Excited to share our paper on perceived health benefits of martial arts and combat sports 🌞👩‍🔬 We found that practitioners report physical, cognitive, emotional and social benefits linked to better self-rated health, with effects across experience levels, not just among most seasoned practitioners 👉

ÖGP 2026 poster highlights: Hannah Tschenett presented on digital stress management; Anna Fekete introduced a questionnaire for music preferences; Sarah Landskron shared an RCT on yoga effects on stress and inflammation, @markusforamitti.bsky.social presented music as collective emotion regulation

ÖGP 2026 talk highlights from our lab: @markusforamitti.bsky.social presented how ASMR can reduce stress, @adreisoerner.bsky.social presented a meta-analysis on mental health in early-career researchers, and @celinebencker.bsky.social shared findings on PMS and stress.

We returned from ÖGP 2026, the 16th Conference of the Austrian Psychology Association, in Salzburg last week and are full of inspiration. 💭✍️ Thank you all for the insightful talks, constructive feedback, and new ideas. We will share out lab's highlights next week! ☀️🎉

Can’t wait for the Conference of the Austrian Psychology Association, ÖGP 2026 in Salzburg starting tomorrow! Check the program at www.oegps.at/aktuelletagung and come see our posters.

We are looking forward to the ÖGP 2026, Conference of the Austrian Psychology Association (16. Tagung der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Psychologie) in Salzburg next week! Check out the program: www.oegps.at/aktuelletagung and drop by at our talks ⬇️!

New in! We welcome Sarah Landskron as a new PhD student in our lab. Sarah will work on an FWF @fwf-at.bsky.sociall project (PI: Bence Szaszkó) on how yoga practice influences stress and inflammation🧘‍♀️🧘‍♂️

Sarah Jasmin Landskron presented her talk “Differential effects of yoga on chronic stress and inflammation: Study design of a randomized controlled trial” @vdscobene.bsky.social

Caroline Rakowitz presented her talk “Human Peak Performance in Special Operations Forces: A Multimodal, Longitudinal Intervention Study on Stress, Recovery, and Health Optimization” @vdscobene.bsky.social

Nadja Plumbaum presented her talk “Efficacy of an App-Based Stress Management Intervention for Reducing Somatic Symptoms: A RCT using Ecological Momentary Intervention” @vdscobene.bsky.social

@markusforamitti.bsky.social presented his talk “Examining Auditory Interventions for Stress Reduction: A Randomized Controlled Study” @vdscobene.bsky.social

Check out this episode by Markus Foramitti about music and stress! ⬇️

Curious what our postdoc Nida Ali does in her research? Take a look! 📊🔬

🌏WHERE DO YOU WANT YOUR RESEARCH TO GO?✈️ Take your research to new places with an international mentor! Apply by March 9. The 2026 HBIC Award competition offers travel grants to facilitate a mentorship collaboration with an international laboratory. See details below ⬇️

Congrats to Hannah Tschenett, Urs Nater, and Georg Funk, on winning a Creating Possible Award for the StressLung project! 🥳🎊 The award supports the evaluation of a digital stress management intervention for people living with lung cancer

We are excited for the upcoming 5th CoBeNe PhD Academy, which is taking place today and tomorrow in Vienna! 🎉 Check out our oral presentations below! 📊

We are excited to welcome Klara Hagspiel, PhD student in our lab! 🍀🎉 Klara is a recipient of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) DOC Scholarship for her project: Improving the Diagnosis and Treatment of People with Persistent Somatic Symptoms. Looking forward to working together! 🔬🌈

We’re excited to share results from a new study on stress management training for managers in small and medium-sized enterprises.The training significantly reduced stress reactivity, depression, and anxiety six months after baseline. Curious to learn more? pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41527061/

We are excited for the new pilot study by our team on a digital stress management intervention: Using the intervention following stressful events in daily life reduced stress and negative affect in a student sample. Want to know more? doi.org/10.1016/j.in...

Excited to share our chapter in Music and Medicine! 📖🎵 We present research on how music listening in everyday life benefits health, integrated into an overarching framework, and provide methodological recommendations for ecological momentary assessment and interventions. See link in the comments ⬇️

Nice to see the media echo of our recent paper on how stress, sentiment, and lyrical complexity in popular music have changed from 1973–2023 - and what this says about collective mood regulation through music 🎵 Summary by the University of Vienna: psychologie.univie.ac.at/news-medienb...

We are thrilled to share our first publication of 2026! 📑🎉We collaborated with Ina Krammer and colleagues on LINA: an augmented reality (AR) social game boosting classmates’ sense of belonging —an uncontrolled pre-post evaluation study. 🎮 Read the paper here: doi.org/10.1007/s123...

New paper from our lab, led by Amini-Nejad & Hirsch with @andreasgoreis.bsky.social validated a German version of the Everyday Discrimination Scale (EDS), showing a robust single-factor structure and high reliability across a diverse student sample and immigrants from Türkiye doi.org/10.1027/2698...

We’re excited to share the protocol paper of Amini-Nejad et al (2025) on postmigration stress and its impact health of forcibly displaced people (FDP). This 14-day Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) study focuses on Arabic- and Farsi-speaking FDP in Austria. Read it here: doi.org/10.1080/2000...

