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Christine Mohr

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Papers by Christine Mohr

Monitoring the effects of therapeutic interventions in depression through self-assessments

Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome, 2021

The treatment of major psychiatric disorders is an arduous and thorny path for the patients conce... more The treatment of major psychiatric disorders is an arduous and thorny path for the patients concerned, characterized by polypharmacy, massive adverse side effects, modest prospects of success, and constantly declining response rates. The more important is the early detection of psychiatric disorders prior to the development of clinically relevant symptoms, so that people can benefit from early interventions. A well-proven approach to monitoring mental health relies on voice analysis. This method has been successfully used with psychiatric patients to ‘objectively’ document the progress of improvement or the onset of relapse. The studies with psychiatric patients over 2-4 weeks demonstrated that daily voice assessments have a notable therapeutic effect in themselves. Therefore, daily voice assessments appear to be a lowthreshold form of therapeutic means that may be realized through self-assessments. To evaluate performance and reliability of this approach, we have carried out a long...

EEG microstates are a candidate endophenotype for schizophrenia

Nature Communications, 2020

Electroencephalogram microstates are recurrent scalp potential configurations that remain stable ... more Electroencephalogram microstates are recurrent scalp potential configurations that remain stable for around 90 ms. The dynamics of two of the four canonical classes of microstates, commonly labeled as C and D, have been suggested as a potential endophenotype for schizophrenia. For endophenotypes, unaffected relatives of patients must show abnormalities compared to controls. Here, we examined microstate dynamics in resting-state recordings of unaffected siblings of patients with schizophrenia, patients with schizophrenia, healthy controls, and patients with first episodes of psychosis (FEP). Patients with schizophrenia and their siblings showed increased presence of microstate class C and decreased presence of microstate class D compared to controls. No difference was found between FEP and chronic patients. Our findings suggest that the dynamics of microstate classes C and D are a candidate endophenotype for schizophrenia.

Colour-emotion associations in individuals with red-green colour blindness

PeerJ

Colours and emotions are associated in languages and traditions. Some of us may convey sadness by... more Colours and emotions are associated in languages and traditions. Some of us may convey sadness by saying feeling blue or by wearing black clothes at funerals. The first example is a conceptual experience of colour and the second example is an immediate perceptual experience of colour. To investigate whether one or the other type of experience more strongly drives colour-emotion associations, we tested 64 congenitally red-green colour-blind men and 66 non-colour-blind men. All participants associated 12 colours, presented as terms or patches, with 20 emotion concepts, and rated intensities of the associated emotions. We found that colour-blind and non-colour-blind men associated similar emotions with colours, irrespective of whether colours were conveyed via terms (r = .82) or patches (r = .80). The colour-emotion associations and the emotion intensities were not modulated by participants’ severity of colour blindness. Hinting at some additional, although minor, role of actual colour...

What does your favourite colour say about your personality? Not much

Personality Science

The claim that favourite colours reveal individuals’ personalities is popular in the media yet la... more The claim that favourite colours reveal individuals’ personalities is popular in the media yet lacks scientific support. We assessed this claim in two stages. First, we catalogued claims from six popular websites, and matched them to key Big Six/HEXACO trait terms, ultimately identifying 11 specific, systematic, testable predictions (e.g., higher Extraversion among those who prefer red, orange, yellow, pink, or turquoise). Next, we tested these predictions in terms of the Big Six personality trait scores and reports of favourite and least favourite colours from 323 French-speaking participants. For every prediction (e.g., red-extraversion), we compared trait scores between participants who chose or did not choose the predicted colour using Welch’s t-tests. We failed to confirm any of the 11 predictions. Further exploratory analyses (MANOVA) revealed no associations between colour preferences and personality trait. Favourite colours appear unrelated to personality, failing to support...

Making sense of free associations with PURPLE – A new coding scheme testing French speakers in three countries

The colour category PURPLE is strangely heterogeneous, potentially due to the use of different co... more The colour category PURPLE is strangely heterogeneous, potentially due to the use of different cognates. We asked French speakers from Algeria, France, and Switzerland (n = 274) to produce up to three free associations with violet (basic term), pourpre, and lilas (non-basic terms). We counted 2,075 associations. We developed a coding scheme that i) covers nine major themes, and ii) shows high inter-rater reliability. Overall, the themes colour terms and natural elements and objects were most prominent showing that participants provided closely related associations. Finally, violet triggered more diverse semantic associations than pourpre or lilas. This was true for all countries. It seems that the basic term PURPLE carries more diverse associations and connotations than the non-basic terms.

