Current Projects
Individual differences in Fear conditioning research
Long-term effects of childhood adversity on social processing
Childhood adversity significantly increases the risk of developing psychiatric disorders in adulthood. However, the mechanisms underlying this long-term vulnerability remain insufficiently understood. One potential pathway is altered social processing. In social environments, other people can represent both sources of threat and sources of reward. Disruptions in how social signals are...
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Meta Science in Fear conditioning research
Dysregulated processing of fear and safety has been linked to anxiety symptoms and related traits, e.g., neuroticism, intolerance of uncertainty or negative emotionality. Yet, different studies focus on different aspects of fear acquisition and extinction, outcome measures, and anxiety-related traits, making an integrative approach to the association of anxiety-related traits...
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Fear Profiles: Identification and characterization of individual trajectories in fear and anxiety
The FEAR PROFILES projects suggests a paradigm shift in fear and anxiety research by focusing on individual differences—often overlooked as residual variance—as key to advancing mechanistic understanding. We use systematic, multi-method studies combining established experimental paradigms with a wide array of methods (fMRI, psychophysiology, VR, freezing platform) designed specifically to...
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fearbase
It is our vision to facilitate cumulative science in the field of human fear conditioning research by gathering datasets and hence generating new information while at the same time ensure sustainability of research investments.To achieve this aim, we are developing a cooperative, sustainable, living and dynamically growing database with living...
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GRK 2753: Emotional Leanring and Memory
Associations between childhood maltreatment and responding to signals of threat and safety in a fear conditioning paradigm
This project investigates how early adversity—an important risk factor for a range of mental health disorders—affects fear learning, generalization and return of fear processes. While patients with anxiety disorders typically show heightened responses to safety cues, previous work suggests that individuals exposed to early adversity may instead be characterized by...
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Early Adversity Shapes Neural Representations of Threat
This project builds on the results of Child (Associations between Childhood Maltreatment and responding to signals of threat and safety in a fear conditioning paradigm), using a similar paradigm adjusted in key aspects to answer new research questions. While the previous project has confirmed and extended findings of blunted (arousal)...
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Past Projects
Research network for the (European) Interdisciplinary study of Fear and Extinction Learning as well as the Return of Fear (EIFEL-ROF)
The EIFEL-ROF network, for which Tina was the spokesperson, aimed to increase communication and coordination through tutorial/research guidelines papers, joint publication of review articles, coordination of cross-laboratory replication tests and data pooling. The discussion in the EIFEL-ROF network have generated many new (meta-) research ideas to answer questions on the...
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CRC 58: Fear, Anxiety, Anxiety Disorders
Longitudinal and multimodal investigations of the modulation of fear- and anxiety-related processes by life adversity – predictive and buffering factors. (B07)
Our study investigates why some individuals experience relapse into anxious behaviors after successful treatment, especially following stressful life events. We use a specialized experimental paradigm called differential fear conditioning, which examines how people distinguish between threat-related and safe cues. After an initial learning phase, where fear responses are acquired, participants...
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