Department of Psychology

Research Goals:

• The Affective Neuropsychology Group studies: 
• Emotional processing in humans 
• Its underlying neural mechanisms

Interests: 

• The influence of emotions on attention and memory processes modulation
• Communicative aspects of emotions in the processing of language and faces 
• The role of emotions in man-machine interactions

Study Focus:

• Typical processes in healthy people 
• Atypical processes as observed in neurological and psychiatric disorders 

Objectives: 

• Gain a comprehensive understanding of emotional processing
• Especially of residual brain functions in patients with severe brain injuries (unresponsive wakefulness and minimal consciousness state) and in developing ways to improve their disease-course with emotional stimulation

Cooperations:

• Epilepsy Clinic Mara  
• House Elim within the Bethel institution. 
• CITEC groups: Neuroinformatics group, Computer Graphics. 
• Several other national and international collaborations

Research Methodology

• Electroencephalography (EEG),
• Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
• Behavioural measures. 

Laboratories

• Several behavioural and EEG-labrooms

The Work in Electroencephalographical (EEG) Labs:

• Measuring electric brain activity by means of sensors
• Background:
  • The activity of the wake human brain generates electric fields 
  • The intensity changes with different brain activities in the order of millionth parts of a volt
  • These changes are being recorded with millisecond precision.
  • For those recordings we use sensor-nets with 32 channels up to high-density with 128 channels.

Equipment: 
ActiveTwo systems by Biosemi: 

• One 128-channel EEG-device 
• One 32-channel EEG-device
   
• TMSi Refa multi-channel amplifier (32 channels & 8 external electrodes & ground electrode)
• EEG low noise cap with 32 build-in electrodes & ground electrode