Binge-watching in times of COVID-19: A longitudinal examination of changes in affect and TV series consumption patterns during lockdown

Psychology of Popular Media, 2022

COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns have had major negative effects on individuals' mental health and psy... more COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns have had major negative effects on individuals' mental health and psychological well-being. Isolated at home, people may engage in recreational activities such as binge-watching (i.e., viewing multiple episodes of a TV series in 1 session) as a strategy to regulate emotional states. This is the first longitudinal study assessing changes in TV series viewing patterns during the first COVID-19 lockdown and examining whether binge-watching was associated with changes in positive and negative affect throughout this period. TV series viewing practices and motivations, binge-watching behaviors, psychopathological symptoms, and affective states were jointly assessed through a 6-week longitudinal online survey at 3 time points (i.e., T1, T2, and T3), in Belgium, France, and Switzerland. Results showed significant increases in individuals' watching habits (e.g., higher daily time spent viewing, expansion of coviewing practices). Results from the longitudinal analyses principally showed that male gender and social motives for TV series watching predicted a decrease in negative affect levels. A problematic binge-watching pattern characterized by loss of control was the single predictor of an increase in negative affect over time. These findings suggest that TV series watching patterns effectively increased during the first COVID-19 lockdown. Watching TV series for social motives emerged as a protective factor, whereas problematic binge-watching seemed to act as a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy throughout these unprecedented circumstances. Public Policy Relevance Statement This is the first large-scale longitudinal study specifically designed to explore the impact of TV series viewing practices on individuals' affective states during the first COVID-19 lockdown. TV series consumption patterns significantly increased over this period. Problematic binge-watching characterized by loss of control seemed to act as a maladaptive strategy to regulate emotional states, whereas watching TV series for social motives emerged as a protective factor in the lockdown context.

RESEARCH ARTICLE Are We Modular Lying Cues Detectors? The Answer Is “Yes, Sometimes”

We quickly form first impressions about newly encountered people guiding our subsequent behaviour... more We quickly form first impressions about newly encountered people guiding our subsequent behaviour (approach, avoidance). Such instant judgments might be innate and automatic, being performed unconsciously and independently to other cognitive processes. Lying detection might be subject to such a modular process. Unfortunately, numerous studies highlighted problems with lying detection paradigms such as high error rates and learning effects. Additionally, humans should be motivated doing both detecting others ’ lies and dis-guising own lies. Disguising own lies might even be more challenging than detecting other people’s lies. Thus, when trying to disguise cheating behaviour, liars might display a mixture of disguising (fake) trust cues and uncontrolled lying cues making the interpretation of the expression difficult (perceivers are guessing). In two consecutive online studies, we tested whether seeing an increasing amount (range 0–4) of lying cues (LC) and non-lying cues (NLC) on a s...

Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences (2001), 55, 595–603 Regular Article Associative processing and paranormal belief

In the present study we introduce a novel task for the quantitative assessment of both originalit... more In the present study we introduce a novel task for the quantitative assessment of both originality and speed of individual associations. This ‘BAG ’ (Bridge-the-Associative-Gap) task was used to investigate the relationships between creativity and paranormal belief. Twelve strong ‘believers’ and 12 strong ‘skeptics ’ in paranormal phenomena were selected from a large student population (n> 350). Subjects were asked to produce single-word associations to word pairs. In 40 trials the two stimulus words were semantically indirectly related and in 40 other trials the words were semantically unrelated. Separately for these two stimulus types, response commonalities and association latencies were calculated. The main finding was that for unrelated stimuli, believers produced associations that were more original (had a lower frequency of occurrence in the group as a whole) than those of the skeptics. For the interpretation of the result we propose a model of association behavior that ca...

