The lab at PUG 2019 in Dresden

Tina attended the 2019 annual conference “Psychology and Brain” in beautiful Dresden. Tina chaired a  symposium on meta-research (see picture). You can find my talk and poster on Extinction retention at OSF.

The lab at APS in Washington DC

Tina presented some of the recent and ongoing work at the Association for Psychological Science annual meeting in Washington DC (23-26.5.2019). She was part of a symposium on “New Directions in Fear and Anxiety”. 

European Meeting on Human Fear Conditioning 2019

The whole group attended the European meeting on Human Fear Conditioning in Würburg, Germany from May 6th to May 8th! We enjoyed two intense and inspiring poster sessions themed “From Fear to Beer” and “the return of Fear and Beer” – yet most of us chose local franconian wine over bear.

Rachel presented a poster on experimental boundary conditions in fear reinstatement in humans – great work using Bayesian Statistics and illustrated by raincloud plots.

Manuel and Maren had prepared a poster showing the first results of our prospective, longitudinal study on the impact of life adversity on fear conditioning, extinction and return of fear. A massive study with N=120 in which particpants underwent a 2-day paradigm at baseline and after 6 month. The study is still ongoing as participants are followed up by questionnaires regularly.

Tina gave a talk presenting a summay of meta-research done in the context of the EIFEL-ROF network during the past years. The slides are available online at OSF. I was overwhelmed by the postive, encouraging and appreciative feedback on this work – particularly by Early Career Researchers.

Welcome Alina!

Welcome Alina who will work as a PhD student in the Emmy-Nöther project Fear Profiles. Alina joined us from the Charite in Berlin!

New publication in Biological Psychiatry

Our new publication in Biological Psychiatry deals with the field of “fear extinction retention” from an empirical meta-research perspective. We discuss terminological vagueness in the field, excessive researchers degrees of freedom, heterogeneity in operationalization of the construct “extinction retention”. Finally, we illustrate the impact of this heterogeneity across 4 datasets. Based on these results, we call for a re-evaluation and re-consideration what we (think) we know about extinction retention.

Congratulations Rachel!

All lab members are going bananas because Rachel has recieved a post-doc grant to continue her research in our group! Thank you University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf for funding! Way to go, Rachel!