We are interested in cognitive and affective processes and how they are influenced by stress.
Click here to find out more about our research.
Lianne Wolsink, PhD
Lianne Wolsink successfully defended her PhD thesis, titled “Extinguishing fear responses and controlling memories: the role of stress hormones, attentional processing of the context, and retrieval suppression”. The committee consisting of Conny Quaedflieg, Sigrid Elsenbruch, Adriane Icenhour and Christian Merz were deeply impressed by both her presentation and the ensuing discussion. They concluded that she fully deserves to be awarded a PhD.
Congratulations, Lianne, we are all very proud of your remarkable achievement! We wish you all the best for your future endeavors!
New paper out on the effects of rumination and reappraisal on repeated exposure to stress
Successful recovery and adaptation to repeated stressors in daily life are essential for mental health. People differ greatly in their resilience to stress: whereas some individuals even gain confidence, others become chronically stressed. One potential moderator may be the use of different emotion regulation (ER) strategies. Therefore, this study examined how two clinically relevant cognitive ER strategies—rumination and reappraisal—influence the ability to recover from and habituate to repeated stress. To investigate this, 91 healthy adults completed the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) on two consecutive days at the same time of day. After the first and prior to the second stress test, participants underwent one of three ER interventions: rumination, reappraisal, or a control condition. Subjective ratings confirmed a successful manipulation of the cognitive-affective state by the rumination intervention. As expected, this intervention prevented physiological habituation to repeated stress, as evidenced by stable cortisol and heart rate responses. In contrast to our expectations, the reappraisal intervention did not improve the cognitive-affective state and did not lead to an enhancement of physiological habituation. Quite the opposite, reappraisal prolonged sympathetic reactivity to the first stress exposure, which might have resulted from poor reappraisal performances immediately after stress exposure. Together, these findings provide initial evidence for differential effects of rumination and reappraisal on psychophysiological adaptations to repeated TSST exposure.
23.07.2025 Carina Zöllner successfully defended her PhD
Carina Zöllner successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “The influence of semantic information on episodic memory retrieval: Behavioral and neuronal patterns and their modulation by the stress hormone cortisol”. Sabine Seehagen, Patrizia Thoma, Boris Suchan and Oliver Wolf were in the committee. They were very impressed by her thesis and her defense. They were convinced that Carina fully deserves to be awarded a PhD Congratulation Carina, we are very proud of you!
25.06.2025 Nicole Klein successfully defended her PhD
Nicole Klein successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Stronger together: The interplay between episodic and semantic memory in constructing past events and the influence of stress”. The committee consisting of Helen Blank, Patrizia Thoma, Christian Merz and Oliver Wolf were really impressed by her work and the discussion. They were convinced that she fully deserves to be awarded a PhD. Congratulations, Nicole, Dr. Klein, we are all very proud of you! All the best for your future steps!
