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RWTH Aachen

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. The university offers a wide range of programs and is known for its cutting-edge facilities and interdisciplinary approach to solving global challenges.

The Faculty of Medicine at RWTH was founded in 1966 as the last of the current 9 faculties at RWTH. In the early years and even after the move to today’s University Hospital in 1985, the focus was on patient care. But nowadays the Faculty of Medicine is one of the university’s strongest research faculties.

Eingangsbereich UK Aachen
Main Entrance of University Hospital RWTH Aachen ©UK Aachen

Contributors

Natalia Chechko

A04: Implicit chemosensory threat signals as stimulators of amygdala hyperresponsiveness in AMD Principal investigator Public relations team member Equal opportunity committee member RWTH Aachen
Natalia Chechko’s research group investigates neuroscientific and bioscientific aspects of various psychiatric disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders and autism spectrum disorder. Cerebral dysfunctions in women of reproductive age who suffer from affective disorders, e.

Thomas Frodl

A08: The metabolic lung-brain axis in aggressive behavior in patients with AMD Q01: Recruitment and biotyping transdiagnostic risk mechanisms for aggressive behaviors in mental disorders across the life span Principal investigator Citizen Advisory Boad RWTH Aachen
Thomas Frodl is a prominent neuroscientist and psychiatrist affiliated with RWTH Aachen University in Germany. His research focuses on the neurobiological underpinnings of psychiatric disorders, particularly depression and anxiety. Frodl employs advanced neuroimaging techniques to investigate brain structure and function, aiming to understand the mechanisms that contribute to these conditions.

Kerstin Konrad

A06: Decoding dynamic reciprocal neural mechanism underlying reactive aggression: Insights from fMRI and fNIRS hyperscanning Q01: Recruitment and biotyping transdiagnostic risk mechanisms for aggressive behaviors in mental disorders across the life span Principal investigator Citizen Advisory Boad RWTH Aachen Research Center Jülich (FZJ)
Kerstin Konrad is affiliated with the RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich, where she specializes in developmental psychology and neuroscience. Her research primarily focuses on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying attention and executive functions in children and adolescents.

Klaus Mathiak

B03: A process-based brain-computer interface to modulate aggressive behavior – a real-time fMRI neurofeedback study C02: Aggressive decisions in social conflicts: Neuro-cognitive models for healthy individuals and psychiatric patients with high scores of aggression Q02: Data management for computational modelling Principal investigator Research data committee member Equal opportunity committee member RWTH Aachen
Klaus Mathiak is a professor at RWTH Aachen University, specializing in psychiatry and psychotherapy. His research integrates neuroimaging, psychophysiology, and clinical studies to understand the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition, aggression, and media influence on behavior.

Carmen Weidler

B01: Neurobehavioral effects of repetitive prefrontal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on pathological aggression Principal investigator RWTH Aachen
Carmen Weidler is a neuroscientist whose research primarily focuses on the neural underpinnings of aggressive and impulsive behavior. Her work explores the effects of brain stimulation techniques, such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), on behavioral and neural correlates of aggression and impulsivity in violent criminal offenders, patients with mental disorders, and healthy individuals.

Projects

A02: Context effects on threat processing in dependence of testosterone levels

Katja Bertsch Sabine Herpertz Ute Habel Isabel Neumann Nick Worm Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg Heidelberg University RWTH Aachen Negative valence system Biological Psychiatry Clinical Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
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.

A04: Implicit chemosensory threat signals as stimulators of amygdala hyperresponsiveness in AMD

Ute Habel Natalia Chechko RWTH Aachen Negative valence system Biological Psychiatry Clinical Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
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.

A06: Decoding dynamic reciprocal neural mechanism underlying reactive aggression: Insights from fMRI and fNIRS hyperscanning

Kerstin Konrad Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg Vanessa Reindl RWTH Aachen Central Institute of Mental Health Negative valence system Clinical Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
The project employs fMRI and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning techniques to explore how brain-to-brain synchrony and dynamic processes within peer dyads facilitate or inhibit aggressive behavior under diverse levels of provocation in adolescent patients and controls.

A08: The metabolic lung-brain axis in aggressive behavior in patients with AMD

Thomas Frodl David Slattery Gabriele Ende RWTH Aachen Goethe University Frankfurt Central Institute of Mental Health Negative valence system Biological Psychiatry Clinical Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Beta-hydroxy-butyrate (BHB), a ketone body, is negatively associated with aggressive behavior. BHB is a metabolite and an active signaling substrate involved in epigenetic regulation of e.g., neurotrophic factor genes in the brain.

B01: Neurobehavioral effects of repetitive prefrontal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on pathological aggression

Carmen Weidler Andreas Reif RWTH Aachen Goethe University Frankfurt Cognitive system Biological Psychiatry Clinical Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
TDCS will be used as an interventional tool to decrease aggression. Using a simultaneous tDCS – fMRI approach, the project aims to enhance cognitive control by repeated prefrontal brain stimulation, investigating its effect on aggression.

B04: Investigating psychological and neural correlates of intimate partner violence

Lisa Wagels Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg Katja Bertsch Julia Koch Julia Schräder Linda Wilkin-Krug RWTH Aachen Central Institute of Mental Health Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg Cognitive system Biological Psychiatry Clinical Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Focus on the neural correlates of characterizing cognitive control deficits during conflict situations. The project will investigate patients with varying levels of cognitive control along with their close partners (sibling or intimate partner) to identify the dynamics of self-regulation and co-regulation in provoked conflict situations in patients with control deficits.

C02: Aggressive decisions in social conflicts: Neuro-cognitive models for healthy individuals and psychiatric patients with high scores of aggression

Christoph Korn Klaus Mathiak RWTH Aachen Heidelberg University Interaction of negative valence system and cognitive system Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Biological Psychiatry
Develop virtual scenarios to assess decision strategies in cartoon-like and naturalistic contexts. The core question is how healthy individuals and patients make (mal-)adaptive aggressive decisions in social conflicts given their threat sensitivity, cognitive functions, and learning experience.

Q02: Data management for computational modelling

Michael Hanke Gabriele Ende Richard Nkrumah Christine Ecker Klaus Mathiak Wiebke Hennig Arezoo Taebi Service project Research Center Jülich (FZJ) Central Institute of Mental Health Goethe University Frankfurt RWTH Aachen
Data management and training platform. A decentralized data management infrastructure will help focus on developmental and therapeutic longitudinal data, training all participating researchers in the necessary skills for future use.