Tobias Kube

No distorted prediction error processing in depression? Pupillary responses to expected vs. unexpected emotional information in clinically depressed and healthy individuals Depression has been associated with a reduced ability to update negative beliefs, possibly driven by difficulties integrating new positive information…

🎉🥳 New article by my PhD student Alexandra Spaeth: We investigated pupillary responses to novel positive vs. negative information on interpersonal scenarios in people with major depression vs. healthy control participants. Published open access in BRAT 👇 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🤕 Many patients find it difficult to interpret figures relating to frequencies and probabilities in medicine.

There is therefore a risk that careless wording could cause confusion or even anxiety! 😰

🚨🚨Abstract submission deadline extended!🚨🚨

⏰ New submission deadline is 16th of February 2026

📢 <1 month left to submit abstracts for the 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗯𝗶𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 & 𝗣𝘀𝘆𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 hashtag#APP2026, 23rd-24th June in Plymouth, UK 🌊!

📌Visit: www.plymouth.ac.uk/whats-on/aut...

Die Macht der Zahlen: 3% vs. drei von Hundert verstehen Entdecken Sie, wie Sprache und Zahlen unsere Wahrnehmung von Heilung und Risiken beeinflussen – eine spannende Analyse von Kube und Rief.

Schöner Beitrag über den JAMA Letter von @rief01.bsky.social und mir. flugundzeit.blog/drei-von-hun...

<em>British Journal of Health Psychology</em> | Wiley Online Library Objectives This research examined whether different framings of the likelihood of side effects influence their occurrence in response to a placebo analgesic. Design Three independent experimental ...

🎉 New article on the effects of likelihood framing on nocebo side effects. Finding: Framing influenced side effect expectations, but not side effect experiences - presumably due to insufficient nocebo effects induced by the experimental model. OA👇 bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/....

Communicating Medical Numbers To the Editor Dr Zikmund-Fisher and colleagues1 highlight several important caveats regarding the presentation of numbers in medical communication and provide thoughtful suggestions for clinicians on ...

🎉 Happy to share a Letter with @rief01.bsky.social in @jama.com: We argue that clinicians should be aware of framing effects when communicating likelihoods. Eg, patients perceive "1 in 10 have side effects" as more concerning than "9 in 10 do not have side effects". jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

🧠💡Reden ist Silber, Ausprobieren ist Gold!
Am 20.06. organisieren wir in Frankfurt ein Praxissymposium zum Thema Verhaltensexperimente. Programm: Vorträge & Workshops mit führenden Expert:innen, u.a. @michaelwitthoeft.bsky.social. Jetzt informieren & anmelden! www.uni-frankfurt.de/110078906/Pr...

Here you can find the entire article selection of the special issue: www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu.... It was a great pleasure working on this and I hope it will help further spread this burgeoning field.

Happy to share the last contribution of our special issue on belief updating in Behaviour Research and Therapy: Jonas'es and my editorial, providing a brief narrative review of the topic and an introduction to the articles of the special issue. authors.elsevier.com/a/1m7Eo1KMdl...

✨Wunderbare Neuigkeiten: Die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft fördert unser neues Netzwerk SNEPP – das Scientific Network for Experimental Psychopathology and Psychotherapy!

www.uni-goettingen.de/de/3240.html...

Thanks @soerenkrach.bsky.social and team for this nice collaborative work!

Belief Updating Deficits in Depression: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Prior studies have found that depression is linked to altered belief updating, but the strength and conditions of this association, such as its depend…

At the same time, dep was not associated with an enhanced integration of negative feedback. Thus, the results are well-consistent with a recent meta-analysis on belief updating deficits in depression: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Intraindividual Trajectories of Belief Updating in Relation to Depressive Symptoms: Reduced Integration of Positive Performance Feedback - Sebastian Meyerhöfer, Charlotte Ottenstein, Lukas Kirchner, L... Previous research suggests that depression is related to difficulties with revising established negative expectations. However, it is not yet clear how precisel...

New paper in CPS 🎉: We developed and validated a novel trial-by-trial belief update task, which allowed us to examine the association with depression quite precisely: dep symptoms were related to a slower update of established negative beliefs following pos info. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Yet, one more article is to come: the editorial by Jonas and me that introduces the special issue in its entirety. Stay tuned!

It was a great pleasure to organise this special issue together with Jonas Everaert. Thanks to all authors for submitting their work to it and to all reviewers who dedicated their time to it as well! Thanks to Michelle Craske for inviting me to organise this and give the topic such a nice platform!

