Tobias Kube

It is with profound sadness that we share that Professor Andrea Evers passed away. Andrea was a visionary leader, a brilliant scientist, and a compassionate colleague.
As we begin to process this immense loss, let us remember Andrea for her remarkable legacy and kindness she brought into our lives.

<em>British Journal of Social Psychology</em> | Wiley Online Library We investigated the preregistered hypothesis that an optimistic bias in updating beliefs about climate change (i.e., integrating good news more than bad news) cross-sectionally (NStudy 1 = 109) and l....

Why do people have so much difficulty to take climate change sufficiently seriously and act accordingly, despite ample evidence? Here we show that this may be related to the propensity to integrate good news about climate change more than bad news. bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Thank you!

Thanks for the great team work @rief01.bsky.social and @a-seewald.bsky.social!

How to Change Negative Outcome Expectations in Psychotherapy? The Role of the Therapist’s Warmth and Competence - Anna Seewald, Winfried Rief, 2023 Negative outcome expectations of psychological treatments predict unfavorable treatment outcomes. Therefore, therapists should approach negative outcome expecta...

This may be different, though, in contexts where people's beliefs are more directly dependent on the person they interact with, e.g. treatment expectations in relation to a health care provider, as shown here for instance: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Thus, these findings demonstrate that it seems to be important how people perceive the content of positive feedback, and this is independent of their perception of the person giving the feedback - or whether it's a person at all. Content over person, so to say.

The manipulation of w&c was very successful. However, it did not lead to differences in changes in performance expectations. Instead, the perception of the content of the feedback was closely related to expectation change (i.e., whether participants considered the fb relevant and valuable).

Specifically, we examined whether a highly warm and competent feedback-provider initiates more change in performance expectations than a less warm and competent provider. Further, there was a control group that received computer-generated feedback. The feedback itself was the same for all groups.

It's the content of the feedback that matters, not the person giving it: An experimental study on change of negative performance expectations Previous research on biased expectation change has mainly focused on the mechanisms underlying the deficient processing of novel positive information …

🎉🥳 New article in BRAT:
Prior research on belief updating, including my own work, has neglected characteristics of the person who provides new information. Here, we systematically manipulated the person's behaviour and examined its effect on belief updating.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thanks to co-authors @rief01.bsky.social, Edith Rapo, and Julia Glombiewski, and the many other people who supported this study over the past 4,5 years.

How people with major depression adjust their expectations of future life events in response to other patients’ reports of the positive effects of psychotherapy Research proposed the devaluation of positive information, referred to as cognitive immunisation, as a mechanism underlying the persistence of negativ…

Happy to share this new article published open access in BRAT🎉📢:
In a relatively large experimental study funded by @dfg.de, we examined cognitive immunisation as a mechanism of biased belief updating in depression. Results suggest a nuanced picture. See more 👇
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thus, a relatively weak positive expectation violation is sufficient to induce updating in non-depressed people, while people with depression do not perceive this as positively and update less, accordingly. With more positive expectation violations, the differences in updating disappear.

Depressive symptoms were associated with particularly little update if the feedback was weakly positive feedback, not so much with clearly positive feedback (see Fig. 4).

The bottom line is that with negative feedback, the linearity assumption works quite well, i.e. the more negative the expectation violation, the stronger the negative expectation change. With positive feedback, the data are more consistent with the tipping point hypothesis.

Participants were provided with five levels of positive vs. negative feedback in two different contexts: social & performance feedback. We compared the predictions of linear updating vs non-linear updating, assuming a tipping point above which updating declines as extreme feedback lacks plausibility

How the discrepancy between expectation and outcome influences expectation change in relation to depressive symptoms – Results from four experimental studies Traditional associative learning models and their clinical applications suggest that the greater the discrepancy between expectations and outcome, the…

Excited to share a new article published in the J of Affective Disorders:
In four experiments, we systematically examined the relationship between the strength of an expectation violation and the extent of expectation change/updating, for pos vs neg information
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Selektive Integration überzeugungskongruenter Informationen: Normaler psychologischer Prozess oder Merkmal psychischer Störungen?: Psychologische Rundschau: Vol 0, No 0 Zusammenfassung: Wenn Menschen bestimmte Kernüberzeugungen über sich selbst, andere Menschen oder die Welt entwickelt haben, bleiben diese oft erstaunlich stabil. Eine Vielzahl von Mechanismen führt d...

