Research Focus
Psychotherapy is an effective form of treatment for many people with mental illnesses and is also considered the treatment of choice for most mental illnesses. Nevertheless, the psychotherapy currently available is only partially effective or not effective at all for some of those affected. In order to be able to help these sufferers better, research has the task of further developing psychotherapeutic procedures.
Psychotherapy research is approaching this goal in very different ways. One way is to better understand why exactly psychotherapy works. With the knowledge of mechanisms of action, we can optimize methods and techniques in a targeted manner or develop new ones. To gain a better understanding of this, however, we first need more knowledge about the development of mental illnesses.
Mental illnesses are also called mental disorders because they are a (consequence of) disorder(s) of relevant mental functions. To better understand why a patient suffers from an anxiety disorder, for example, it is actually necessary to describe the extent to which the reaction of her anxiety system differs from that of a healthy person. Not all anxiety is the same. There are major individual deviations in the experience of the respective disorder, which are associated with specific functional disorders. The research of our working group is therefore based on a mechanistic biopsychological process model of psychopathology and anxiety.
(from: Richter, J., & Nazarenus, E. (2023). Biologisch unterstützte psychotherapeutische Interventionen bei therapieresistenten Depressionen. In Therapieresistenz bei Depressionen und bipolaren Störungen (pp. 497-509). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.)
In contrast to the nosological concepts of established classification systems (ICD-11 and DSM-V), mental disorders and their clinical symptoms are conceived as cognitive, emotional and behavioral consequences of dysfunctions of biopsychological processes and thus transdiagnostically. Research questions are based on established neurobiological models of psychological processes of human experience and behavior. The translational research of the working group therefore takes place at the intersection between basic psychological research and clinical-psychotherapeutic application research: from the laboratory to the therapy room to the real world and back, from experimentally controlled studies to analogy studies to randomized psychotherapy studies and back, with healthy subjects, risk populations and patients with mental disorders.
With a research focus on stress- and trauma-associated disorders, anxiety disorders and depressive disorders, we include various system levels of biopsychological functionality in the data analysis, including (epi-)genetic, hormonal, brain functional, (peripheral) physiological, subjective and behavioral indicators. Various research methods are used, e.g. paradigms of fear conditioning and extinction, symptom provocation (e.g. behavioral test, trauma film paradigm, emotional imagining), but also non-invasive stimulation methods
