Michèle Wessa

German Cancer Research Center(DKFZ)/Central Institite of Mental Health (ZI) · Cancer Survivorship and Psychological Resilience/Neuropsychology and Psychological Resilience Research

Resilience has been defined as the maintenance or quick recovery of mental health during and after stressor exposure. One popular operationalization of this concept is to model prototypical trajectories of mental health in response to an adverse event, where trajectories of undisturbed low or rapidly recovering symptoms both comply with the resilie...

Background Preventing mental health problems and promoting mental wellbeing is the aim of school-based mental health literacy (MHL) programs. Previous research suggests that good MHL (knowledge and skills regarding mental health, resilience, and help-seeking) helps people to take good care of their own and others’ mental health and use support-serv...

The effects of athletic burnout on life satisfaction vary greatly between individuals, but few studies have examined influencing factors, such as coping mechanisms, that explain these differences. While athletes’ performance levels seem to influence the development of burnout symptoms, there is a lack of studies examining different performance leve...

Perceived control is a key mechanism implicated in stress resilience. A tendency to perceive control over stressors may protect individuals against negative outcomes across various situations by increasing active coping and preventing exacerbated stress reactions. Assuming that individual differences in perceived control during an uncontrollable st...

Background: Societal measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 (eg, lockdown and contact restrictions) have been associated with decreased health and well-being. A multitude of prepandemic studies identified the beneficial effects of physical exercise on both physical and mental health. Objective: We report on the feasibility of a remote physic...

Interpretation biases in the processing of ambiguous affective information are assumed to play an important role in the onset and maintenance of emotional disorders. Reports of low reliability for experimental measures of cognitive biases have called into question previous findings on the association of these measures with markers of mental health...

The preprint is an extended abstract of a poster presented at the 9th Symposium of Resilience Research, held at Mainz from the 27th to the 29th September 2023.

Theoretical background: Climate change, loss of biodiversity, and other ecological crises can be frightening, saddening, and guilt-inducing. Despite a recent surge of environmental-psychological research dedicated to these eco-emotions, it remains unclear how individuals should deal with such affective states. Accordingly, the motivational and path...

Stress resilience is the maintenance of mental health despite adversity. We have predicted that a tendency to appraise stressors in a realistic to slightly unrealistically positive fashion (positive appraisal style, PAS) is prospectively associated with more resilient outcomes; that PAS is a proximal and integrative resilience factor, mediating the...

Successful and efficient emotion regulation (ER) is a key mechanism for mental health. However, acute stress may impact the ability to cognitively regulate negative emotions due to its immediate effects on executive functioning. Based on previous studies, we expected that the time at which ER is tested after a stressor might have a decisive influen...

Appraisal refers to the evaluation of stimuli or situations with respect to an individual’s goals and needs. Stimuli or situations that are appraised as a threat to one’ goals and needs (‘stressors’) induce stress responses (‘stress’). Stressor appraisal occurs on various dimensions, of which the magnitude or cost of a potential adverse outcome, th...

In the face of climate change, people experience a variety of emotions, e.g., guilt, grief, anger, anxiety, or even shock. Although these emotions are generally considered unpleasant, they may play a key role in dealing with climate change by motivating climate action. In 2022, Ágoston et al. introduced three questionnaires to assess eco-guilt (EGu...

Societies are exposed to major challenges at an increasing pace. This underscores the need for preventive measures such as resilience promotion that should be available in time and without access barriers. Our systematic review summarizes evidence on digital resilience interventions, which have the potential to meet these demands. We searched five...

Positive Appraisal Style Theory of Resilience posits that a person’s general style of evaluating stressors plays a central role in mental health and resilience. Specifically, a tendency to appraise stressors positively (positive appraisal style; PAS) is theorized to be protective of mental health and thus a key resilience factor. To this date no me...

Patients with bipolar disorder (BD) experience more frequent and intense emotions in response to environmental conditions relative to healthy subjects, which leads to mood instability. The aim of this study was to investigate the time-course of emotion regulation strategies, distraction, and reappraisal, in euthymic BD patients using electroencepha...

Sports injuries are ubiquitous and can have far-reaching consequences for athletes (e.g., health, performance). Previous studies have examined various psychosocial influencing factors (e.g., stress), but have mostly focused on only one or two injury characteristics (e.g., frequency), neglecting the broader injury pattern. Thus, the present study ai...

