Steffen Moritz

Steffen Moritz is head of the clinical neuropsychology unit at the University Medical Center Hamburg (Germany). Among his responsibilities is the neurocognitive assessment of patients with psychological disorders; he is also actively involved in the development of low-threshold psychological treatments.

Among other achievements, he has received the NARSAD Young Investigator award twice and the NARSAD Independent Investigator award once. His current research is focused on cognitive biases in schizophrenia that can lead to distortions in decision-making (e.g., jumping to conclusions). Most notably among his contributions to the field, he was the first researcher to describe overconfidence in incorrect memories in individuals with schizophrenia; in addition, he developed the ‘liberal acceptance’ theory to explain the pathogenesis of delusional ideation. Prof. Moritz has successfully translated this line of research into a treatment program called Metacognitive Training for Schizophrenia (MCT), which is now available in 39 languages at no cost from www.uke.de/mct. He has also developed an individualized metacognitive therapy for patients with schizophrenia (MCT+). A number of randomized controlled studies have confirmed the safety and efficacy of these programs (see meta-analyses by Penney et al., 2022, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2790555; Sauvé et al., 2020: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2020.101854). Although cognitive interventions are regarded as important complementary treatment strategies, there is a lack of evaluated and easy-to-administer programs for schizophrenia. MCT and MCT+ promise to fill that gap. More recently, Prof. Moritz has developed a self-help technique known as decoupling to decrease body-focused repetitive behaviors such as skin picking and trichotillomania, which can be downloaded at no cost here: https://www.uke.de/decoupling. Other self-help techniques such as myMCT for OCD can be downloaded at https://www.clinical-neurospychology.de.