Markus Reichert

• University of Salzburg

Sedentary lifestyles can be seen as one of the central risk factors for poor health in the 21st century. Previous studies indicated negative associations between sedentary behavior and brain health. However, the neurological link between sedentary behavior and gray matter volume remains unclear. This study aimed to assess the relationship between d...

Objective Depression is a multifaceted disorder with neurobiological, behavioral, and environmental components. This review aims to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) and computational methods are advancing the understanding and treatment of depression, focusing on neurobiological mechanisms, early detection, and behavioral activation (BA) in...

Background Advancing evidence-based, tailored interventions for substance use disorders (SUDs) requires understanding temporal directionality while upholding ecological validity. Previous studies identified loneliness and craving as pivotal factors associated with alcohol consumption, yet the precise directionality of these relationships remains am...

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Menschen mit schweren psychiatrischen Erkrankungen (SMI), wie Schizophrenie und schweren Depressionen, haben oft Schwierigkeiten, Zugang zu adäquater Gesundheitsversorgung zu erhalten. Negative Symptome wie Antriebslosigkeit und sozialer Rückzug stellen dabei besondere Herausforderungen dar. Digitale Tools, insbesondere das Ecologic...

Alcohol consumption (AC) is a leading risk factor for death, morbidity, and disability worldwide. Gender-specific differences in AC and its moderators, which may serve as markers for preventing severe alcohol use disorders (AUD), showed inconsistent results. Additionally, the impact of COVID-19-related lockdowns on these differences remains unclear...

Smartphones and social media have become an integral part of human daily life and they influence mental well-being. These accounts have been researched in the general population, but not in athletes. This is critical given enhanced physical and emotional stressors in athletes versus non-athletes. Therefore, we here studied intra- and interindividua...

Alcohol consumption (AC) and its repercussions present considerable health hazards both globally and on a personal level. The use of alcohol ranks among the top causes of preventable fatalities. Conventional retrospective self-reporting techniques frequently do not adequately reflect the intricate and variable nature of drinking habits in those wit...

Introduction Many patients with eating disorders (EDs) engage in excessive and compulsive physical activity (pathological exercise, PE) to regulate negative mood or to “burn calories.” PE can lead to negative health consequences. Non‐exercise activity (NEA) bears the potential to serve as intervention target to counteract PE and problematic eating...

Most of the scientific research on alcohol consumption behavior in humans is laboratory-based, as reflected by the ratio of laboratory vs. real-life contributions to this handbook. Studies in daily life, although having a long history in addiction research (Shiffman et al., Ann Behav Med 16:203–209, 1994), are in the minority. This is surprising, g...

In sports and exercise, establishing new and optimizing already learned movements paves the way towards an athlete’s success. This process of learning repeatedly relies on human interaction and therefore requires interactions between athletes, coaches, or teachers. To reduce yet not eliminate this dependency, Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be abl...

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are seen as a continuum ranging from goal‐directed and hedonic drug use to loss of control over drug intake with aversive consequences for mental and physical health and social functioning. The main goals of our interdisciplinary German collaborative research centre on Losing and Regaining Control over Drug Intake (Re...

Background The interplay of physical activity (PA) with affective well-being (AWB) is highly critical to both health behaviors and health outcomes. Current prominent theories presume AWB to be crucial for PA maintenance, and PA is evidenced to foster mental health. However, thus far, PA-AWB associations have mainly been researched in laboratory set...

Green space may be an important physical activity facilitator for children and adolescents. However, to date, most studies focused on urban green space, and few studies investigated associations between green space and physical activity across urban and rural areas, which was the goal of this study. Data were obtained from a German cohort study, in...

Social isolation and loneliness pose major societal challenges accelerated by the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, especially for mental health. In this cohort study using accelerometry, electronic diaries and neuroimaging in a community-based sample of 317 young adults, we show that people felt affectively worse when lacking social contact, but...

Objective: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) constitutes a critical public health issue and has sex-specific characteristics. Initial evidence suggests that progesterone and estradiol might reduce or increase alcohol intake, respectively. However, there is a need for a better understanding of how the menstrual cycle in females and the ratio of progestero...

