Social Neuroscience

Mental disorders and specifically schizophrenia is characterized by social cognitive dysfunctions. Social functioning is further related to perception and action in many ways. The goal of the TNM-Lab is to investigate how the perception of actions (PACT/PACT-SZ) and the neural correlates of gesture processing (EEG-CON, Gestik3) are related to social cognitive functioning in patients with schizophrenia. Furthermore, neural correlates of the perception and production of negative facial emotions is investigated in healthy subjects with genetic or environmental risk for schizophrenia (GUI), to demonstrate how neural production-perception matching processes could be modulated my genetic risk and might contribute to the development of schizophrenia. In this context, social intergroup relations are of specific interest, since they might contribute to the increased risk for schizophrenia observed in migrants. Finally, we investigate the effect of an humor training on social cognitive functioning in a longitudinal fMRI design (EKFS).