Neuer d. Open Access Artikel:
Die selektive Integration von Informationen in bestehende Überzeugungen wird als Kernmerkmal psychischer Störungen diskutiert. Psychisch gesunde Menschen tun das aber auch. Wie lässt sich dieser offenkundige Widerspruch auflösen?👇
econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/10.1026/...

Very much looking forward to my new position in Frankfurt! 😊

What we’re witnessing in America is what happens when disordered discourse captures a political party, then the state itself. The Republican Party was the first to fall - abandoning truth for conspiracy, ideology for grievance, and policy for performative outrage.

Interesting thought, but I don't quite agree with it. Given that the experiential learning intervention (i.e., behavioural experiment) would be conducted anyway, doing a short (2-5 min) mood-alleviating exercise prior to it has no significant effects on the costs of this approach.

Eight things scientists can do right now to stand up to the Trump administration’s attacks on research, public health, and the environment A guest post by Dr Anne Toomey, author of the book "Science with Impact: How to Engage People, Change Practice, and Influence Policy".

🧵Delighted to share a new guest post by Dr Anne Toomey on **8 things scientists can do right now to stand up for science in the US**

Thread of her *evidence-based* actions follows, whole post here
christinapagel.substack.com/p/eight-thin... 1/11

Winterdepression? Warum wir im Dunkeln grübeln, und wie wir damit aufhören Wenn die Nacht hereinbricht, werden unsere Gedanken schwerer, besonders der Winter macht melancholisch. Warum ist das so? Der Psychotherapeut Tobias Kube hilft, Wege aus der Dunkelheit zu finden

Interessanter Artikel @derfreitag.bsky.social zum Thema Depression und Grübeln, vor allem im Winter, zu dem ich auch einige Einschätzungen abgegeben habe: www.freitag.de/autoren/der-....

📢JOB ALERT📢
Zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt suche ich für meine neue Abteilung in Frankfurt jmd. für die wiss. Leitung der experimentalpsych. Labore, mit Schwerpunkt auf Eyetracking. Wenn ihr jmd. kennt, die/der jmd. kennt usw., freue ich mich sehr übers Teilen!👇

www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794805/FB0...

An Active Inference Model of the Optimism Bias | Computational Psychiatry Computational Psychiatry publishes original research articles and reviews that involve the application, analysis, or invention of theoretical, computational and statistical approaches to mental functi...

Excited to have our new paper out in @cpsyjournal.bsky.social 🎉✨ with my amazing co-authors @christopherjwhyte.bsky.social @hohwy.bsky.social

We develop an active inference model of the optimism bias to model development, belief updating and optimistic action.

cpsyjournal.org/articles/10....

Zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt ist in Landau eine W3 Professur für Klinische KiJu ausgeschrieben. Es ist ein tolles Arbeitsumfeld mit tollen Kolleg:innen, bei gleichzeitig entspannter Grundatmosphäre und pfälzischer Gemütlichkeit. Die genaue Ausschreibung gibt es hier 👇

jobs.rptu.de/jobposting/e...

📢New article📢:
We provide experimental evidence that threat perception influences the formation of intrusive memories. This study goes back to a hypothesis we derived here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... Nice to see that the results are beautifully consistent with this hypothesis :)

<em>British Journal of Health Psychology</em> | Wiley Online Library Objective While ample research links health beliefs to physical health in both healthy and clinical populations, the specific health beliefs that drive this effect remain underexplored. Addressing t.....

🎉New open access article by Nofar Mizrachi supervised by @lironrozenkrantz.bsky.social, to which I was happy to contribute: bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/.... Across 3 studies, we show that people's beliefs about their immune system predicted the course of somatic symptoms over 1 y.

Soon I will also publish a first job advertisement in which we are looking for a lab manager with a focus on setting up an eye tracking lab. If you are interested or know someone who might be, please get in touch with me!

Happy to announce that I accepted an offer of the University of Frankfurt to become (full) Professor of Clinical Psychology and Experimental Psychopathology from 1 April 2025. Very much looking forward to working with great colleagues like @christianfiebach.bsky.social and @yeeleeshing.bsky.social.

🚨Keynote speakers for the Computational Psychiatry Conference (14-16th July, Tubingen) announced 📢
Very excited to have excellent keynotes across theory-driven CP, machine learning, and clinical psychiatry:
Andreas Heinz
Georgia Koppe
Chandra Sripada
Sophie Valk
Tor Wager
#cpconf25 www.cpconf.org