Background Students enrolling in higher education often adopt lifestyles linked to worse mental health, potentially contributing to the peak age onset of mental health problems in early adulthood. However, extensive research is limited by focusing on single lifestyle behaviors, including single time points, within limited cultural contexts, and foc...

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a major contributor to global disability and mortality. Cross-sectional studies linked AUD to reduced cognitive control and heightened risky decision-making. However, the temporal direction of these effects remains unknown: are cognitive-behavioral alterations a consequence or a precursor of drinking? Here, for the fir...

Background: Physical behavior (PB) is a key lifestyle factor in regulating and preventing diseases across the lifespan. Researchers identified affective, cognitive, and contextual factors like weather conditions, as significant contributors in determining if individuals are physically active. However, there is scarce empirical evidence about poten...

In the last two decades, e-diary studies have gained increasing interest, with a dominant focus on mood and affect. Although requested in current guidelines, psychometric properties are rarely reported, and methodological investigations of factor structure, model fit, and the reliability of mood and affect assessment are limited. We used a seven-da...

Background Childhood trauma exposures (CTEs) are frequent, well-established risk factor for the development of psychopathology. However, knowledge of the effects of CTEs in healthy individuals in a real life context, which is crucial for early detection and prevention of mental disorders, is incomplete. Here, we use ecological momentary assessment...

The coronavirus pandemic has brought about dramatic restrictions to real-life social interactions and a shift towards more online social encounters. Positive social interactions have been highlighted as an important protective factor, with previous studies suggesting an involvement of the amygdala in the relationship between social embeddedness and...

Physical activity and sedentary behavior play a crucial role for both physical and mental health. While epidemiological studies provide crucial evidence for the long-term health effects of physical activity and sedentary behavior, it is less well-known how physical activity and sedentary behavior are related to mental health in everyday life. Ambul...

Introduction Physical behavior is a key lifestyle factor in regulating and preventing diseases across the lifespan. Researchers identified affective, cognitive, and contextual factors like weather conditions, as significant contributors in determining if individuals are physically active. However, there is scarce empirical evidence about potential...

The COVID-19 pandemic strongly impacted people's daily lives. However, it remains unknown how the pandemic situation affects daily-life experiences of individuals with preexisting severe mental illnesses (SMI). In this real-life longitudinal study, the acute onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany did not cause the already low everyday well-being...

Zu den potenziellen Einflüssen des weiblichen Zyklus auf Training, Leistung und Gesundheit gibt es unzureichend belastbare Daten aus längsschnitt­lichen Studien. Dank Digitalisierung sind heutzutage Datenerhebungen im Alltag, in Echtzeit, gerätegestützt und als intensiv-longitudinale Zeitreihendaten möglich. Wir führen in diese Methodik ein und bes...

Background: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a critical public health issue with sex-specific characteristics and the need for a better mechanistic understanding. Initial evidence suggests that progesterone can reduce alcohol intake, while estradiol leads to an increase. However, we lack knowledge about how progesterone relative to estradiol influence...

Importance Alcohol consumption (AC) leads to death and disability worldwide. Ongoing discussions on potential negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on AC need to be informed by real-world evidence. Objective To examine whether lockdown measures are associated with AC and consumption-related temporal and psychological within-person mechanisms. D...

Self-regulation, the ability to guide behavior according to one’s goals, plays an integral role in understanding loss of control over unwanted behaviors, for example in alcohol use disorder (AUD). Yet, experimental tasks that measure processes underlying self-regulation are not easy to deploy in contexts where such behaviors usually occur, namely o...

The coronavirus pandemic has brought about dramatic restrictions to real-life social interactions and a shift towards more online social encounters. Positive social interactions have been highlighted as an important protective factor, with previous studies suggesting an involvement of the amygdala in the relationship between social embeddedness and...

