Maurizio Sicorello

The Young Scientists Retreat of the bioDGPs/DGPA is open for registration again!

For early career researchers in German bio-/neuropsychology wanting to connect there is nothing better.

I'm serious, three people of my first YSR made it into my PhD thesis acknolwdgement, right next to my grandma!

S-DERSvalid This repository contains preregistrations, data and analysis code for an empirical research project on State Difficulties in Emotion Regulation (S-DERS). This project comprises: -the validation of a G...

Of course! This information should be in the supplements (Table S4) linked next to the preprint (osf.io/ebj6u/ ). There, you have to go to the "files" tab to see the supplements. I think it's not super optimal how psyarxiv places supplements 🤷‍♂️

Affect influences affect and S-DERS scores, which both influence later affect scores

New preprint out! 🔬

We provide daily life versions for the State Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale together with a ton of insights on temporal dynamics and relations to momentary stressors and affect :)

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Something I will never understand about Bayes hardliners: If frequentist 95% CIs are basically the same as Bayesian 95% HDIs with flat priors, why are we talking so much about "incorrect CI interpretations as probabilities" with the former?

...to point out how we can reach a systematic (but slow) fundament, are in my experience much harder to publish and don't receive a lot of interest. I still see this discrepancy clearly with positive/negative publications. And this prevents biology from having a meaningful impact on mental health

Personal note:
I am deeply frustrated with the way science promotes positive findings. There is an endless line of prominent biomarkers, explaining why one person differs from another. In my areas, they all fall apart over time and leave barely anything to build on. Negative findings, which try...

My take-away:
The frontal lobe might indicate emotion regulation capability, but we have no direct evidence for this. From the current literature the answer would be: No.

Until we improve questionnaires, tasks, and fMRI and actually show this, we need to stop making such strong statements IMO

E.g., if a person has different vascularity due to aging, they will show different whole-brain responses. And these effects are much larger than those we are actually targeting. Therefore, between-person fMRI easily needs N around 1000, casting doubts on large parts of the clinical fMRI literature

That people with larger amygdala responses (than others) also have larger responses in the rest of the brain means: People differ in their global brain responses, likely due to purely methodological issues and confounding. As we show, this is an issue for task-based fMRI as a whole, beyond emotion.

These are all *between-person* effects. Hence, this is about comparing capability between different people (e.g. akin to comparing clinical versus healthy groups or along dimensional measures).

*Within-person* fMRI compares different conditions in the same individuals and overall works super well.

Figure described in the corresponding post

When you correlate these three outcomes with brain-wide responses on a between-person level (explanation later), you see that trait questionnaires correlate with nothing, task-based ratings correlate with small responses outside emotion regulation networks and the amygdala correlates with everything

Lesson 2) People who are better at down-regulating their emotional task responses are barely better at down-regulate their amygdala (compared to other people)

...despite the fact that decoding of emotional ratings from fMRI works super well for emotional *states* over time. Largely a methods issue.

Notably, most questionnaires aim to measure habits rather than ability and have low correlations with what people are actually doing in their daily lives. The latter is also true for experimental tasks. So, the issue are likely both questionnaire and task design, as well as their alignment

Shows the correlations between trait questionnaires and amygdala downregulation (r = .01), trait questionnaires and task-based affective ratings (r = .05) and task-based affective ratings and amygdala down-regulation (r = .08, the only statistically significant effect)

There are three common outcomes used to indicate who is better at emotion regulation. These three outcome types barely overlap.

There are two important lessons from this:
1) Already the most used trait questionnaires and task-based self-reports do not correlate, i.e. measure unrelated things

The problem: When most clinical fMRI studies find a group difference in the frontal lobe, they conclude an issue with emotion regulaiton. Even in psychotherapy and journalism, the frontal lobe is often the suspect for such deficits. But the evidence is actually lacking a lot.