Based on previous studies, the present four experiments (total N = 468) aimed at investigating the effectivity of rumination induction in different experimental settings. We were particularly interested in rumination in the context of individual goal achievement and tested whether an instruction that referred to unresolved goals had a direct observ...

A negative interpretation bias appears to depend on several depression-related state and trait characteristics, most notably depressive symptoms, negative mood, and negative cognitive schemas. While empirical findings for explicitly assessed interpretation bias are rather consistent, implicit measures have revealed heterogeneous results. In this co...

In the face of climate change, people experience a variety of emotions, e.g., guilt, grief, and anxiety. Although these emotions are generally considered unpleasant, they may play a key role in dealing with climate change by motivating pro-environmental behavior. In 2022, Ágoston et al. introduced three questionnaires to assess eco-guilt (EGuiQ-11)...

BACKGROUND Societal measures to contain the outspread of COVID-19 (e.g., lockdown, contact restrictions) have been associated with decreased health and well-being. A multitude of pre-pandemic studies identified the beneficial effects of physical exercise on both physical and mental health. OBJECTIVE Here, we report on the feasibility of a remote p...

Background Societal measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 (eg, lockdown and contact restrictions) have been associated with decreased health and well-being. A multitude of prepandemic studies identified the beneficial effects of physical exercise on both physical and mental health. Objective We report on the feasibility of a remote physical e...

Engagement with music has the capacity to influence and be influenced by affective experiences. Although cross-sectional and experimental research provides evidence that music engagement is related to higher positive and lower negative affect, few studies have investigated the bidirectional nature of this relationship over time. The present longitu...

Background Stress is among the leading causes for diseases. The assessment of subjectively perceived stress is essential for resilience research. While the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) is a widely used questionnaire, a German short version of the scale is not yet available. In the current study, we developed such a short version using a machine lea...

Background: Work-related stress is a risk factor for a number of adverse health and work outcomes. Resilience trainings are a promising approach for adequately dealing with work stress and keeping employees mentally healthy. However, results of previous resilience trainings have been heterogeneous, ranging from null findings to large effects. Exis...

Climate change can be frightening. Accordingly, individuals report negative emotions such as eco anxiety (i.e., a fear of environmental doom) with increasing frequency. However, previous research identified the potential of eco anxiety to motivate pro-environmental behavior. Conversely, studies on emotion regulation found that the frequent use of c...

Societal measures to contain the outspread of COVID-19 (e.g., lockdown, contact restrictions) have been associated with decreased health and well-being. A multitude of pre-pandemic studies, however, identified the beneficial effects of physical exercise on both physical and mental health. Consequently, we investigated the buffering potential of a p...

Background and objectives: Previous research identified cognitive reappraisal as an adaptive emotion regulation strategy. However, theories on emotion regulation flexibility suggest that reappraisal effectiveness (RE) may depend on an individual's familiarity with stressors. In this study, we expect high reappraisal inventiveness (RI), i.e., the g...

Background/Objective: Several factors associated with resilience as the maintenance of mental health despite stress exposure can be strengthened through participation in leisure time activities. Since many people listen to or make music in their leisure time, the aim of the present study was to provide insights into the architecture of how resilien...

Background: Analyzing cortical folding may provide insight into the biological underpinnings of neurodevelopmental diseases. A neurodevelopmental subtype of bipolar disorders (BD-ND) has been characterized by the combination of early age of onset and psychotic features. We investigate potential cortical morphology differences associated with this...

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global stressor with inter-individually differing influences on mental health trajectories. Polygenic Risk Scores (PRSs) for psychiatric phenotypes are associated with individual mental health predispositions. Elevated hair cortisol concentrations (HCC) and high PRSs are related to negative mental health outcomes. We anal...

Background Internationally as well as nationally there is a strong call to anchor health promotion in schools, not only but especially in connection with the growing rate of psychological problems during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In recent years the promotion of mental health literacy has received increasing attention as a p...

Substantial evidence shows that physical activity and fitness play a protective role in the development of stress related disorders. However, the beneficial effects of fitness for resilience to modern life stress are not fully understood. Potentially protective effects may be attributed to enhanced resilience via underlying psychosocial mechanisms...

