from impairments in social functioning. This study investigates differences in empathy, compassion, and Theory of Mind (ToM) in individuals with OCD as a possible cause for social functioning deficits. Design: Sixty-four individuals diagnosed with OCD and 62 healthy in...

Social cognition allows humans to understand and predict other people's behavior by inferring or sharing their emotions, intentions and beliefs. Few studies have investigated the impact of one's own emotional state on understanding others. Here, we tested the effect of being in an angry state on empathy and theory of mind (ToM). In a between-groups...

Narcissism can manifest in a grandiose form-admiration-seeking, exhibitionism, and dominance-or a vulnerable form-anxiety, withdrawal, and hypersensitivity. While grandiose narcissism is conceptually in line with an independent self-construal, as prevalent in Western countries, the vulnerable form can be assumed to relate more to an interdependent...

Background Causal quests in non-randomized studies are unavoidable just because research questions are beyond doubt causal (e.g., aetiology). Large progress during the last decades has enriched the methodical toolbox. Aims Summary papers mainly focus on quantitative and highly formal methods. With examples from clinical psychology, we show how qua...

Narcissism is a Janusian personality construct, associated with both grandiose self-assuredness and dominance, as well as vulnerable insecurity and reactivity. Central questions of intra-and interpersonal functioning in narcissism are still a matter of debate. Neuroscience could help to understand the paradoxical patterns of experience and behavior...

Humans are a highly social species. Complex interactions for mutual support range from helping neighbors to building social welfare institutions. During times of distress or crisis, sharing life experiences within one’s social circle is critical for well-being. By translating pattern-learning algorithms to the UK Biobank imaging-genetics cohort (n...

Empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) are two core components of social understanding. The EmpaToM is a validated social video task that allows for independent manipulation and assessment of the two capacities. First applications revealed that empathy and ToM are dissociable constructs on a neuronal as well as on a behavioral level. As the EmpaToM has b...

This study aimed to compile and synthesize studies investigating explicit emotion regulation in patients with bipolar disorder and individuals at risk of developing bipolar disorder. The importance of explicit emotion regulation arises from its potential role as a marker for bipolar disorders in individuals at risk and its potent role in therapy fo...

Meditation-based mental training interventions show physical and mental health benefits. However, it remains unclear how different types of mental practice affect emotion processing at both the neuronal and the behavioural level. In the context of the ReSource project, 332 participants underwent an fMRI scan while performing an emotion anticipation...

Harking and p-hacking are considered as main causes of the replication crisis, and pre-registration of hypotheses and analyses is regarded as the best countermeasure so far. However, the pressure to produce purportedly confirming results through hidden exploration largely resists. While some pre-registration advocates encourage the alternative of h...

Background Deficient cognitive control (CC) over emotional distraction is a central characteristic of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Reduced activation of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) has been linked to this deficit. This study investigates whether it is possible to ameliorate CC deficits via anodal tDCS over the left dlP...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by difficulties in social communication and interaction, which have been related to atypical neural processing of rewards, especially in the social domain. Since intranasal oxytocin has been shown to modulate activation of the brain's reward circuit, oxytocin could be a useful tool to ameliorate the p...

Patients with mental disorders often struggle to generate positive emotions, a critical deficit as positive emotions can cause cascading effects leading to well-being. Here, we focus on a specific form of positive emotion, compassion that arises as an affiliative response to other people. The cultivation of compassion has a long tradition in Easter...

In public discourse, narcissism is often portrayed one-sidedly and overly negative, rendering a picture of narcissistic individuals as “toxic people” or “evil characters”. Beyond these salient associations, psychological theories point to a more complex phenomenon, and different developmental mechanisms are being discussed in relation to it. We inv...