Education
Claus Lamm did his Diploma and Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at the University of Vienna.
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Claus Lamm
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His research focuses on the psychological and biological mechanisms underlying social cognition, affect, and behavior. His main research focus are the neural underpinnings of empathy, to whose understanding he has made pioneering contributions.
Achievements
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Claus Lamm did his Diploma and Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at the University of Vienna. He then joined the lab of Jean Decety, first at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale) in Bron, France (2005), and then at the University of Chicago (2006-2008). He then joined Tania Singer’s group at the Laboratory of Social and Neural Systems Research (founded by Ernst Fehr, University of Zurich). In 2010, he moved back to the University of Vienna as a Professor of Biological Psychology. He is the director and founder of the Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Unit, and currently also the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Psychology. He is also one of the two directors of a Multimodal Neuroimaging research cluster, and board member of the Cognitive Science Research Platform. In 2014, he was elected to become a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and he received the Elisabeth Lutz Price by the same institution in recognition for his work on the biological and neural bases of social behavior. His research examines human social behavior using an interdisciplinary multi-level approach. He combines behavioral and experimental psychology with methods from neuroimaging, electroencephalography, transcranial brain stimulation, psychopharmacology and psychoneuroendocrinology. He also actively collaborates with clinical investigators and with cognitive biologists. In several papers published in journals such as Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Journal of Neuroscience, and NeuroImage, he and his collaborators showed that empathy is a complex construct for which two main components are important: shared affective representations, and self-other distinction. More recently, he could show using the phenomenon of placebo analgesia that empathy for pain is grounded in self-experienced pain.
Membership
He is also one of the two directors of a Multimodal Neuroimaging research cluster, and board member of the Cognitive Science Research Platform. In 2014, he was elected to become a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and he received the Elisabeth Lutz Price by the same institution in recognition for his work on the biological and neural bases of social behavior.