Supplementary material from "A machine learning approach to quantify the specificity of colour–emotion associations and their cultural differences

The link between colour and emotion and its possible similarity across cultures are questions tha... more The link between colour and emotion and its possible similarity across cultures are questions that have not been fully resolved. Online, 711 participants from China, Germany, Greece and the UK associated 12 colour terms with 20 discrete emotion terms in their native languages. We propose a machine learning approach to quantify (a) the consistency and specificity of colour–emotion associations and (b) the degree to which they are country-specific, on the basis of the accuracy of a statistical classifier in (a) decoding the colour term evaluated on a given trial from the 20 ratings of colour–emotion association and (b) predicting the country of origin from the 240 individual colour–emotion associations, respectively. The classifier accuracies were significantly above chance level, demonstrating that emotion associations are to some extent colour-specific and that colour–emotion associations are to some extent country-specific. A second measure of country-specificity, the in-group advantage of the colour-decoding accuracy, was detectable but relatively small (6.1%), indicating that colour–emotion associations are both universal and culture-specific. Our results show that machine learning is a promising tool when analysing complex datasets from emotion research.

Цвета эмоций: экспериментальное исследование ассоциативных связей в современном русском языке [Colors of emotions: Experimental research of associative relations in modern Russian]

Litera, 2019

The subject of the research is the analysis of associative relations between twenty emotional con... more The subject of the research is the analysis of associative relations between twenty emotional concepts (interest, amusement, pride, joy, pleasure, satisfaction, admiration, love, relief, compassion, sadness, guilt, sorrow, shame, disappointment, fear, disdain, disgust, hatred and anger) and twelve basic names of colurs in the Russian language (red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, blue, violet, brown, pink, grey, black and white). The research is aimed at 1) discovering chromatic and achromatic meanings of emotions; 2)discovering syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations between color associations; 3) conduction of a linguocultural expertise of national specifics of discovered associative relations. The research is based on the on-line experiment that involved 103 Russian speakers (63 females and 40 males, the average age of resondents is 36.5, min age is 19 and max age is 78, sd=16.7). To analyze emotions, the researcher has applied the Geneva Emotion Wheel Inventory (GEW version 3....

How Stage Magic Perpetuates Magical Beliefs

Mind Reading as a Cultural Practice, 2020

As social beings, humans try to control and predict each other’s thoughts and behaviours. Stage m... more As social beings, humans try to control and predict each other’s thoughts and behaviours. Stage magicians are particularly experienced at controlling observers’ perception and reality. Indeed, magicians frequently pretend to read your mind or predict your thoughts and behaviour. To understand if, and how observers accept such deceptive information, we reviewed empirical studies that tested the psychological impact of such mind reading demonstrations (mind-over-mind magic). Based on this review, we report on the following major observations. First, observers experience mind reading routines as being of genuine paranormal nature when endorsing such beliefs already ahead of such demonstrations (confirmation bias). Moreover, information on the demonstration will likely be i) dismissed if inconsistent with one’s beliefs, and ii) overridden when the demonstration is of attention- and affect-grabbing potential. Finally, people’s beliefs in what they experienced might increase, but only when beliefs are very close to the actual experience.

Early Detection of the Risk of Developing Psychiatric Disorders: A Study of 461 Chinese University Students under Chronic Stress

Psychopathology, 2019

Chronic stress, a characteristic of modern time, has a significant impact on general health. In t... more Chronic stress, a characteristic of modern time, has a significant impact on general health. In the context of psychiatric disorders, insufficient coping behavior under chronic stress has been linked to higher rates of (1) depressive symptoms among subjects of the general population, (2) relapse among patients under treatment for clinical depression, and (3) negative symptoms among subjects with an elevated vulnerability to psychosis. In this normative study we assessed basic coping behavior among 461 Chinese freshman university students along with their consumption behavior and general health in terms of regular exercises, physical health, psychosomatic disturbances, and mental health. The assessments relied on two instruments that have already demonstrated their capability of (1) reliably detecting insufficient coping behavior under chronic stress and (2) reliably quantifying the interrelation between coping behavior and mental health in the Western world. Thus, we aimed to comple...

