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New preprint on individual-level & group level reliability

In this pre-print by Maren Klingelhöfer Jens, Mana Ehlers, Vincent Keynayian (BA student) and former lab member Manuel Kuhn, we target the important question of individual and group level reliability of common measures in fear conditioning reserach: skin conductance, ratings and BOLD fMRI. Bottom line: group level stability is fine, individual-level stability did not make us very happy.

We also ask the related question to what extend responding in preceding experimental phases predicts responding in later experimental phases – a highly relevant question for clinical translation! Of course we do that multiverse-style!

Bonus: Open data and code and you can do the magic to generate the manuscript from the data and code we provide! This is the lab’s 2nd manuscript written in a fully reproducibly way in R markdown! Well done team!

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PhD position available from July 1st 2022

We are excited to announce that the lab has an open PhD position starting from july 1st 2022. The position is part of the brand new research training group “Emotional Learning and Memory” funded by the German Research Foundatation (DFG). More information can be found here.

The project aims to investigate how childhood adversity gets ‚under the skin‘ by investigating the neuro-physiological mechanisms underlying response differences to signals of threat and safety in individuals exposed and not exposed to early life adversity. To this end, we use state of the art functional and structural imaging in combination with defensive startle responding, freezing-like behavior in humans and measures of physiological arousal and endocrine stress responding (cortisol in hair and saliva) in a fear conditionig and generalization paradigm.

Applications open until april 1st! Looking forward!