Research Unit 751: The Science of Social Stress
The new Research Unit (Forschergruppe) has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in January 2006 for 3 years and was extended in 2009 for another 3 years.
Modern societies imply continuous demands for the adaptation of human beings to a stream of social stressors. Such new types of allostatic load range from information intake to insecurity, and even anxiety and traumatic stress, resulting also from new wars or terrorism. Chronic or massive stress changes mind, brain structure and functioning, including memory systems, with consequent changes of the dynamic interaction of individuals with their cultural environment, including adaptation to social stress. The collective and long-term effects of stressors, even if transient, may be changing the brain's processing modes and thereby may be resulting in characteristic psychological, behavioural, and physiological responses that can be considered as 'maladaptation' to environmental conditions. It is the goal of the Research Unit to model this dynamic interface between allostasis, mind, brain, and body. Adopting the perspective of bio-social co-constructivism with its plastic adaptation as impulse for a new paradigmatic development, we will investigate how social stressors and related learning conditions shape the structure and function of the interwoven human soft- and hardware, i.e., mind and brain/body, in their adaptation to socio-cultural conditions. Planned as an interdisciplinary research initiative, concepts, methods and own previous research on functional brain plasticity and psycho_neuro_immunology will be combined with those of affective neuroscience, considering emotions as action dispositions. Emotional and motivational aspects of human behaviour will further be studied by exploiting concepts and methods of social and applied psychology.
Projects
Project A1: Reacting to the unpleasant: Dynamics of the human defence cascade (PD Dr. Andreas Keil, University of Florida, NIMH Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention)
Project A2: Social stress and affective information processing: a neuroscience perspective (Prof. Dr. Harald Schupp, Dr. Markus Junghöfer, University of Münster)
Project A5: Psychosocial stress and memory control (Junior-Prof. Dr. Johanna Kissler)
Project B1: The influence of social stress on the T cell response to viral infection (Prof. Dr. Marcus Groettrup, Dept. Biology, together with Dr. Harald Engler, University of Duisburg-Essen)
Projekt B2: Stress by acute inflammation in humans: Effects on brain activity, neuropsychological performance and social behavior (Profs. Drs. Manfred Schedlowski, University of Duisburg-Essen; Jörg-Reiner Overbeck & Elke Gizewski, University Hospital Essen).
Project B4: Neural network architecture under conditions of traumatic and post-traumatic stress (Prof. Dr. Thomas Elbert, Dr. Maggie Schauer)
Project B5: Social stress, allostatic load and psychopathology (Prof. Dr. Brigitte Rockstroh)
Project B6: Change of neural network indicators through Narrative Treatment of PTSD in torture victims (Prof. Dr. Frank Neuner, University of Bielefeld).