Feeling Blue or Seeing Red? Similar Patterns of Emotion Associations With Colour Patches and Colour Terms

i-Perception, 2020

For many, colours convey affective meaning. Popular opinion assumes that perception of colour is ... more For many, colours convey affective meaning. Popular opinion assumes that perception of colour is crucial to influence emotions. However, scientific studies test colour-emotion relationships by presenting colours as patches or terms. When using patches, researchers put great effort into colour presentation. When using terms, researchers have much less control over the colour participants think of. In this between-subjects study, we tested whether emotion associations with colour differ between terms and patches. Participants associated 20 emotion concepts, loading on valence, arousal, and power dimensions, with 12 colours presented as patches (n ¼ 54) or terms (n ¼ 78). We report high similarity in the pattern of associations of specific emotion concepts with terms and patches (r ¼.82), for all colours except purple (r ¼.À23). We also observed differences for black, which is associated with more negative emotions and of higher intensity when presented as a term than a patch. Terms and patches differed little in terms of valence, arousal, and power dimensions. Thus, results from studies on colour-emotion relationships using colour terms or patches should be largely comparable. It is possible that emotions are associated with colour concepts rather than particular perceptions or words of colour.

Unkept promises of cognitive styles: A new look at old measurements

PLOS ONE, 2018

Cognitive style is thought to be a stable marker of one's way to approach mental operations. Whil... more Cognitive style is thought to be a stable marker of one's way to approach mental operations. While of wide interest over the last decades, its operationalization remains a challenge. The literature indicates that cognitive styles assessed via i) questionnaires are predicted by personality and ii) performance tests (e.g., Group Embedded Figures Test; GEFT) are related to general intelligence. In the first study, we tested the psychometric relationship between the Cognitive Style Index questionnaire (CSI) and personality inventories (NEO Five Factor Inventory; NEO-FFI, HEXACO Personality Inventory Revised; HEXACO-PI-R). In the second study, we assessed the CSI, NEO-FFI, GEFT and a general intelligence test (Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices Test; RSMT). We found that CSI scores were largely predicted by personality and that CSI was uncorrelated with GEFT performance. Instead, better performance on the GEFT was associated with better performance on the RSMT. We conclude that i) cognitive style questionnaires overlap with personality inventories, ii) cognitive style performance tests do not measure cognitive styles and should not be used as such and iii) the cognitive style concept needs to be assessed with alternative measurement types. We discuss possible future directions.

Magical Potential: Why Magic Performances Should be Used to Explore the Psychological Factors Contributing to Human Belief Formation

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2018

Beliefs in supernatural entities are integral parts of both our culturally embedded religions and... more Beliefs in supernatural entities are integral parts of both our culturally embedded religions and more individualized magical belief systems (e.g., paranormal beliefs, spirituality). Scholars regularly link the occurrence of beliefs to individuals' cognitive and affective ways of information processing. For magical beliefs in particular, we expect children to endorse them. When reaching adulthood, however, individuals should have abandoned magical beliefs, and become pragmatic, sceptical, critical and rational thinkers. The reality is, a large proportion of the adult population can be described as magical thinkers, or report having had magical experiences, even in the recent past. Moreover, psychological research in adults shows a large range of magical beliefs, which correlate with particular psychological processing biases (e.g., repetition avoidance, seeing signal in noise). Unfortunately, these correlational studies do not tell us whether such psychological processing biases precede magical beliefs or whether they result from these magical beliefs. Knowing the direction of such relationships is key to understand which psychological biases might contribute to adult belief formation (or the persistence of beliefs from childhood). To test such causal relationships, we started to systematically apply an experimental approach in which people are exposed to anomalous events. Such a central event allows before-after comparisons of psychological biases. First empirical results confirmed that the use of magic performances, particularly when of paranormal nature, results in an important amount of paranormal explanations. Pre-existing beliefs enhanced this explanation bias. These results show how easily naïve observers can be Btricked^into unsubstantiated beliefs.