Deep learning approaches can uncover complex patterns in data. In particular, variational autoencoders achieve this by a non-linear mapping of data into a low-dimensional latent space. Motivated by an application to psychological resilience in the Mainz Resilience Project, which features intermittent longitudinal measurements of stressors and menta...

In this study, a new group intervention program to foster resilience in nursing professionals was tested for efficacy. In total, 72 nurses were recruited and randomised to either an intervention condition or to a wait list control condition. The study had a pre-test, post-test, follow-up design. The eight-week program targeted six resilience factor...

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted severe restrictions on everyday life to curb the spread of infections. For example, teaching at universities has been switched to an online format, reducing students' opportunities for exchange, and social interaction. Consequently, their self-reported mental health has significantly decreased and there is a press...

Resilience to stress has gained increasing interest by researchers from the field of mental health and illness and some recent studies have investigated resilience from a network perspective. General self-efficacy constitutes an important resilience factor. High levels of self-efficacy have shown to promote resilience by serving as a stress buffer....

Animal research has repeatedly shown that control is a key variable in the brain's stress response. Uncontrollable stress triggers a release of monoamines, impairing prefrontal functions while enhancing subcortical circuits. Conversely, control over an adverse event involves prefrontally mediated downregulation of monoamine nuclei and is considered...

Neuroimaging evidence implicates structural network-level abnormalities in bipolar disorder (BD); however, there remain conflicting results in the current literature hampered by sample size limitations and clinical heterogeneity. Here, we set out to perform a multisite graph theory analysis to assess the extent of neuroanatomical dysconnectivity in...

Recent theories propose moderate (compared to high or no) stressor exposure to promote emotion regulation capacities. More precisely, stressful situations are expected to serve as practice opportunities for cognitive reappraisal, i.e. the reinterpretation of a situation to alter its emotional impact. Accordingly, in this study we expect an inverted...

Traditional supervised learning with deep neural networks requires a tremendous amount of labelled data to converge to a good solution. For 3D medical images, it is often impractical to build a large homogeneous annotated dataset for a specific pathology. Self-supervised methods offer a new way to learn a representation of the images in an unsuperv...

Resilience is the maintenance and/or quick recovery of mental health during and after periods of adversity. It is conceptualized to result from a dynamic process of successful adaptation to stressors. Up to now, a large number of resilience factors have been proposed, but the mechanisms underlying resilience are not yet understood. To shed light on...

Resilience has been defined as the maintenance or quick recovery of mental health during and after times of adversity. How to operationalize resilience and to determine the factors and processes that lead to good long-term mental health outcomes in stressor-exposed individuals is a matter of ongoing debate and of critical importance for the advance...

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting measures can be regarded as a global stressor. Cross-sectional studies showed rather negative impacts on people’s mental health, while longitudinal studies considering pre-lockdown data are still scarce. The present study investigated the impact of COVID-19 related lockdown measures in a longitudinal German sampl...

Traditional supervised learning with deep neural networks requires a tremendous amount of labelled data to converge to a good solution. For 3D medical images, it is often impractical to build a large homogeneous annotated dataset for a specific pathology. Self-supervised methods offer a new way to learn a representation of the images in an unsuperv...

BACKGROUND Physical activity ameliorates chronic stress. Latest research suggests a relation between resilience and physical fitness. Beneficial adaptations of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the sympathetic nervous system, the endocannabinoid system, and the tryptophan pathway, induced by an active lifestyle, are considered to be resilien...

Background Physical activity alleviates chronic stress. The latest research suggests a relationship between resilience and physical fitness. Beneficial adaptations of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, sympathetic nervous system, endocannabinoid system, and tryptophan pathway, which are induced by an active lifestyle, are considered to be con...

Cognitive emotion regulation is a key mechanism for the maintenance of mental health, but may fail, when individuals are exposed to acute stress. To date, it is not well understood whether and to what extent acute stress effects contribute to impairments in emotion regulation capacities as the sparse existing studies have yielded heterogeneous resu...

Animal research has repeatedly shown that experience of control over an aversive event can protect against the negative consequences of later uncontrollable stress. Neurobiologically, this effect is assumed to correspond to persistent changes in the pathway linking the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the dorsal raphe nucleus. However, it...

Resilience to stress has gained increasing interest by researchers from the field of psychology and psychiatry. Several studies have investigated resilience from a network perspective. General self-efficacy constitutes an important resilience factor. High levels of self-efficacy have shown to promote resilience by serving as a stress buffer. However, li...

