Tel.:

+49-621-1703-6501

Fax:

+49-621-1703-6505

Internet:

Email:

peter.kirsch@zi-mannheim.de

The department of Clinical Psychology is investigating causes, symptoms, implications and effective psychotherapeutic treatments of mental disorders primarily from a biopsychological and neuroscientific perspective. Searching for biological underpinnings of psychological processes related to mental disorders and the course of illness, we apply methods from brain imaging, imaging genetics, computational neuroscience, psychophysiology and experimental psychology.
Regarding mechanisms, we have a strong interest in the neurobiology of social cognition and its impairments in mental disorders like schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, autism or psychopathy. Another focus of the department is the translation of neurobiological mechanisms identified into new psychotherapeutic treatments. Here, we also aim to use neurobiological signatures to predict psychotherapy response using computational models.

Becker A, Kirsch M, Gerchen MF, Kiefer F, Kirsch P (2016) Striatal activation and frontostriatal connectivity during non-drug reward anticipation in alcohol dependence Addiction Biology, [Epub ahead of print] .

Gerchen MF, Bernal-Casas D, Kirsch P (2014) Analyzing task-dependent brain network changes by whole-brain psychophysiological interactions: a comparison to conventional analysis Human Brain Mapping, 35(10), 5071-5082 .

Bernal-Casas D, Balaguer-Ballester E, Gerchen MF, Iglesias S, Walter H, Heinz A, Meyer-Lindenberg A, Stephan KE, Kirsch P (2013) Multi-site reproducibility of prefrontal-hippocampal connectivity estimates by stochastic DCM Neuroimage, 82 555-563 .

Plichta MM, Wolf I, Hohmann S, Baumeister S, Boecker R, Schwarz AJ, Zangl M, Mier D, Diener C, Meyer P, Holz N, Ruf M, Gerchen MF, Bernal-Casas D, Kolev V, Yordanova J, Flor H, Laucht M, Banaschewski T, Kirsch P, Meyer-Lindenberg A, Brandeis, D (2013) Simultaneous EEG and fMRI reveals a causally connected subcortical-cortical network during reward anticipation The Journal of Neuroscience, 33, 14526-14533 .

() Hippocampal-Dorsolateral Prefrontal Coupling as a Species-Conserved Cognitive Mechanism: A Human Translational Imaging Study Neuropsychopharmacology, 40(7), 1674-1681 .