Stripping #The Dress: the importance of contextual information on inter-individual differences in colour perception

Psychological research, Jan 26, 2018

In 2015, a picture of a Dress (henceforth the Dress) triggered popular and scientific interest; s... more In 2015, a picture of a Dress (henceforth the Dress) triggered popular and scientific interest; some reported seeing the Dress in white and gold (W&G) and others in blue and black (B&B). We aimed to describe the phenomenon and investigate the role of contextualization. Few days after the Dress had appeared on the Internet, we projected it to 240 students on two large screens in the classroom. Participants reported seeing the Dress in B&B (48%), W&G (38%), or blue and brown (B&Br; 7%). Amongst numerous socio-demographic variables, we only observed that W&G viewers were most likely to have always seen the Dress as W&G. In the laboratory, we tested how much contextual information is necessary for the phenomenon to occur. Fifty-seven participants selected colours most precisely matching predominant colours of parts or the full Dress. We presented, in this order, small squares (a), vertical strips (b), and the full Dress (c). We found that (1) B&B, B&Br, and W&G viewers had selected colo...

An investigation of left/right driving rules on deviations while walking

PloS one, 2017

When traversing through an aperture, such as a doorway, people characteristically deviate towards... more When traversing through an aperture, such as a doorway, people characteristically deviate towards the right. This rightward deviation can be explained by a rightward attentional bias which leads to rightward bisections in far space. It is also possible, however, that left or right driving practices affect the deviation. To explore this possibility, Australian (left-side drivers) and Swiss (right-side drivers) participants (n = 36 & 34) walked through the middle of an aperture. To control for the sway of the body, participants started with either their left or right foot. Sway had a significant effect on participants' position in the doorway and the amount of sway was greater for Australians-perhaps due to national differences in gait. There was a significant rightward deviation for the Swiss, but not for the Australians. It is suggested that driving practices have a small additive effect on rightward attentional biases whereby the bias is increased for people who drive on the ri...

Vulnerabilität und psychische Erkrankung

Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 2014

Vulnerability and psychic illness Based on a sample of 1701 college and university students from ... more Vulnerability and psychic illness Based on a sample of 1701 college and university students from four dif ferent sites in Switzerland, the U.S., and Argentina, this study investigated the interrelationships between insufficient coping skills under chronic stress and impaired general health. We sought to develop standardised means for "early" identification of students at risk of mental health problems, as these students may benefit from "early" interventions before psychiatric symptoms develop and reach clinically relevant thresholds. All students completed two selfreport questionnaires: the Coping Strategies Inventory "COPE" and the Zurich Health Questionnaire "ZHQ", with the latter assessing "regular exercises", "consumption behavior", "impaired physical health", "psycho somatic disturbances", and "impaired mental health". This data was sub jected to structure analyses based on neural network approaches, using the different study sites' data subsets as independent "learning" and "test" sam ples. We found two highly stable COPE scales that quantified basic coping behaviour in terms of "activitypassivity" and "defeatismresilience". The excellent reproducibility across study sites suggested that the new scales characterise socioculturally independent personality t raits. C orrelation analyses for external validation revealed a close relationship between high scores on the defeatism scale and impaired physical and mental health, hence underlining the scales' clinical relevance. Our results suggested in particular: (1.) the proposed method to be a powerful screening tool for early detection and prevention of psychiatric disorders; (2.) physical activity like regular exercises to play a critical role not only in preventing health prob lems but also in contributing to early intervention programs.

Mentalizing skills do not differentiate believers from non-believers, but credibility enhancing displays do

PloS one, 2017

The ability to mentalize has been marked as an important cognitive mechanism enabling belief in s... more The ability to mentalize has been marked as an important cognitive mechanism enabling belief in supernatural agents. In five studies we cross-culturally investigated the relationship between mentalizing and belief in supernatural agents with large sample sizes (over 67,000 participants in total) and different operationalizations of mentalizing. The relative importance of mentalizing for endorsing supernatural beliefs was directly compared with credibility enhancing displays-the extent to which people observed credible religious acts during their upbringing. We also compared autistic with neurotypical adolescents. The empathy quotient and the autism-spectrum quotient were not predictive of belief in supernatural agents in all countries (i.e., The Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States), although we did observe a curvilinear effect in the United States. We further observed a strong influence of credibility enhancing displays on belief in supernatural agents. These findings hig...

Hand matters: Left-hand gestures enhance metaphor explanation

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2017

The modified Edinburgh Handedness Inventory Please indicate your preference in the use of your ha... more