Principal Investigator

Dr. Tobias Kube

Tobias Kube is a clinical psychologist and licensed psychotherapist who received his PhD in 2018 from the Philipps-University of Marburg. After a 6-months postdoctoral research visit at Harvard Medical School in 2019 (supervisors: Prof. Dr. Ted Kaptchuk, Prof. Dr. Arthur Barsky, Prof. Dr. Irving Kirsch), he joined the Pain and Psychotherapy Research Lab at the University of Koblenz-Landau (since 2023: RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau) headed by Prof. Dr. Julia A. Glombiewski as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer. In the winter semester 2023/24 and the summer semester 2024, he is Interim Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at the Georg-August-University of Goettingen. Since 2024, he is the head of the Emmy Noether Group on Biased Belief Updating in Depression.

Besides posttraumatic stress disorder, persistent somatic symptoms, and placebo/nocebo effects, his main research focus has been on the psychopathology of depression. In addition to cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on the importance of dysfunctional beliefs/expectations in depression, his main expertise is the conduction of experimental studies on biased belief updating in depression. From 2021-2024, this experimental research has been continued in greater depth in a DFG-funded project (KU 3955/3-1: “On the revision of negative expectations in people with depressive symptoms - A series of experimental investigations”). Through the research programme of the Emmy Noether group, he hopes to gain a deeper understanding of the deficits in belief updating of patients with depression and identify targets for focused psychological interventions to modify these deficits.

Dr. Jonas Everaert

Jonas Everaert is an Associate Professor at Tilburg University, Netherlands. His research integrates several levels of analysis and methods from cognitive, affective, and social sciences to unravel the complex interplay of causal risk factors contributing to depression and anxiety. He uses this understanding to develop better theories and identify opportunities for prediction, detection, and intervention.

As the developer of the emotional BADE task, Jonas Everaert supports all projects from the research programme, in which this task is used.

Dr. Tim Kaiser

Tim Kaiser is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of clinical psychology and psychological methods who received his PhD in 2019 from the University of Salzburg, Austria. After working as a postdoctoral researcher at the health psychology division of Prof. Dr. Jens Blechert (University of Salzburg), he worked for 3.5 years at the chair of clinical psychology and psychotherapy of the University of Greifswald, Germany (head: Prof. Dr. Eva-Lotta Brakemeier). Since March 2023, he works at the methods and evaluation/quality assurance unit headed by Prof. Dr. Steffi Pohl at the Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests include causal inference in the context of clinical psychology, using network models for psychotherapy process and outcome research, and the development and testing of clinical support systems.

Given his great methodological expertise, Tim Kaiser particularly supports the projects from research line three on the clinical impact of biased belief updating in depression, especially the investigation of how deficits in belief updating predict poor symptom response in the acute phase of cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Dr. Christoph Korn

Christoph Korn holds an Assistant Professorship (tenure-track) of Social Neuroscience at Heidelberg University (Decision Neuroscience of Human Interactions – Lab at Heidelberg University (dnhi-lab.org); Section Social Neuroscience, Department of General Adult Psychiatry). His work addresses the following questions: How do humans make social decisions and how do they learn about each other? How can we assess the behavioural and neural mechanisms of such decision-making and learning processes with the help of computational models? How do these processes differ in individuals suffering from psychiatric disorders? Christoph’s research projects combine computational modeling of behavioral data, model-based and multivariate analyses of fMRI data, pupillometry, evolutionary game theory, virtual reality, etc. He is strongly committed to open science (e.g., sharing data/code and preregistering our studies).

Christoph conceptually supports the conduction of all projects of the research programme, in which a social feedback processing task, which he developed, is used. In addition, Christoph’s methodological expertise will also be of great value in the projects in which we use eye tracking.

Tobias Kube