Importance: Alcohol consumption (AC) leads to death and disability worldwide. Ongoing discussions on potential negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on AC need to be informed by real-world evidence. Objective: To examine whether lockdown measures are associated with AC and consumption-related temporal and psychological within-person mechanis...

Self-regulation, the ability to guide behavior according to one’s goals, plays an integral role in understanding loss of control behaviors a pertinent example being substance use disorders (SUD). Yet, experimental tasks that measure processes underlying self-regulation are not easy to deploy in contexts where such behaviors often occur, namely in r...

Background: Early identification of risk for depression and anxiety disorders is important for prevention, but real-life affective well-being and its biological underpinnings in the population remain understudied. Here, we combined methods from epidemiology, psychology, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and functional magnetic resonance imagin...

Psychological stress and physical activity are interrelated, constituting a relevant association to human health, especially in children. However, the association’s nature remains elusive, i.e., why psychological stress predicts both decreased and increased physical activity. To test whether effects vary as a function of the level of analyses, we d...

Background Urban and rural areas have been experiencing major demographic and structural changes, characterized by an aging population in rural areas and a growth of cities in number and size. However, it is poorly researched how children’s physical activity and screen time developed in urban and rural areas. To address this deficit, we investigate...

Exercise interventions in mental disorders have evidenced a mood-enhancing effect. However, the association between physical activity and affect in everyday life has not been investigated in adult individuals with ADHD, despite being important features of this disorder. As physical activity and affect are dynamic processes in nature, assessing thos...

Little is known about behavioral transfer and compensation within and between moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and sedentary behavior. Thus, taking a within-person perspective, this study investigated across 1 week whether (a) children and adolescents compensate for increased MVPA and sedentary behavior with less of the respective beha...

Introduction: Over the last decades, our understanding of the cognitive, motivational, and neural processes involved in addictive behavior has increased enormously. A plethora of laboratory-based and cross-sectional studies has linked cognitive-behavioral measures to between-subject differences in drinking behavior. However, such laboratory-based...

Background:Social integration is a major resilience factor for staying healthy. However, the COVID-19-pandemic led to unprecedented restrictions in social life. The consequences of these social lockdowns on momentary well-being are yet not fully understood.Method:We investigated the individual affective benefit from social interactions in a longitu...

BACKGROUND Wearable technology is a leading fitness trend with a growing commercial industry and an established method to collect physical behavior data in research studies. High-quality free-living validation studies are required to enable both researchers and consumers to make a guided decision on which study to rely on and which device to use. H...

Background: Wearable technology is a leading fitness trend in the growing commercial industry and an established method for collecting 24-hour physical behavior data in research studies. High-quality free-living validation studies are required to enable both researchers and consumers to make guided decisions on which study to rely on and which dev...

Ambulantes Assessment (AA), auch bekannt als Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), Experience Sampling Method (ESM) oder real-time data capture, bezeichnet computergestützte Methoden zur Erhebung von Selbstauskünften, Verhalten, Kontextparametern und physiologischen Prozessen im Alltag. Es ermöglicht wiederholte, multimodale Echtzeiterfassungen so...

Physical behavior (i.e., physical activity, sedentary behavior, and sleep) is a crucial lifestyle factor for preventing and managing diseases across the lifespan. However, less is known about potential work-related psychological and cognitive outcomes such as productivity. The present study examined within-person associations between physical behav...

Public health challenges such as physical inactivity are multiplex and cannot be effectively addressed by single organizations or sectors. For this reason, public health policies have to involve various sectors and foster partnerships among organizations. Social network analysis (SNA) provides a methodological toolkit that enables the investigation...

Precision psychiatry stands to benefit from the latest digital technologies for assessment and analyses to tailor treatment towards individuals. Insights into dynamic psychological processes as they unfold in humans' everyday life can critically add value in understanding symptomatology and environmental stressors to provide individualized treatmen...

Background: Social integration is a major resilience factor for staying healthy. However, the COVID-19-pandemic led to unprecedented restrictions in social life. The consequences of these social lockdowns on momentary well-being are yet not fully understood. Method: We investigated the individual affective benefit from social interactions in a long...

