About me

I am an assistant professor at the Experimental Psychology department of Utrecht University. I received my PhD in Psychology from Leipzig University on a project combining sentence production and working memory. During my postdoc at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen I also became interested in non-invasive brain stimulation as a tool to investigate language processing in the healthy brain. After another postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, I returned to the Netherlands and joined the lab of Dennis Schutter at Utrecht University. My work is now focused on investigating the interplay of language and emotion processing in the cerebellum. For this I use a combination of neuroimaging, brain stimulation and behavioural techniques. I am also teaching different courses at the bachelor and master level and supervising internship and thesis projects. If you're a student interested to work on a topic close to my research interests, feel free to get in touch via e-mail.

Trivia: My favourite thing to do in R is plotting stuff; I have seen all episodes of Family Guy so many times that I can find a fitting quote for pretty much every daily situation (I hate Brian though); I believe the best album in the entire history of humankind is Turn On The Bright Lights by Interpol (people will argue about this, because Beatles and Stones and Led Zeppelin etc., but they probably weren't a teenager in the early 2000s).

Publications

Peer-reviewed publications

Klaus, J., Stoodley, C. J., & Schutter, D. J. L. G. (2024). Neurodevelopmental trajectories of cerebellar grey matter associated with verbal abilities in males with autism spectrum disorder. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 67, 101379. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2024.101379

Kruithof, E. S., Klaus, J., & Schutter, D. J. L. G. (2024). Cerebellar asymmetry of motivational direction: Anger-dependent effects of cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation on aggression in healthy volunteers. Cerebellum, 23(4), 1426-1434. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12311-023-01644-z

Klaus, J., Wolfs, E. ML., & Schutter, D. JLG. (2024). Cerebellar roots of aggression in violent psychopathic offenders: Evidence from structural neuroimaging studies. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 55, 101333. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2023.101333

Wolfs, E. M. L., Van der Zwaag, W., Priovoulos, N., Klaus, J., & Schutter, D. J. L. G. (2023). The cerebellum during provocation and aggressive behaviour: A 7 T fMRI study. Imaging Neuroscience, 1, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1162/imag_a_00044

Kruithof, E. S., Klaus, J., & Schutter, D. J. L. G. (2023). The human cerebellum in reward anticipation and outcome processing: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 149, 105171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105171

Schutter, D.J.L.G., Smits, F., & Klaus, J. (2023). Mind matters: A narrative review on affective state-dependency in non-invasive brain stimulation. International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, 23(3), 100378. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijchp.2023.100378

Wolfs, E.M.L., van Lutterveld, R., Varkevisser, T., Klaus, J., Geuze, E., & Schutter, D.J.L.G. (2023). Lower cerebello-cortical functional connectivity in veterans with reactive aggression symptoms: A pilot study. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 159, 42-49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2023.01.023

Kruithof, E. S., Klaus, J., & Schutter, D. J. L. G. (2022). The cerebellum in aggression: Extending the cortico-limbic dual-route model of motivation and emotion. Motivation Science, 8(2), 150-160. https://doi.org/10.1037/mot0000251

Klaus, J., & Schutter, D.J.L.G. (2022). Non-invasive brain stimulation of the cerebellum in emotion. In: Adamaszek, M., Manto, M., & Schutter, D.J.L.G. (Eds). The emotional cerebellum. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 1378. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99550-8_8

Bongaerts, F.L.P., Schutter, D.J.L.G., & Klaus, J. (2022). Cerebellar tDCS does not modulate language processing performance in healthy individuals. Neuropsychologia, 169, 108206. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108206

Wolfs, E., Klaus, J., & Schutter, D.J.L.G. (2022). Cerebellar grey matter volumes in reactive aggression and impulsivity in healthy volunteers. The Cerebellum, 22, 223–233. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12311-021-01337-5

Klaus, J., & Schutter, D.J.L.G. (2021). Electrode montage-dependent intracranial variability in electric fields induced by cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation. Scientific Reports, 11, 22183. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-01755-9

Ponce, G.V., Klaus, J., & Schutter, D.J.L.G. (2021). A brief history of cerebellar neurostimulation. The Cerebellum, 21, 715–730. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12311-021-01310-2

Klaus, J., & Schutter, D.J.L.G. (2021). Functional topography of anger and aggression in the human cerebellum. NeuroImage, 226, 117582. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117582

Klaus, J., & Hartwigsen, G. (2020). Failure to improve verbal fluency with transcranial direct current stimulation. Neuroscience, 449, 123-133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2020.09.003

Friehs, M.A., Klaus, J., Singh, T., Frings, C., & Hartwigsen, G. (2020). Perturbation of the right prefrontal cortex disrupts interference control. NeuroImage, 220. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117279

Piai, V., Klaus, J., & Rossetto, E. (2020). The lexical nature of alpha-beta oscillations in context-driven word production. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 55, 100905. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2020.100905

Klaus, J., Schutter, D.J.L.G., & Piai, V. (2020). Transient perturbation of the left temporal cortex evokes plasticity-related reconfiguration of the lexical network. Human Brain Mapping, 41, 1061–1071. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.24860

Klaus, J., & Hartwigsen, G. (2019). Dissociating semantic and phonological contributions of the left inferior frontal gyrus to language production. Human Brain Mapping, 40, 3279-3287. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.24597

Klaus, J., & Schriefers, H. (2019). Bilingual word production. In: The Handbook of the Neuroscience of Multilingualism. Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119387725.ch10

Klaus, J., & Schriefers, H. (2018). An investigation of the role of working memory capacity and naming speed in phonological advance planning in language production. The Mental Lexicon, 13, 159-185. https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.17020.kla

Klaus, J., & Schutter, D.J.L.G. (2018c). Putting focus on transcranial direct current stimulation in language production studies. PLoS ONE, 13, e0202730. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202730

Klaus, J., & Schutter, D.J.L.G. (2018b). The role of left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in language processing. Neuroscience, 377, 197-205. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2018.03.002

Klaus, J., & Schutter, D.J.L.G. (2018a). Non-invasive brain stimulation to investigate language production in healthy speakers: A meta-analysis. Brain and Cognition, 123, 10-22. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2018.02.007

Klaus, J., Lemhöfer, K., & Schriefers, H. (2018). The second language interferes with picture naming in the first language: evidence for L2 activation during L1 production. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33, 867-877. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2018.1430837

Jescheniak, J.D., Kurtz, F., Schriefers, H., Günther, J., Klaus, J., and Mädebach, A. (2017). Words we do not say – Context effects on the phonological activation of lexical alternatives in speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43, 1194-1206. http://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000352

Klaus, J., Mädebach, A., Oppermann, F., & Jescheniak, J. D. (2017). Planning sentences while doing other things at the same time: Effects of concurrent verbal and visuospatial working memory load. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 70, 811-831. http://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2016.1167926

Work in progress

File drawer

Klaus, J., & Schriefers, H. Measuring verbal working memory capacity: A reading span task for laboratory and web-based use. http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/NJ48X
This was an attempt to introduce an online version of the reading span task in English, Dutch, and German. It never made it to a published paper, but the task and clumsy analysis scripts can be found on Github.

Contact me

Feel free to drop me a line if you want to discuss my work, have a nice story to share or want to compliment me on my pretty cat.

j dot klaus at uu dot nl

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