The main research focus of our group is the investigation of emotion and its interaction with cognitive functions such as perception, attention, learning and memory. Our work is theoretically grounded on several basic assumptions:

1. Emotional feelings are complex processes which can be decomposed into fundamental sub-processes.
2. The conscious perception of emotions is just one aspect of emotional processing which rests on the shoulders of underlying sub-conscious mechanisms.
3. Thus, to understand the inherent complexity of emotions means to describe them on various levels.

Emotionally unconscious processes are at the center of our research. Naturally, people can only report vaguely on such processes. Still, these mechanisms guide a variety of sub-processes such as emotional evaluation, the organization of action or the activation of bodily reactions. Emotions are thus a complex, evolutionarily shaped psychological system responsible for essential functions due to its fast and highly adaptive nature. Since the phenomenon of the emotional unconscious is not approachable by direct observation, neuroscientific methods provide an invaluable tool for emotion research. They enable to directly investigate the emotional unconscious. For this endeavour, our group has specialized in combining neuroimaging (fMRI) and electrophysiological (EEG) measures. The combination of these methods provides the advantage to detail the emotional unconscious regarding qualitatively different characteristics. Using neuroimaging, the underlying neuronal substrate can be identified, while the measurement of brainwaves reveals the temporal dynamics of the associated processes.