PhD student Martin Skopp (Marburg University) has won the Poster Award of this year’s congress of the European Association for Beahvioural and Cognitive Therapies (EABCT) for his presentation "Dynamics of Reward Processes in Social Anxiety: A time-series Network Analysis" . The presented research project was made possible with a Mini-grant by LOEWE Research Center DYNAMIC.

Subject of the study was the dynamic interplay of reward processing with approach motivation, positive affect, depressive symptoms, social anxiety and engagement in social interactions. To this end, test participants with high or low levels of social anxiety were assessed several times a day over a two-week period. On this basis, dynamic network models for the two groups were calculated and compared with one another. It could be revealed that higher situative anticipation of pleasure from social interaction was an important predictor for subsequent approach motivation in both groups, but only connected to higher positive affect and less anxiety in the anxious group. These findings underscore reward proccessing as important process in the development of psychopathology and possible target for therapy. 

The annual EABCT congress belongs to the largest conferences on clinical psychology and psychotherapy research in Europe. This year’s edition was characterized by many contributions that focused on optimization of psychotherapy by applying network perspectives on mental disorders or suggested individualization of psychotherapy.