[Blended-learning in psychosomatics and psychotherapy - Increasing the satisfaction and knowledge of students with a web-based e-learning tool].

Objectives: To improve the synergy of established methods of teaching, the Department of Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Münster, developed a web-based elearning tool using video clips of standardized patients. The effect of this blended-learning approach was evaluated.

Methods: A multiple-choice test was performed by a naive (without the e-learning tool) and an experimental (with the tool) cohort of medical students to test the groups' expertise in psychosomatics.

Catechol-O-methyltransferase gene variation: impact on amygdala response to aversive stimuli.

The functional catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) val158met polymorphism has been found to be associated with anxiety disorders and depression as well as with neural correlates of emotional processing, with, however, contradictory results. Thus, the aim of the present study was to re-evaluate the impact of the COMT val158met variant on neural activation correlates of emotional face processing in a sample of healthy probands. In 85 healthy subjects genotyped for the COMT val158met polymorphism, amygdala responses were assessed by means of fMRI.