Updating Inferences About Negative Events: Does the Direction of the Update Matter? Belief updating—the revision of beliefs in light of new evidence—is central to adaptive cognition and emotion regulation yet often disrupted in emotio…

Happy (and sad) to share the last article of our special issue on belief updating in BRAT: it's on how people update attributions of negative events (e.g., bad luck, my own incompetence, etc.) and how this relates to psychopathology. Open access: 👇 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Hi @jensfoell.de, vielen Dank für die Anfrage! Prinzipiell fände ich das interessant, aber auf absehbare Zeit sehe ich nicht, wie ich dafür Kapazitäten aufbringen kann, da ich erst vor relativ kurzem meine Professur in FFM begonnen habe und dort alle Hände voll zu tun habe an diversen Ecken.

Self-esteem modulates beneficial causal attributions in the formation of novel self-beliefs Healthy individuals typically attribute successes to internal causes, such as their abilities, and failures to external factors, like bad luck. In contrast, individuals with depression and low self-es...

New preprint by
@annalinavmayer.bsky.social and team members together with @tobikube.bsky.social
💫

„Self-esteem modulates beneficial causal attributions in the formation of novel self-beliefs“

#affectedbeliefs #sociallearning #beliefformation

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

From Maltreatment to Mistrust: Impaired Belief Updating as a Mechanism Linking Childhood Maltreatment to Interpersonal and Clinical Outcomes Childhood maltreatment (CM), defined as caregiver-perpetrated abuse or neglect during childhood or adolescence, is associated with enduring social dys…

Next article of our special issue published in BRAT, examining the role of childhood maltreatment (CM): www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... Adults with CM history showed impaired belief updating when interacting with strangers and such deficits moderated the association of CM and PTSD symptoms.

Professur (W2) für Klinische Psychoanalyse - Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main bietet Stelle als Professur (W2) für Klinische Psychoanalyse in Frankfurt am Main - jetzt bewerben!

In Frankfurt ist zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt eine W2 Professur für Klinische Psychoanalyse zu besetzen, mit erforderlicher Fachkunde in tiefenpsychologisch-fundierter Psychotherapie oder analytischer Psychotherapie. Bei Interesse freuen wir über Bewerbungen! Details 👇
jobs.zeit.de/jobs/profess...

The effect of state anxiety on jumping-to-conclusions bias in social anxiety: An experimental and computational modelling study Research indicates that the tendency to make hasty decisions based on minimal information, also known as the Jumping-to-Conclusions bias, may be linke…

Happy to see the next article of our special issue in BRAT (open access): The authors investigated the associaiton of social anxiety and belief updating in the context of the jumping-to-conclusion bias, using a Bayesian compuational modelling approach. Details👇 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti....

From my perspective, an intriguing finding from this study is that the two factors are relatively independent from each other. You could expect the level of fear to reduce when expectancies are violated, and vice versa, but the authors show that these factors independently predict treatment outcome.

Same same but different: Threat expectancy change and fear reduction as readouts of exposure rationales are only weakly associated and contribute differentially to treatment outcome in anxiety disorde... Responses to exposure therapy vary across individuals, emphasizing the need for a deeper understanding of its underlying mechanisms. This study examin…

Great to see the next article of our special issue on belief updating out in BRAT. In this large clinical trial, the authors investigated the relative importance of expectancy violation vs fear reduction as two rationales of exposure therapy. For details, see 👇 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti....

Thanks to Edith in particular for this nice work, but also to @neutrophine.bsky.social and Julia Glombiewski for supporting this research!

Why is this relevant? How we search for information determines the subjective reality each of us construes. Understanding the biases people with dep symptoms have in this information seeking process may thus explain why they often end up with a negative view of themselves and the world.

Key findings: i) Depression is related to a greater incongruence between self-perception and anticipated perception by others; that is, people with dep symptoms view themselves more negatively than they expect to be viewed by others. ii) Depression is overall reduced to less feedback seeking.

Better to keep a negative self-perception than ask for feedback? - How depressive symptoms are associated with the desire for social feedback We investigated whether depressive symptom severity is associated with incongruence between how people perceive themselves (self-perception) and how t…

Excited to share this new article of my PhD student Edith Rapo on the association between depression and seeking feedback from others about oneself, depending on the anticipated feedback's valence and congruence with the self-perception. Open Acces in BRAT 👇 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Happy to share the first meta-analysis on biased belief updating in depression, published in Clin Psych Rev. Across 29 studies, depression was related to a reduced belief update following positive information, but not to an increased update following neg info. 👇 authors.elsevier.com/c/1lsBL~0r1z...

Unfortunately, in the production process, the publisher confused Figure 1 with a figure that was actually supposed to be presented in the supplementary material only. Here's the real Figure 1, which is missing now in main article 🙈🤷‍♂️.

Key findings: 1) the greater the expectation-outcome discrepancy, the greater the update; 2) in the entire (non-clinical) sample greater update for positive expectation-outcome discrepancies than for negative ones; 3) depressive symptoms related to more neg updating following neg social experiences