The ReSource Team

Researchers

Boris Bernhardt, Dr.

In the ReSource Project, Boris is looking at MRI-based structural and functional brain network changes due to mental training effects. He is also interested in combining these longitudinal data with statistical pattern learning.

Boris Bornemann, Dr.

Boris is looking at the role of body awareness or mind-body coherence and also at changes in subjective experiences through contemplative practice in the context of the ReSource Project.

Anne Böckler, Dr.

Anne is studying empathy and theory of mind processes in the ReSource Project and she plays economic games with the study participants to investigate changes in social behavior. In addition to that, she examines how meditation shapes perception and attention and how it affects the self-concept.

Haakon Engen, Dr.

Haakon is constructing mechanistic models of the dynamics of emotional processes for the ReSource Project to investigate emotions, how they occur, how we deal with them, and how they affect us on an experiential and physical level.

Veronika Engert, Dr.

Research group leader

Veronika’s work in the ReSource Project focuses on how the training will influence psychological and physical well-being. Specifically, she will investigate everyday levels of subjective-psychological stress and diverse physiological parameters such as levels of the stress hormone cortisol, cardiovascular activity, and activity of the immune system.

Lea Hildebrandt, Dr.

Lea is interested in the effects of the ReSource Project training on social interactions, emotional reactivity, and attention by sending participants into virtual environments to study their behavior in scenarios that would be difficult to re-create in the real world.

Phillipp Kanske, PD Dr.

Philipp is investigating the effects of mental training in the ReSource Project on participants’ evaluation of social scenarios with differing emotional value and their interpretation of social behavior and decision making. In addition, he studies the training effects on attention and emotional processing.

Bethany Kok, PhD

In the ReSource Project, Bethany explores how physiological functioning and perceptions of social closeness interrelate across time of training, using an interdisciplinary approach to address social bonds as a regulatory mechanism of the parasympathetic nervous system.

Anna-Lena Lumma, Dr.

Anna-Lena’s goal within the ReSource Project is to investigate how the participant's sense of self and their subjective feelings about being in the world changes over the course of the project by considering subjective and qualitative data and relating them to quantitative data such as autonomic nervous activity.

Cade McCall, PhD

Scientific Staff

In the ReSource Project, Cade studies attention, emotional reactivity, and social behavior in virtual environments that have the complex and interactive qualities of life in the “real world”.

Marisa Przyrembel, Dr.

Marisa investigates the participants’ phenomenological experience concerning the mental training within the ReSource project. Via qualitative data she examines to which extent the perception of emotional, cognitive, and bodily states changes in the context of the meditation practice, and how far mindfulness and awareness for these potential changes develop.

Mathis Trautwein, Dr.

Mathis’ work in the ReSource Project focuses on investigating neuronal mechanisms and training induced plasticity of social capacities, including perspective taking, empathy and compassion. To this aim, he will measure brain activity during the perception and evaluation of realistic dyadic interactions.

Anita Tusche, Dr.

Anita is interested in economic decision making and the factors which influence such behavior. In the ReSource Project, she investigates via computer-based experiments whether participant's economically relevant decisions will change or remain constant over time based on their training.

Sofie Valk, Dr.

In the ReSource Project, Sofie is interested in changes in structural brain networks involved in social cognition and applies structural imaging methods to identify both local and network-based changes in regions associated with empathy and mentalizing. This is intended to uncover relations between brain structure, behavior, and personality traits.

Pascal Vrticka, Dr.

Group Leader

Pascal works with psychological, biological and neural data from the ReSource project. His research focuses on the Resoure training's influence on various markers of stress and health. In so doing, Pascal is especially interested in relations between these markers and psychological traits from an attachment theory perspective.

Lara Puhlmann

PhD Student

In the context of the ReSource project, Lara investigates the influence of mental training on various biological markers of health. Her main interest is the complex relation between these markers and psychological measures such as chronic stress, as well as with structural changes in the brain.

Roman Linz

PhD Student

Roman works with ReSource data focusing on stress, subjective experience and well-being. He is interested in exploring the interaction of mind and body by relating subjective-psychological (affective and cognitive) and physiological (endocrine and neural) markers.