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone in the WASAD community! 💫❄️🎄 We wish you a peaceful season and a restful end to the year - a time to unwind, reflect, and recognize both the big and small achievements of the past year. We can't wait to see what 2026 will bring! 🎉

Great news as we head into the holidays: Our project about the effect of multimodal art on pain and stress by Anna Fekete & @rosamaidhof.bsky.social with @evalabs.bsky.social won the Faculty’s Registered Report Award! 👉 doi.org/10.31234/osf... Anna also won an awesome Christmas sweater prize🎄🪅

@adreisoerner.bsky.social and @markusforamitti.bsky.social appeared on camera for a PULS 4 documentary on the topic of stress — with an expert interview, a guided meditation and insights into a stresstest. 🔬🎊 👉 Check it out: www.joyn.at/filme/puls-4...

As we wrap up our #WASAD2025 recap, we want to offer a big thank you to the organizing & scientific committees, speakers, moderators, and everyone who joined! Your insightful questions, presentations, and conversations brought the congress and our discussions around stress and anxiety to life ✨

In addition, we want to thank the @lmumuenchen.bsky.social Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, the @mpi-psychiatry.bsky.social, the Gesellschaft für Angstforschung (GAF), the @stressnetworkch.bsky.social, the @gsrnet.bsky.social, and the Flagship UMZH Stress for collaborating with us! 🙏 🎉

Last week our team got together at a local café to get into the holiday spirit 🎄⛄💫 We wish everyone happy holidays, a relaxing end to the year and a great start to the New Year! 🍀

We are glad to see this paper out by @markusforamitti.bsky.social in collaboration with @mauriciojdmartins.bsky.social, @clauslamm.bsky.social and @scanunit.bsky.social! 🧠🫀🎵Read more about the shift toward music with more negative, stressful, and simpler lyrics over the past 50 years below.

We are proud to congratulate Dr. Teresa O’Rourke, @teresaorourke.bsky.social, on successfully defending her PhD! 🎉🔬 In her dissertation, she investigated risk and protective factors for mental health in young people experiencing chronic stress. We are excited where her work takes her next! 🍀

Congratulations to Mira Erhart, Ronja Brinkmann, and colleagues for their poster award, received for their work exploring “Posterior Insula Coupling with Individual Heart Rate during Acute Stress as a Resilience Marker”! 🫀🧠🏆

Congratulations to Anita Meinke and colleagues for winning one of our poster awards, with their poster “Change in the association between mental health and problematic internet use in adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic”! 📱🏆

A new study by our lab alumni, Dr. @hannamuees.bsky.social et al., reveals negative links between stress and sexual desire, arousal, and activity, with stronger effects in women. It highlights potential effects of stress reduction interventions on positive sexuality: doi.org/10.1016/j.ps...

Congratulations to @andreasgoreis.bsky.social and colleagues for winning one of three poster awards for their poster titled “Impact of Social Media on Triggering Nonsuicidal Self-Injury (NSSI) in Adolescents: A Comparative Ambulatory Assessment Study”! 📱💬 🏆

In comparing adolescents with and without a history of NSSI, they showed that for adolescents who engage in NSSI, negative events on social media were more strongly associated with perceived stress, negative affect, and NSSI urges than real-life negative events.

However, NSSI events during the sampling period were mostly triggered by real-life events. These results underscore the need for targeted interventions addressing online interactions to mitigate NSSI behaviors and improve adolescent mental health.

In his keynote lecture, “Treatment of PTSD: State-of-the-Art and Beyond,” Professor Thomas Ehring @thomasehring.bsky.social, Chair of Clinical Psychology and Psychological Treatment at LMU Munich @lmu-klips.bsky.social, offered an overview of current evidence-based interventions for PTSD and CPTSD.

In addition, he outlined promising future directions for the treatment of these trauma-related disorders, for example by using dynamic indicators for treatment planning to identify the optimal timing for trauma-focused interventions.

Keynote Lecture 4/5: Professor Dr. Peter Zwanzger is Medical Director of the kbo-Inn-Salzach Hospital, a teaching hospital of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (@lmumuenchen.bsky.social).

His main clinical and research focus is on neurobiology, psychopharmacology and psychotherapy of depression and anxiety disorders, neurostimulation, E-mental Health and Virtual Reality (VR).

At #WASAD2025 he primarily addressed the latter with his insightful keynote on "Virtual Reality in anxiety – perspectives and limitations".

A new study by Dr. @hannamuees.bsky.social et al. explores how tiredness and fatigue impact sexual desire, arousal, and activity. Findings reveal gender-specific associations and highlight the need for gender-sensitive interventions to enhance positive sexuality and health doi.org/10.1007/s007...

StressLab PhD student, Markus Foramitti, presented at ISGMA on a project integrating musicology and psychology to study how sound artifacts are perceived and experienced. Thanks to everyone who engaged with the work, and kudos to @fwf-at.bsky.social for hosting!

“Is there a conductor for the orchestrated stress-induced interaction between brain and heart?” This central question guided the keynote lecture delivered by Karl-Heinz Ladwig, Professor of Psychosomatic Medicine and Medical Psychology at the Technical University of Munich (@tum.de).

Swipe through the photos above for a glimpse into his exploration of the brain-heart connection! 💥🧠🫀.

The second keynote lecture of #WASAD2025 was held by Dr. Jan Deussing, Head of the Molecular Neurogenetics research group at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry (@mpi-psychiatry.bsky.social) in Munich, Germany.

His lecture, “Decoding the impact of genetic risk factors and stress exposure on psychiatric disorders,” offered valuable insights into his research on gene–environment interactions, neuropeptide pathways, and other stress-related disease mechanisms. 🧬🧠

“Complete freedom from stress is death.” – Hans Selye Highlight of the Opening Ceremony was the Hans Selye Lecture, delivered by Brenda Penninx, Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, on the topic “Towards Reducing the Public Health Burden of Anxiety Disorders.”