Vera U Ludwig

Vera U Ludwig
University of Pennsylvania | UP · Department of Neuroscience

Dr. rer. nat.

About

33
Publications
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Introduction
Investigating and optimizing interventions to strengthen interpersonal connections - for example in order to maximize team performance - including psychological and physiological measures in dyads (e.g., heart rate, electrodermal response, EEG, eye tracking), at the Platt Labs - http://plattlabs.rocks/

Publications

Publications (33)
Article
Humans share implicit preferences for certain cross-sensory combinations; for example, they consistently associate higher-pitched sounds with lighter colors, smaller size, and spikier shapes. In the condition of synesthesia, people may experience such cross-modal correspondences to a perceptual degree (e.g., literally seeing sounds). So far, no stu...
Article
Humans share implicit preferences for cross-modal mappings (e.g., low pitch sounds are preferentially paired with darker colours). Individuals with synaesthesia experience cross-modal mappings to a conscious degree (e.g., they may see colours when they hear sounds). The neonatal synaesthesia hypothesis claims that all humans may be born with this e...
Article
Hypnotic responding might be due to attenuated frontal lobe functioning after the hypnotic induction. Little is known about whether personality traits linked with frontal functioning are associated with responsiveness to hypnotic suggestions. We assessed whether hypnotic suggestibility is related to the traits of self-control and impulsivity in 154...
Article
Full-text available
Hypnosis can affect perception, motor function, and memory. However, so far no study using neuroimaging has investigated whether hypnosis can influence reward processing and decision-making. Here we assessed whether posthypnotic suggestions can diminish the attractiveness of unhealthy food and whether this is more effective than diminishing attract...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Increasingly, business leaders and other professionals are called upon to be vulnerable and authentic in the workplace, which often includes disclosing emotions to others. While sharing emotions is known to enhance closeness, several questions remain underexplored. Specifically, disclosing personal facts about oneself and disclosing em...
Preprint
INTRODUCTION: People hold general beliefs about the world called primals (e.g., the world is Safe, Intentional), which are strongly linked to individual differences in personality, behavior and mental health. How such beliefs form or change across the lifespan is largely unknown, although theory suggests that beliefs become more negative after disr...
Preprint
Background: All mobile organisms forage for resources, choosing to depart for a new source based on changes in resource intake rates and comparisons with the average for the environment. In humans, nomadic lifestyles favoring exploration have been associated with genetic mutations implicated in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), invit...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction: People hold general beliefs about the world called primals (e.g., the world is Safe, Intentional), which are strongly linked to individual differences in personality, behavior, and mental health. How such beliefs form or change across the lifespan is largely unknown, although theory suggests that beliefs become more negative after di...
Article
Full-text available
Background After learning new skills, healthcare professionals do not always apply them in practice, despite being motivated. This may be referred to as an intention-behavior gap. One example is the positioning of immobilized and disabled patients in hospitals, nursing homes, or neurorehabilitation clinics. Positioning is crucial to prevent complic...
Article
Full-text available
Studies in decision neuroscience have identified robust neural representations for the value of choice options. However, overall values often depend on multiple attributes, and it is not well understood how the brain evaluates different attributes and integrates them to combined values. In particular, it is not clear whether attribute values are co...
Article
Full-text available
Background and aims Maladaptive eating habits are a major cause of obesity and weight-related illness. The development of empirically-based approaches, such as mindfulness training (MT) that target accurate mechanisms of action to address these behaviors is therefore critical. Two studies were conducted to examine the impact of MT on maladaptive ea...
Article
To reach longer-term goals and live aligned with their values, people typically must regulate their behavior. Effortful self-control is one way to achieve this and is usually framed as a forceful struggle between lower-level impulses and higher-level cognitive control processes. For example, people may restrain themselves from eating cake in order...
Article
Objectives: Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have been shown to reduce engagement in disordered eating behaviors, although how these interventions engender change remains unclear. The objective of this exploratory qualitative study was to describe the experiences and perceived attitudinal and behavioral changes of women participating in a min...
Article
Full-text available
