Congratulations to our PhD student Rosa M. Maidhof who won the “Best Poster Award” at the “Best Poster Science Slam” at the virtual conference of the European Association of Psychosomatic Medicine (EAPM, taking part June 3-4), with the poster “The role of music listening style in acute responses to cold pressor pain” (Maidhof RM, Wuttke-Linnemann A, Kappert B, Schwerdtfeger A, Kreutz G, Nater UM).

Some people cope better with crises and strokes of fate than others. This psychological resistance is called resilience. And resilience was the subject of the program "P.M. Wissen" on Servus TV.

In this program, Prof. Urs Nater (Clinical Psychology of Adulthood) has his say as an expert. He and his team want to find out the secret behind this by exposing test subjects to a stressful situation and then measuring how quickly the body recovers from it. 

To the video contribution of the broadcast

Congratulations to Anja Feneberg, Urs Nater, Ricarda Nater-Mewes, and Stefanie Hirsch who won the 50th Anniversary Research and Development Award of the Society of Education, Music and Psychology Research (SEMPRE)! This funding will allow to conduct an ecological momentary music intervention study to reduce acute stress in the daily life of Turkish immigrant women. 

Our team member Hanna Mües has been elected speaker of the ÖGP-JuWis (young scientists of the Austrian Society of Psychology), Jakob Bergmann (Johannes Kepler Universität Linz) has been elected vice-speaker and Smirna Malkoc (Johannes Kepler Universität Linz) has been elected cashier. Find out more about the ÖGP-JuWis and events here.

We are happy to welcome our new student assistants Katharina Knogler, BSc and Hannah Tschenett, BSc to our Stress Lab.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank Stephan Ho, BSc and Luise Huybrechts, BSc for their hard work and wish them all the best for the future!

We are happy to welcome Christian Gold, PhD, as a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Vienna! He is Principal Researcher at GAMUT, NORCE Norwegian Research Centre, Bergen, Norway and Adjunct Professor at the University of Bergen as well as at Aalborg University, Denmark. Furthermore, he serves as an Editor of the Cochrane Developmental, Psychosocial and Learning Problems Group and is Past Editor of the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy. He holds a music therapy degree from Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts and a PhD from Aalborg University. His research includes randomised trials and systematic reviews of psychosocial interventions in mental health, as well as process-outcome research and reviews of research methodology. His work has been cited more than 5000 times according to Google Scholar, with an h-index of 34. He has over 60 international peer-reviewed publications (of over 270 publications in total) and as PI has managed research grants totalling over 5M€. You can have a look at his Homepage here.

Congratulations to Dr. Nida Ali on completing her PhD in Clinical Psychology at McGill University in Montreal! We are happy to welcome her as our new colleague and Post Doc to our Lab. Together with Prof. Urs Nater she will be working on investigating the interrelationships among the physiological, immune, genetic, and psychological stress responses in healthy and clinical populations.

An interview with our colleague Hanna Mües on the importance of sexuality has been published in the new issue of "Medizynisch". You can read all about it here.

We are happy to welcome our new colleague and external PhD student Ina Stacher, MSc to our Lab. Working in the research group "D.O.T - Die offene Tür" at Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft, she will be supervised by Dr. Beate Schrank (Karl Landsteiner Privatuniversität für Gesundheitswissenschaften) and Prof. Urs Nater.

We are delighted to welcome Menta Havadi, MA, a recent graduate from Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary) to our lab! She will be working as a research intern on a project investigating the links between music and skin barrier recovery under the supervision of Dr. Jasminka Majdandžić for the next six months.

We are delighted to welcome Jackie O'Brien as a visiting PhD student from the University of Oregon (US) to our Lab! She will be collaborating on a project focusing on how childhood and chronic stress interact to influence stress reactivity during a social stressor. This project will continue to develop over the next year and we look forward to welcoming her back for future visits.

Andreas Goreis, MSc, has not only finished his Master's degree in psychology. He has also been granted an uni:docs fellowship, which enables him to join our Team and start his Ph.D. in October 2018. Congratulations on both achievements and welcome to our Team!

Our Music & Health Lab Team was very happy about the opportunity to organize workshops for children aged 7 to 12 years in this year's Kids' University (KinderuniWien). The workshops were dedicated to the question whether listening to music promotes health and well-being and provided insight into the Lab's current research. The children learned how the effects of music listening on stress are investigated in the Lab and experienced directly how different kinds of music contributed to their own feelings of relaxation and happiness. However, it was not only the visiting children who learned something. The team also learned a lot about the children's own musical preferences.

In a ceremonial opening, the university's psychological outpatient unit, which is lead by Dr. Dr. Dipl.-Psych. Ricarda Nater-Mewes, was celebrated. Some of our Lab's scientific projects and intervention studies are conducted in collaboration with this unit. At the celebratory opening we presented selected projects from our Lab which were of great interest. Click here to find out more about the outpatient unit.

We are happy to welcome Dr. Veronika Mészáros from the Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary to our Lab! She will stay from May 22nd until June 21st 2018 to learn more about our Lab's research.

We were very happy to welcome Dr. Alexandra Linnemann to our Lab! She gave a talk on: "Psychobiologische Stressforschung im Alltag - Ansätze, Methoden und Ergebnisse zur stressreduzierenden Wirkung von Musikhören im Alltag".