Emotional intelligence (EI) is considered a determinant of sports performance. Two opposing perspectives have been discussed in the theoretical discourse on EI: EI as an ability versus EI as a trait, both widely differing in content and method of assessment. Previous applied sport psychology research is characterized by a heterogeneous use of diffe...

Social embedding and social support are critical for mental health protection. Here, we study increases in affective well-being in naturalistic social contexts,¹ a concept that we call social affective benefit (SAB). Unlike traditional inventory-based measures, which quantify differences between study participants, SAB reflects within-person social...

Physical activity substantially improves well-being and mental health, but the underlying brain processes remain unclear. Most research concerns exercise, although the majority of everyday human behaviors, such as walking or stair climbing, are nonexercise activities. Combining neuroimaging with ecological assessment of activity and GPS-triggered s...

The physical activity enjoyment scale (PACES) is a measurement instrument that is commonly used in monitoring and intervention research to assess how much people enjoy being physically active, as this has been related to physical activity adherence. However, while the measurement properties of PACES are well-researched in the English language, ther...

A theory-driven classification recently introduced to sport psychology distinguishes between goal-directed self-talk as a controlled type of self-talk, and spontaneous self-talk as an uncontrolled type of self-talk. Based on this classification, the aim of this study was to explore the relationship between self-talk and emotions. To this end, twent...

There is growing evidence that sedentary behavior is a risk factor for somatic and mental health. However, there is still a lack of objective field methods, which can assess both components of sedentary behavior: the postural (sitting/lying) and the movement intensity part. The purpose of the study was to compare the validity of different accelerom...

Physical activity is beneficial for human physical health and well‐being. Accordingly, the association between physical activity and mood in everyday life has been a subject of several Ambulatory Assessment studies. This mechanism has been studied in children, adults and the elderly, but neglected in adolescents. It is critical to examine this mech...

Technological and digital progress benefits physical activity (PA) research. Here we compiled expert knowledge on how Ambulatory Assessment (AA) is utilized to advance PA research, i.e., we present results of the 2nd International CAPA Workshop 2019 “Physical Activity Assessment – State of the Science, Best Practices, Future Directions” where invit...

Accelerometers offer opportunities for researchers to capture valid data about the intensity and amount of physical behavior (PB) in real-time over a period of several days and weeks. From this multidimensional data, a great number of metrics can be derived to capture and describe the unique aspects of PB. The goal of this paper is to help the end-...

Humans in the industrialized world spend a large amount of daily time in sedentary behaviour. Since sedentariness negatively impacts a variety of psycho‐physiological outcomes the identification of antecedents that lead to sedentary behaviour is an important public health issue. In this context, mood, a central indicator for both psychological well...

A growing body of literature indicates a potential role for physical exercise in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Suggested effects include the reduction of ADHD core symptoms as well as improvements in executive functions. In the current review, we provide a short overview on the neurophysiological mechanisms assum...

The breathtaking technological progress in the field of mobile computing, smartphones and wearables offers new opportunities for psychiatric research and therapy. Wearables enable not only the objective assessment of psychiatric symptoms in real time and everyday life but using continuous monitoring and analysis of relevant parameters can also defi...

Psychiatric morbidity is high in cities, so identifying potential modifiable urban protective factors is important. We show that exposure to urban green space improves well-being in naturally behaving male and female city dwellers, particularly in districts with higher psychiatric incidence and fewer green resources. Higher green-related affective...

Rapid worldwide urbanization benefits humans in many aspects, but the prevalence of common psychiatric disorders is increased in urban populations. While the impact of city living and urban upbringing on mental health is well established, it remains elusive which of the multiple factors of urban living convey risk and resilience for mental disorder...

Introduction: Experimental evidence shows that breaking-up sedentary behavior is positively associated with positive mental health outcomes. However, whether sedentary breaks influence mood in everyday life is largely unknown. Moreover, it is unclear which break patterns are most beneficial to enhance mood. Methods: To investigate the degree to...