During self-control, we may resist short-term temptations in order to reach a favorable future (e.g., resisting cake to stay healthy). The neural basis of self-control is typically attributed to “cold,” unemotional cognitive control mechanisms which inhibit affect-related regions via the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Here, we investigate the neural unde...
Article
In everyday life, we often deliberate about affective outcomes of decisions which can be described as ambivalent; i.e. positive and negative at the same time. For example, when looking forward to meet a dear friend at her/his favorite concert although one dislikes the music that is being performed. Thus, anticipation of bivalent emotions and their...
Article
Full-text available
Background Decubitus ulcers are associated with a burden for the patients and cause enormous costs. One of the reasons for the development of decubitus is prolonged exposure to pressure. The aim of this pilot study was to examine the pressure distribution of healthy individuals either positioned in Positioning in Neutral (LiN) or conventional posit...
Poster
Descriptors: emotion regulation, self-control, brain activation Emotion regulation (ER), personality and Self-Control (SC) are important for social adjustment and well-being with high correlations between those traits. We investigated, which individual variables are contributing to the explanation of brain activation during (successful) ER in a str...
Article
Full-text available
Aims There is accumulating evidence that automatic processes play a large role in alcohol dependence, which may be related to alcohol craving and consumption. The aim of this study is to investigate associations between cognitive biases in alcohol-dependent patients, and how these measures relate to drinking behavior. Methods Thirty alcohol-depend...
Article
Full-text available
Self-control can be defined as the ability to exert control over ones impulses. Currently, most research in the area relies on self-report. Focusing on attentional control processes involved in self-control, we modified a spatial selective attentional cueing task to test three domains of self-control experimentally in one task using aversive, tempt...
Article
Full-text available
Both self-control and emotion regulation enable individuals to adapt to external circumstances and social contexts, and both are assumed to rely on the overlapping neural resources. Here, we tested whether high self-reported self-control is related to successful emotion regulation on the behavioral and neural level. One hundred eight participants c...
Article
Full-text available
Humans value rewards less when these are delivered in the future as opposed to immediately, a phenomenon referred to as delay discounting. While delay discounting has been studied during the anticipation of rewards and in the context of intertemporal decision-making, little is known about its neural correlates in the outcome phase (during reward de...
Article
The distinct feeling of wanting to act and thereby causing our own actions is crucial to our self-perception as free human agents. Disturbances of the link between intention and action occur in several disorders. Little is known, however, about the neural correlates of wanting or intending to act. To investigate these for simple voluntary movements...
Article
Attentional control in demanding cognitive tasks can be improved by manipulating the motivational state. Motivation to obtain gains and motivation to avoid losses both usually result in faster reaction times and stronger activation in relevant brain areas such as the prefrontal cortex, but little is known about differences in the underlying neuroco...
Article
Full-text available
Alcohol-dependent patients have been shown to faster approach than avoid alcohol stimuli on the Approach Avoidance Task (AAT). This so-called alcohol approach bias has been associated with increased brain activation in the medial prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens. Cognitive bias modification (CBM) has been used to retrain the approach bias wi...
Article
Severe immobility due to lesions of the brain necessitates therapeutic positioning over the long term. There is little scientific evidence concerning the efficacy of different positioning methods. This clinical trial compares the effects of conventional positioning (CON) with those of positioning in neutral (LiN). A prospective, multicenter, invest...
Article
Background: Severe immobility due to lesions of the brain necessitates therapeutic positioning over the long term. There is little scientific evidence concerning the efficacy of different positioning methods. This clinical trial compares the effects of conventional positioning (CON) with those of positioning in neutral (LiN).
Article
Full-text available
Behavioral studies have shown an alcohol approach bias in alcohol-dependent patients: the automatic tendency to faster approach than avoid alcohol compared to neutral cues, which has been associated with craving and relapse. Although this is a well-studied psychological phenomenon, little is known about the brain processes underlying automatic acti...
Article
We report a single-case study, EB, who experiences synaesthetic sensations of color from tactile stimulation. Developmental synaesthesia is typically characterized by the consistency of synaesthetic pairings over time, in that stimuli tend to generate the same synaesthetic responses on different occasions. Here we demonstrate that EB's touch-color...

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