Child Psychiatry

Laboratory for Psychophysiological assessments at the department of Child- and Adolescent Psychiatry

The department of Child- and Adolescent Psychiatry has an almost 15 year old tradition of research into the psychophysiology of information processing in children with developmental disorders. A variety of neurocognitive models and resulting paradigms are applied to investigate and explain cognitive and affective deficiencies in children with e.g. ADHD and autism spectrum disorders by measuring the children’s autonomic and electrocortical responses in specific experimental task conditions.

All studies are carried out in collaboration with the department of Experimental and Work Psychology, technical support being received from the “Instrumentatie Dienst Psychologie (IDP, University of Groningen).

The equipment consists of a 72-channel REFA system including 8 analogue channels (TwenteMedical System International) and a galvanic separation for a Fin.A.Pres device (Ohmeda, 2300) for the continuous recording of blood pressure. Heart rate is generally measured from precordial leads with Ag-AgCl electrodes and breathing by a Nihon Kohden impedance plethysmograph. The software applied consists of E-Prime (Psychology Software Tools, Inc.) for building tasks, CARSPAN (Mulder, van Roon, Schweizer) for the analysis of cardiovascular data and Brain Vision Recorder and Brain Vision Analyser (Brain Products GmbH) for the acquisition and analysis of the EEG data.

Location: Hanzeplein 1, 9713 GZ Groningen

Contact: Monika Althaus, tel: 050-3610974, e-mail: m.althaus accare.nl