Empirical evidence shows that physical behavior positively impacts human health. Recently, researchers have started to differentiate between physical activity and sedentary behavior showing independent effects on somatic health. However, whether this differentiation is also relevant for mood dimensions is largely unknown. For investigating the dyna...

Technological progress offers the chance to incorporate health interventions into everyday life, for example, on smartphones, which may be beneficial for people with mental illness. However, there is a large gap between what is technically feasible and what is known about effects on everyday life. For example, exercise is known to reduce depression...

Physical activity is known to preserve both physical and mental health. However, the physical activity levels of a large proportion of adolescents are insufficient. This is critical, since physical activity levels in youth have been shown to translate into adulthood. Whereas in adult populations, mood has been supposed to be one important psycholog...

Introduction Given the large influx of city dwellers worldwide, the considerably heightened prevalence of psychiatric disorders in cities is a macrosocial challenge. Recent evidence points towards an altered neuronal stress regulation, e.g., in the anterior cingulate cortex as a central underling phenotypic change caused by urbanicity [1]. However,...

Besonders im Leistungssport liegt noch ein weiter Weg zum pragmatischen und offenen Umgang mit psychischen Erkrankungen vor uns. Als Wegweiser geben wir im Folgenden einen Überblick über Häufigkeit, Entstehung und Behandlungsmöglichkeiten psychischer Beschwerden bei Leistungssportlern. Dabei skizzieren wir Perspektiven, wie es gelingen kann, neben...

Introduction: The association between physical activity and mood is of major importance to increase physical activity as a prevention strategy for noncommunicable diseases and to improve mental health. Unfortunately, existing studies examining how physical activity and mood wax and wane within persons over time in everyday life do show ambiguous f...

Self-reporting is a well-established approach within the medical and psychological sciences. In order to avoid recall bias, i.e. past events being remembered inaccurately, the reports can be filled out on a smartphone in real-time and in the natural environment. This is often referred to as ambulatory assessment and the reports are usually triggere...

A physically active lifestyle has been related to positive health outcomes and high life expectancy, but the underlying psychological mechanisms maintaining physical activity are rarely investigated. Tremendous technological progress yielding sophisticated methodological approaches, i.e., ambulatory assessment, have recently enabled the study of th...

Background: Psychiatric research is increasingly interested in the influence of social and environmental contexts on human health. According to recent findings, specific impacts of urban upbringing relate to the heightened prevalence of mental disorders. Although this is a major societal problem, it remains unknown which environmental components (e...

In ambulatory assessment, psychologists apply experience sampling methods (ESM) on mobile devices to assess self-reports from subjects. One major challenge is to support domain experts to create ESM apps themselves without prior programming knowledge. When running ESM apps, subjects are prompted to answer self-reports time-triggered at fixed points...

The experience sampling method (ESM) is applied in ambulatory assessment to prompt subject self-reporting. Existing mobile apps provide time-triggered prompts but lack event-triggers. Hence, the sampling might not occur in moments that are of interest for a psychologist. To identify relevant sensor sources and contexts we conducted an online survey...

We present MoA², a context-aware smartphone app for the ambulatory assessment of mood, tiredness and stress level. In principle, it has two features: (1) mood assessment and (2) mood recognition. The mood assessment system combines benefits of state of the art approaches. The mood recognition is concluded by smartphone-based wearable sensing. In a...

In ambulatory assessment, subjects are monitored in everyday life. Though, it is diffcult to unobtrusively assess information - e.g. about their context and affective state - which results in an increased burden for the subjects. This burden is caused by a complex self-report that they need to provide or by additional wearables that need to be carr...

Mental health and well-being can be related to both individual as well as environmental factors. In order to address the latter relationship we use an Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) approach to capture the mood of 10 persons in real-time and real-life via questionnaires sent to their smartphones. This paper focuses on the timing of the quest...

Background: Abnormalities in motor activity represent a central feature in major depressive disorder. However, measurement issues are poorly understood, limiting the use of objective measurement of motor activity for diagnostics and treatment monitoring. Methods: To improve measurement issues, especially sensor placement, analytic strategies and...