Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Katja Werheid

Assistant professor for Clinical Gerontopsychology at the Department of Psychology at the Humboldt University of Berlin

Since October 2008, Katja Werheid holds an assistant professorship for Clinical Gerontopsychology at the Department of Psychology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. After studying Psychology in Muenster, Gothemburg/Sweden and Hamburg, she received her PhD in 2001 at the University of Leipzig for her work on cognition in Parkinson’s disease at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. She worked in different research groups at the Humboldt University, Dept. of Psychology, in Stockholm and Boston, and underwent training programs in Clinical Neuropsychology and Psychotherapy. The topic of her post-doc research, for which she received the Margret Baltes Award, is the interaction of emotion and memory in normal aging, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Alzheimer disease.

Research Focus

Clinical Gerontopsychology is a research field at the crossroads of Clinical Psychology, Gerontopsychology, and Neuropsychology. It extends from developing psychological treatments for early dementia to experimental neuroscientific research of age-related changes in cognitive and emotional processing.

To illustrate this research area, the Figure shows the results of an experiment in which event-related brain potentials were recorded on the scalp of young and elder volunteers. They were watching faces with either a neutral or an angry facial expression, which had either been previously presented or not. Participants were asked to classify the faces as either familiar or unfamiliar. The figure shows the difference potential (familiar – unfamiliar) between 400 and 700 ms after presentation of a face. Age differences emerged for neutral faces, but not for angry faces. Thus, the effect of emotion on memory is preserved in elder age, despite age-related memory decline. 

Contact: Prof. Dr. Katja Werheid, e-mail, tel. : +49-(0)30-2093-9419, www.psychologie.hu-berlin.de/mitarbeiter/1509570