RG Psychobiology of Emotional Learning

The working group aims at investigating central mechanisms that may be important for the development and maintenance of mental disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder, addiction or chronic pain as well as neurological disorders involving for example transient global amnesia. The focus here is on learning and memory processes as well as reward processing. In the context of a multimodal approach, neural (functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging), psychological (personality, behaviour), physiological (especially stress parameters) and genetic factors are analysed. The investigation of patient groups in comparison to healthy control individuals, but also of adolescents, who are in a developmental course assumed to repesent a risky period for several disorders, finally allows a well-defined identification of risk and resilience factors and may therefore provide a basis to set up new treatment methods.