Psychological Flexibility as Active Resilience Mechanism: Neurocognitive Mechanisms and Dopaminergic Mediation (C03)

• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 264810226

In the first funding period, project C03 has investigated mechanistic commonalities and dissociations between three facets of psychological flexibility, i.e., cognitive, affective, and feedback-based flexibility. In addition, results in C03 suggest that affective flexibility is particularly important for (subjectively rated) resilience. In the second funding period, this hypothesis and its generalizability to outcome-dependent measures of resilience will be investigated in a high-powered fMRI study with Z03-characterized participants (realized together with C04-C06). C03 will focus more explicitly on affective flexibility, and continue to clarify underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. C03 will furthermore investigate the role of flexibility in physiological responding for resilience to stress. Lastly, C03 will assess the causal contribution of psychological flexibility to resilience via a large-scale training study in an at-risk-sample.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1193: Neurobiology of Resilience to stress-related mental dysfunction: from understanding mechanisms to promoting prevention
• Applicant Institution: Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
• Co-Applicant Institution: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
• Project Heads: Professor Dr. Christian Fiebach; Professor Dr. Mathias Schreckenberger