Ulrike Basten

Ulrike Basten
University of Koblenz-Landau (Landau) · Biological Psychology

Professor

About

40
Publications
27,568
Reads
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2,707
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
October 2020 - present
University of Koblenz and Landau
Position
  • Professor
July 2010 - September 2020
Goethe University Frankfurt
Position
  • PostDoc Position
October 2006 - June 2010
Heidelberg University
Position
  • PhD Student

Publications

Publications (40)
Article
Full-text available
General intelligence is a psychological construct that captures in a single metric the overall level of behavioural and cognitive performance in an individual. While previous research has attempted to localise intelligence in circumscribed brain regions, more recent work focuses on functional interactions between regions. However, even though brain...
Article
Intelligence-related differences in the intrinsic functional organization of the brain were studied with a graph-theoretical approach, comparing effects on nodal measures of brain network efficiency (concerning specific nodes of the network) and global measures (concerning the overall brain network). Functional imaging data acquired for 54 healthy...
Article
Full-text available
When we make decisions, the benefits of an option often need to be weighed against accompanying costs. Little is known, however, about the neural systems underlying such cost-benefit computations. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and choice modeling, we show that decision making based on cost-benefit comparison can be explained as a stoc...
Preprint
Background: Childhood maltreatment is associated with a higher risk for developing psychological disorders, such as depression or anxiety. Dysfunctional emotion regulation (ER) has been implicated as a neurocognitive mechanism linking adverse childhood experiences to an increased risk for psychopathological outcomes. Objective: This preregistered s...
Article
Full-text available
Resilience has been defined as the maintenance or quick recovery of mental health during and after stressor exposure. One popular operationalization of this concept is to model prototypical trajectories of mental health in response to an adverse event, where trajectories of undisturbed low or rapidly recovering symptoms both comply with the resilie...
Article
Full-text available
Interpretation biases in the processing of ambiguous affective information are assumed to play an important role in the onset and maintenance of emotional disorders. Reports of low reliability for experimental measures of cognitive biases have called into question previous findings on the association of these measures with markers of mental health...
Article
The process model of affect regulation provides a theoretical framework for the description of general regulatory processes in influencing emotions or moods, coping with stressful or unpleasant situations and controlling impulses. While pain research has traditionally focused on the concept of coping, there has recently been a growing interest in e...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Background: Childhood maltreatment, such as the experience of physical or emo:onal abuse and neglect, is associated with a higher risk for developing emo:onal or behavioural problems and psychiatric disorders, for example depression or anxiety disorders. Dysfunctional emotion regulation (ER) has been implicated as a neurocognitive mechanism linking...
Preprint
Stress resilience is the maintenance of mental health despite adversity. We have predicted that a tendency to appraise stressors in a realistic to slightly unrealistically positive fashion (positive appraisal style, PAS) is prospectively associated with more resilient outcomes; that PAS is a proximal and integrative resilience factor, mediating the...
Preprint
Full-text available
Appraisal refers to the evaluation of stimuli or situations with respect to an individual’s goals and needs. Stimuli or situations that are appraised as a threat to one’ goals and needs (‘stressors’) induce stress responses (‘stress’). Stressor appraisal occurs on various dimensions, of which the magnitude or cost of a potential adverse outcome, th...
Article
Full-text available
Positive Appraisal Style Theory of Resilience posits that a person’s general style of evaluating stressors plays a central role in mental health and resilience. Specifically, a tendency to appraise stressors positively (positive appraisal style; PAS) is theorized to be protective of mental health and thus a key resilience factor. To this date no me...
Article
Full-text available
Individual differences in emotion regulation (ER) are assumed to play an important role in resilience and mental health. In a standardized laboratory setting, we investigated how the individual tendency to select specific ER strategies (reappraisal vs. distraction) and the capacity to implement these strategies are related (a) to each other and (b)...
Preprint
Positive Appraisal Style Theory of Resilience posits that a person’s general style of evaluating stressors plays a central role in mental health and resilience. Specifically, a tendency to appraise stressors positively (positive appraisal style; PAS) is theorized to be protective of mental health and thus a key resilience factor. To this date no me...
Article
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global stressor with inter-individually differing influences on mental health trajectories. Polygenic Risk Scores (PRSs) for psychiatric phenotypes are associated with individual mental health predispositions. Elevated hair cortisol concentrations (HCC) and high PRSs are related to negative mental health outcomes. We anal...
Article
Full-text available
Youth with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at increased risk to develop co-morbid depression. Identifying factors that contribute to depression risk may allow early intervention and prevention. Poor emotion regulation, which is common in adolescents, is a candidate risk factor. Impaired cognitive emotion regulation is a fundamen...
Chapter