The elusive neural signature of emotion regulation capabilities: evidence from a large-scale consortium Cognitive reappraisal is a fundamental emotion regulation strategy for mental and physical well-being, but how its neural mechanisms relate to individual differences remains poorly understood. In a co...

BIG PREPRINT🔬

In a newly founded consortium we show that we barely know anything about the neurobiology underlying emotion regulation capacity! (40 fmri samples, N=2175)

So, time-out for prefrontal cortex explanations!

And we also show why this might be the case 🧵

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Schematic of the ordered links from categorical diagnoses over dimensional taxonomies, emotional (dys-)function, differential neurobiology to affective neuroscience

Invited comment:
We need a better taxonomy of emotional dysfunctions to understand their neurobiology; a role neither clinical categories nor hiTOP-like dimensions currently fulfill IMO.

...and more "respect" for current basic affective neuroscience

Share link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lYd48jVtv...

Translation, validation and extended factor models of the German State Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (S-DERS) - Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation Background Difficulties in emotion regulation are a key transdiagnostic factor in mental health disorders. While much research has focused on emotion regulation difficulties as stable, trait-like cons...

Are you looking for a validated version of the German "State Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale" for experimental contexts?

Besides the validation, we found there is little support for an "emotion regulation difficulties factor"

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

After 3h of "post conference party sleep" this was more than a pleasent suprise! I am super excited to have received the IGOR award :)

In case someone wants to have a look at our related preprint on the neurobiology of negative affective traits: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Good morning! The social media team @stephannebe.bsky.social @ocklenburg.bsky.social @tdresler80.bsky.social @mariame.bsky.social and @msicorello.bsky.social behind this account hope you enjoyed the amazing @pug2025.bsky.social in Würzburg so far and are ready for the last day! #PuG2025

I don’t understand Bluesky yet. I follow basically only scientists from my field, but in my feed I only see (non-sciency) pictures of flowers, football, and mediocre cat content (and that‘s hard to do).

Is there a way do improve this? 🥲

This was a huge amount of work and although most co-authors are unfortuantely not on bluesky, I want to thank them all for the amazing support and, most importantly, their patience!

/end

@aidangcw.bsky.social

5) There are methodological reasons why regions and networks generally can't work well as neural measures for individual difference questions in task-based fMRI (e.g., group comparisons). And we can probably do something about this!

4/

3) Theory-driven neural targets like the amygdala, salience network, and validated neural signatures largely do not work

4) Machine Learning can produce replicable effect sizes around r = .20 (which is similar to most trait-behavior effect sizes)

/3

TL;DR
1) Negative affective traits *can* be predicted from task-based fMRI data. But not all traits are created equal...

2) It largely depends on which trait and task you are looking at. Both should be well-aligned

2/

The functional neurobiology of negative affective traits across regions, networks, signatures, and a machine learning multiverse Understanding the neural basis of negative affective traits like neuroticism remains a critical challenge across psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry. Here, we investigate which level of brain org...

Interested the neurobiology of negative affective traits?

Our new preprint included many favorites (amygdala, salience network, validated neural signatures) and a machine learning multiverse of 1200 models and 14 traits!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What did we learn?
#neuroscience #psychology

Here, I am not excluding my own work. I am trying though and am hoping for a systemic change which supports well thought-out projects with clarity on the steps towards theoretical and practical significance. Even if some steps sound boring and not like they can transform everything right away.

Another example: There are many competing theories of emotion and a lot of work rests on these theories. Which of these theories is most likely to be correct based on evidence? After doing a lot of reading (and research) in this area, I still have no idea. Often not even where predictions differ

For 60 years it seemed that biological research is on the verge of transforming mental health. It’s much easier to publish some association between something clinical and brain stuff than making sure effects are meaningful and robust. IMO most papers fail (society) already in the introduction.

Why does this very basic science goal need permanent positions IMO?

Because it is currently much easier/effective to provide the illusion of progress, than real progress.

Without being „saved“ in theories or concrete applications, most scientific insights will be lost. For example: