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Project 6: Individual differences in stability and change of expectations - What is the role played by personality traits and serotonin?

Prof. Dr. Erik Mueller

PhD Students: Christopher Stolz, Sarah- Louise Unterschemmann, Matthias Sperl

This project investigates personality traits and neurobiological mechanisms linked to expectation violation. Within this project, the stability and modification of expectations will be recorded by self-disclosure measures and behavior observation as well as by electrocortical indices using EEG. Activity of serotonin is experimentally manipulated with pharmacological agents. Additionally, it shall be investigated in what way personality characteristics moderate other GRK studies’ effects.

Publications

Bierwirth, P., Sperl, M. F. J., Antov, M. I., & Stockhorst, U. (in press). Prefrontal theta oscillations are modulated by estradiol-status during fear recall and extinction recall. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2021.02.011

Sperl, M. F. J., Wroblewski, A., Mueller, M., Straube, B., & Mueller, E. M. (2021). Learning dynamics of electrophysiological brain signals during human fear conditioning. NeuroImage, 226, 117569. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117569

Mueller, E. M., Sperl, M. F., & Panitz, C. (2019). Aversive imagery causes De Novo fear conditioning. Psychological science, 30(7), 1001-1015.

Panitz, C., Keil, A., & Mueller, E. M. (2019). Extinction-resistant attention to long-term conditioned threat is indexed by selective visuocortical alpha suppression in humans. Scientific reports, 9(1), 1-9.

Sperl, M. F., Panitz, C., Rosso, I. M., Dillon, D. G., Kumar, P., Hermann, A., Whitton, A. E., Hermann, C., Pizzagalli, D. A., & Mueller, E. M. (2019). Fear extinction recall modulates human frontomedial theta and amygdala activity. Cerebral Cortex, 29(2), 701-715.

Stolz, C., Endres, D., & Mueller, E. M. (2019). Threat‐conditioned contexts modulate the late positive potential to faces—A mobile EEG/virtual reality study. Psychophysiology, 56(4), e13308.

Panitz, C., Sperl, M. F., Hennig, J., Klucken, T., Hermann, C., & Mueller, E. M. (2018). Fearfulness, neuroticism/anxiety, and COMT Val158Met in long-term fear conditioning and extinction. Neurobiology of learning and memory, 155, 7-20.

Sperl, M. F., Panitz, C., Hermann, C., & Mueller, E. M. (2016). A pragmatic comparison of noise burst and electric shock unconditioned stimuli for fear conditioning research with many trials. Psychophysiology, 53(9), 1352-1365.

More information on Prof. Dr. Erik Müller

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