Research at the Department of CAPPP

Research at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics aims for a better understanding of mental disorders to develop novel and individualized therapies. In a next step, we pursue the development of effective and widely disseminated prevention strategies.

Interdisciplinary methods

To achieve these goals, our research activities are interdisciplinary and use multimodal methods to be able to address core research questions in development psychiatry. Therefore, we connect clinical and cognitiveneuroscience research in humans and in animal models. While our work follows a transdiagnostic and dimensional approach to the development of mental health symptoms over the life span, we focus specifically on anxiety disorders, ADHD and autism. At the heart of this transdiagnostic research are learning mechanisms, which can bridge different levels of description on the biological-neuroscientific, the cognitive-psychological and the social-interactive level. Learning mechanisms may be key to a transdiagnostic understanding of mental health symptom and to improve diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for children and adolescents.

Collaboration in research networks

Our scientific activities are organized in nine research groups. We are part of national and international research networks such as CRC TRR58  “Fear, Anxiety and Anxiety Disorders”, CRC TRR 265  „Losing and regaining control over drug intake“, dem CRC 940  „Volition and cognitive Control“, and the BMBF-funded networks „Protect-AD “, „Esca-Life“, ASD-Net  as well as the networks DFG-AFFIP und INTERGATE-ADHD.

Network Würzburg

In Würzburg there is a long-standing collaboration within the Centre for Mental Heath with the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics  and the Institute of Psychology. Together with these local partners, we have founded the German Centre of Prevention Research, which provides a unique platform to address the major research challenge of prevention.