Psychological research is increasingly concerned with the interactions between the use of digital games and the development of intelligence in children and adolescents. This paper integrates the findings of neurocognitive research on effects of gaming on attentional processes and executive functions as well as the findings of clinical psychological...
Chapter
Full-text available
Die psychologische Forschung beschäftigt sich zunehmend mit den Wechselwirkungen zwischen der Nutzung digitaler Spiele und der Intelligenzentwicklung bei Kindern und Jugendlichen. In diesem Beitrag werden die Befunde der biologisch-psychologischen Kognitionsforschung zur Wirkung von Gaming auf Aufmerksamkeitsprozesse und exekutive Funktionen sowie...
Article
Full-text available
Resilience has been defined as the maintenance or quick recovery of mental health during and after times of adversity. How to operationalize resilience and to determine the factors and processes that lead to good long-term mental health outcomes in stressor-exposed individuals is a matter of ongoing debate and of critical importance for the advance...
Chapter
Full-text available
Functional brain imaging studies of intelligence have tackled the following questions: What happens in our brains when we solve tasks from an intelligence test? And are there differences between people? Do people with higher scores on an intelligence test show different patterns of brain activation while working on cognitive tasks than people with...
Article
Physical separation from caregivers activates attachment-related behaviors. However, neural underpinnings of this biological mechanism in humans and their development are poorly understood. We examined via functional MRI brain responses to pictorial representations of separation as a function of attachment-security, attachment-avoidance, and attach...
Article
Full-text available
A positive association between brain size and intelligence is firmly established, but whether region-specific anatomical differences contribute to general intelligence remains an open question. Results from voxel-based morphometry (VBM) - one of the most widely used morphometric methods - have remained inconclusive so far. Here, we applied cross-va...
Preprint
Full-text available
Resilience has been defined as the maintenance or quick recovery of mental health during and after times of adversity. Such good longer-term mental health outcomes despite adversity presumably result from complex and dynamic processes of adaptation to stressor exposure (‘resilience processes’), which in many cases include changes in individual prop...
Article
Full-text available
p>Consistent failure over the past few decades to reduce the high prevalence of stress-related disorders has motivated a search for alternative research strategies. Resilience refers to the phenomenon of many people maintaining mental health despite exposure to psychological or physical adversity. Instead of aiming to understand the pathophysiology...
Article
Full-text available
The pFC is critical for cognitive flexibility (i.e., our ability to flexibly adjust behavior to changing environmental demands), but also for cognitive stability (i.e., our ability to follow behavioral plans in the face of distraction). Behavioral research suggests that individuals differ in their cognitive flexibility and stability, and neurocompu...
Article
Full-text available
The present study investigates the effects of trait anxiety on the neural efficiency of working memory component functions (manipulation vs. maintenance) in the absence of threat-related stimuli. For the manipulation of affectively neutral verbal information held in working memory, high- and low-anxious individuals (N = 46) did not differ in their...
Article
Full-text available
Task representations consist of different aspects such as the representations of the relevant stimuli, the abstract rules to be applied, and the actions to be performed. To be flexible in our daily lives, we frequently need to switch between some or all aspects of a task. In the present study, we examined whether switching between abstract task rul...
Article
Full-text available
An impairment of attentional control in the face of threat-related distracters is well established for high-anxious individuals. Beyond that, it has been hypothesized that high trait anxiety more generally impairs the neural efficiency of cognitive processes requiring attentional control—even in the absence of threat-related stimuli. Here, we use f...
Article
Full-text available
Recent studies suggest an association of dopamine D2 receptor (DRD2) availability with flexibility in reward-based learning. We extend these results by demonstrating an association of genetically based differences in DRD2 density with the ability to intentionally switch between nonrewarded tasks: noncarriers of the A1 allele of the DRD2/ANKK1-TaqIa...
Article
Mounting evidence shows that the brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) plays a crucial role in depression and anxiety. The discovery of a functional variant of the BDNF gene--the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism--led to new insights into the molecular genetic mechanisms underlying these emotional disorders. Although there is evidence from animal resea...
Article
Full-text available
Mounting evidence from animal studies show that the mesolimbic dopaminergic pathways are modulated by the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). This study investigates in N=768 healthy Caucasian participants the influence of two prominent functional single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on the BDNF gene (BDNF Val66Met SNP) and the ankyrin repe...
Article
Dopamine modulates complex cognitive functions like working memory and cognitive control. It is widely accepted that an optimal level of prefrontal dopamine supports working memory performance. In the present study we used a molecular genetic approach to test whether the optimal activity of the dopamine system for different component processes of w...
Article
Although the brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) has been mainly investigated in the context of depression and anxiety disorders, several studies also suggest an association between BDNF and smoking. BDNF represents a protein which crucially influences several processes in the cell ranging from growth to apoptosis. A functional variant of the...

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