Isabel Dziobek’s interests and works lie in the field of social cognitive and affective neuroscience of mental disorders and targeted technological diagnostics and interventions. She has been focusing among others on social interaction, emotion processing, and empathy in healthy individuals and clinical populations involving social dysfunction such as autism and borderline personality disorder. As an experimental psychologist and psychotherapist (CBT) she is interested in both, understanding the mechanisms of (dis)order in social information processing and in the development and validation of treatment options for those with respective impairments. The methods that she and her team use encompass structural and functional MRI, EEG, eye tracking, and peripheral physiology measures such as skin conductance and heart rate assessments.
Prof. Dziobek got her diploma in Psychology from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and her diploma thesis focussed on the effects of MDMA on cognition. She continued to do a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience at the New York University School of Medicine from 2001-2005, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. From 2009-2014 she headed the junior research group “Understanding Interaffectivity” at Freie Universität Berlin, followed by an associate professorship for Social Cognition in 2014 at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Since 2018 she is full professor of Clinical Psychology of Social Interaction at the Institute of Psychology at HU Berlin.
Prof. Dziobek has published more than 140 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals and has co-authored several works on the socio-emotional effects of psychedelics and entactogenics. She has conducted numerous multicenter third-party funded studies and received several awards for her work, among others the Charlotte and Karl-Bühler Price of the German Society for Psychology in 2014.
