Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Faculty of Medicine, RWTH Aachen University, and Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-10), Research Center Jülich
Professor Ute Habel is a distinguished academic at RWTH Aachen University, renowned for her expertise in neuropsychology. Her research delves into the neural mechanisms of emotions, cognition, and psychiatric disorders, utilizing advanced neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI. With a prolific output of publications, she significantly contributes to the understanding of brain function in both health and disease. As a dedicated educator, she mentors students and fosters interdisciplinary collaborations, making substantial impacts on both academic research and clinical practices in neuropsychology and psychiatry.
Projects
The focus will be on the influences of a provocative context on social threat processing in AMD under different testosterone levels. Specifically, the project aims to analyze the modulating function of context under testosterone application versus suppression on threat sensitivity in healthy controls as well as patient groups.
We make use of threat-related chemosensory stimuli, namely body odor, acquired during aggressive behavior (boxing) and unconsciously perceived, to investigate heightened amygdala responses to threat stimuli in aggressive patients. Body odors have the major advantage of being directly projected into the amygdala, circumventing cortical preprocessing, thereby enabling the differentiation of mechanisms between bottom-up altered limbic processing and top-down modulated altered cognitive evaluation.
The central recruitment platform for collecting and curating a longitudinal dataset for studying individual aggression dynamics related to the neural, cognitive-emotional, neurobiological, psychopathological and environmental factors in patient groups.
Governance, and communication among participating researchers and the public.
Publications
Blair, R. J., Habel, U., Votinov, M., Wagels, L., & Denson, T. F. (2025). A cognitive neuroscience approach to understanding aggression and its treatment. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 179, 106386. https://doi.
Psychopathy is one of the greatest risk factors for serious and persistent violence. In order to detect its neurobiological substrates, we examined 39 male psychopathic subjects and matched controls using structural MR imaging and the Psychopathy Check-List (PCL-R).
Introduction: Everyday life requires correct processing of emotions constantly, partly occurring unconsciously. This study aims to clarify the effect of emotion perception on different event-related potentials (ERP; P100, N170). The P100 and N170 are tested for their suitability as electrophysiological markers in unconscious processing.
Sites
RWTH Aachen University is one of Europe’s leading institutions for science and engineering education. Renowned for its strong emphasis on research and innovation, RWTH Aachen collaborates closely with industry and is part of the prestigious IDEA League.
Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) is a German national research institution that pursues interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy, information, and bioeconomy. It operates a broad range of research infrastructures like supercomputers, an atmospheric simulation chamber, electron microscopes, a particle accelerator, cleanrooms for nanotechnology, among other things.