Deep learning approaches can uncover complex patterns in data. In particular, variational autoencoders (VAEs) achieve this by a non-linear mapping of data into a low-dimensional latent space. Motivated by an application to psychological resilience in the Mainz Resilience Project (MARP), which features intermittent longitudinal measurements of stres...

Theories on the aetiology of depression in humans are intimately linked to animal research on stressor controllability effects. However, explicit translations of established animal designs are lacking. In two consecutive studies, we developed a translational paradigm to study stressor controllability effects in humans. In the first study, we compar...

MRI‐derived brain measures offer a link between genes, the environment and behavior and have been widely studied in bipolar disorder (BD). However, many neuroimaging studies of BD have been underpowered, leading to varied results and uncertainty regarding effects. The Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta‐Analysis (ENIGMA) Bipolar Disorder...

Background Resilience can be defined as maintaining or regaining mental health during or after significant adversities such as a potentially traumatising event, challenging life circumstances, a critical life transition or physical illness. Healthcare students, such as medical, nursing, psychology and social work students, are exposed to various st...

Background Resilience can be defined as the maintenance or quick recovery of mental health during or after periods of stressor exposure, which may result from a potentially traumatising event, challenging life circumstances, a critical life transition phase, or physical illness. Healthcare professionals, such as nurses, physicians, psychologists an...

Trivial acts of dishonesty are very prevalent in everyday life and have severe economic and societal consequences. The present study aims to examine the role of descriptive and injunctive norms in minor and major dishonesty under ambiguity. We devised a novel experimental design in which rule violations can be the result of honest mistakes or vario...

Background/Objective: Stress is perceived differently across individuals, which might be particularly true for nonclinical and clinical subjects. For this reason, we tested a German adaption of the 10-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) for model fit and measurement invariance in a big nonclinical and clinical sample. Method: We (1) conducted mult...

Identifying individual differences in stress reactivity is of particular interest in the context of stress-related disorders and resilience. Previous studies already identified several factors mediating the individual stress response of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA). However, the impact of long-term HPA axis activity on acute stress...

Resilience has been defined as the maintenance or quick recovery of mental health during and after times of adversity. Such good longer-term mental health outcomes despite adversity presumably result from complex and dynamic processes of adaptation to stressor exposure (‘resilience processes’), which in many cases include changes in individual prop...

Background Lithium (Li) is the gold standard treatment for bipolar disorder (BD). However, its mechanisms of action remain unknown but include neurotrophic effects. We here investigated the influence of Li on cortical and local grey matter (GM) volumes in a large international sample of patients with BD and healthy controls (HC). Methods We analyz...

Bipolar Disorder (BD) has a debilitating impact on psychosocial functioning and social decision-making. Recent evidence using the Ultimatum Game (UG) has shown increased rejection of moderately unfair offers in BD, suggesting impaired processing of ambiguous social information related to fairness. The present study builds upon this finding to inves...

Although bipolar disorder (BD) is a relatively frequent, severe and disabling disease, we still lack reliable diagnostic tools. The existence of anatomo-functional brain abnormalities in BD is now well established by MRI studies [1]. Machine learning allows individual level analysis and could potentially lead to diagnostic applications [2]. This is...

Background: Motivational dysregulation represents a core vulnerability factor for bipolar disorder. Whether this also comprises aberrant learning of stimulus-reinforcer contingencies is less clear. Methods: To answer this question, we compared healthy first-degree relatives of individuals with bipolar disorder (n = 42) known to convey an increas...

Background: Lithium is recommended as a first line treatment for bipolar disorders. However, only 30% of patients show an optimal outcome and variability in lithium response and tolerability is poorly understood. It remains difficult for clinicians to reliably predict which patients will benefit without recourse to a lengthy treatment trial. Great...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

The ability to regulate emotions is essential for psychological well-being. Therefore, it is particularly important to investigate the specific dynamics of emotion regulation. In a new approach, we developed a novel paradigm – the Script-based Reappraisal Test (SRT) – to measure the processes involved in reappraisal, especially reappraisal inventiv...

Motivated by the recent replicability crisis we tested replicability of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) group activations in two independent samples. An identical behavioral and fMRI test battery for the longitudinal investigation of stress resilience mechanisms was developed for the Mainz Resilience Project (MARP) and conducted in a d...