Raffael Kalisch

EU Horizon2020 project DynaMORE (Dynamic MOdelling of REsilience) · Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research (LIR) Mainz

Significance Traumatic events can engender persistent excessive fear responses to trauma reminders that may return even after successful treatment. In the psychotherapy of fear or anxiety disorders, patients make safety experiences that generate fear-inhibitory safety memories. Fear, however, frequently returns because safety memory retrieval fails...

The well-replicated observation that many people maintain mental health despite exposure to severe psychological or physical adversity has ignited interest in the mechanisms that protect against stress-related mental illness. Focusing on resilience rather than pathophysiology in many ways represents a paradigm shift in clinical-psychological and ps...

p>Consistent failure over the past few decades to reduce the high prevalence of stress-related disorders has motivated a search for alternative research strategies. Resilience refers to the phenomenon of many people maintaining mental health despite exposure to psychological or physical adversity. Instead of aiming to understand the pathophysiology...

Fear extinction does not prevent post-traumatic stress or have long-term therapeutic benefits in fear-related disorders unless extinction memories are easily retrieved at later encounters with the once-threatening stimulus. Previous research in rodents has pointed towards a role for spontaneous prefrontal activity occurring after extinction learnin...

It is a joyous relief when an event we dread fails to materialize. In fear extinction, the appetitive nature of an omitted aversive event is not a mere epiphenomenon but drives the reduction of fear responses and the formation of long-term extinction memories. Dopamine emerges as key neurobiological mediator of these related processes.

Adverse life experiences are associated with an increased risk of mental disorders. The successful adaptation to adversity and maintenance or quick restoration of mental health despite adversity is referred to as resilience. Identifying factors that promote resilience can contribute to the prevention of mental disorders. Lifestyle behaviors, increa...

In this study, we examined how Big Five personality traits relate to outcome-based resilience in primarily female, upper-middle class, ethnically diverse U.S. adolescents (baseline N = 535; age range = 15–17) oversampled on elevated neuroticism. Cross-sectional, prospective-longitudinal, and dynamic analyses were performed with 8-year longitudinal...

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 Up to 30% of pregnant individuals experience high levels of stress. At the same time, 15-20% of new mothers develop postpartum depression, and 25-35% experience postpartum anxiety. Mobile applications have the potential to provide an accessible, scalable solution to these mental health challenges. However, previous evidence indicates tha...

Background: Stress-related disorders present a significant global burden. There is great need for effective, preventive measures. Mobile just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAI) have the potential to be applied in real time and context-specifically, precisely when individuals need them most. However, they have not been widely implemented in the...

This study investigates the role of positive cognitive reappraisal (PCR) flexibility and variability in mental health in response to real-life stressors among college students. We employed ecological momentary assessment and intervention through ReApp, a mobile app designed to train and promote PCR. We analyzed data from the intervention groups acr...

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...

Objective Digital mental health interventions delivered via smartphone-based apps effectively treat various conditions; however, optimizing their efficacy while minimizing participant burden remains a key challenge. In this study, we investigated the potential benefits of a burst delivery design (i.e. interventions delivered only in pre-defined tim...

People with Parkinson’s disease (PD) are sensitive to effects of long-term stress, but might differ in stress resilience, i.e. the ability to maintain mental health despite adversity. It is unclear whether stress resilience in PD is predominantly determined by dopamine deficiency, psychosocial factors, or both. In PD animal models, chronic stressor...

Even after successful extinction, conditioned fear can return. Strengthening the consolidation of the fear-inhibitory safety memory formed during extinction is one way to counteract return of fear. In a previous study, we found that post-extinction L-DOPA administration improved extinction memory retrieval 24 h later. Furthermore, spontaneous post-...

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...

An interesting recent development in emotion research and clinical psychology is the discovery that affective states can be modeled as a network of temporally interacting moods or emotions. Additionally, external factors like stressors or treatments can influence the mood network by amplifying or dampening the activation of specific moods. Research...

Stress resilience is the phenomenon that some people maintain their mental health despite exposure to adversity or show only temporary impairments followed by quick recovery. Resilience research attempts to unravel the factors and mechanisms that make resilience possible and to harness its insights for the development of preventative interventions...

Objective: This study examines whether resilience and mentalizing capacities affect the network constellation of various protective and risk factors among psychotherapists during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: A multinational sample of N = 536 psychotherapists completed surveys regarding their mentalizing capacity, general resilience, and therapist...

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...

Introduction Although the COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected wellbeing of at-risk groups, most research on resilience employed convenience samples. We investigated psychosocial resilience and risk factors (RFs) for the wellbeing of psychotherapists and other mental health practitioners, an under-researched population that provides essential su...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on population-wide mental health and well-being. Although people experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage may be especially vulnerable, they experience barriers in accessing mental health care. To overcome these barriers, the World Health Organization (WHO) designed two scalable psychosocial interve...

Background The mobile Agnew Relationship Measure (mARM) is a self-report questionnaire for the evaluation of digital mental health interventions and their interactions with users. With the global increase in digital mental health intervention research, translated measures are required to conduct research with local populations. Objective The aim o...

Robust reward sensitivity may help preserve mental well‐being in the face of adversity and has been proposed as a key stress resilience factor. Here, we present a mobile health application, “Imager,” which targets reward sensitivity by training individuals to create mental images of future rewarding experiences. We conducted a two‐arm randomized co...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected the mental health of international migrant workers (IMWs). IMWs experience multiple barriers to accessing mental health care. Two scalable interventions developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) were adapted to address some of these barriers: Doing What Matters in times of stress (DWM)...

Background Cross-sectional relationships between psychosocial resilience factors (RFs) and resilience, operationalized as the outcome of low mental health reactivity to stressor exposure (low “stressor reactivity” [SR]), were reported during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Objective Extending these findings, we here examined prosp...

Background. Healthcare workers (HCWs) in COVID-19 pandemic hotspots were exposed to workplace stressors. Structural occupational factors that prevent stressor exposure from translating into mental health problems (i.e., resilience factors) remain poorly understood. This study identifies resilience factors actionable at the workplace and examines th...

Objective: Digital mental health interventions delivered via smartphone-based apps effectively treat various conditions, but optimizing their efficacy while minimizing participant burden remains a key challenge. Here, we investigated the potential benefits of a burst delivery design, i.e., intervention delivered only in pre-defined time intervals,...

Background: People with Parkinson’s disease (PD) are very sensitive to psychological stress, but not everybody reacts the same to adversity. The ability to maintain mental health despite adverse events has been conceptualized as stress-resilience. It is unclear whether stress-resilience in PD is predominantly determined by dopamine deficiency, psyc...

BACKGROUND Although the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic has severely affected wellbeing of at-risk groups, most research on resilience employed convenience samples. OBJECTIVE We investigated psychosocial resilience and risk factors (RFs) for the wellbeing of psychotherapists and other mental health practitioners, an under-researched population that provides e...

Background: Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a substantial burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies for the prevention and treatment of mental disorders requires a better understanding of their risk and resilience factors. This multicenter study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psychol...

Even after successful extinction, conditioned fear can return. Strengthening the consolidation of the fear-inhibitory safety memory formed during extinction is one way to counteract return of fear. In this preregistered direct replication study in male participants, we confirm that spontaneous post-extinction reactivations of a neural activation pa...

Background Evidence-based mental health interventions to support healthcare workers (HCWs) in crisis settings are scarce. Objective To evaluate the capacity of a mental health intervention in reducing anxiety and depression symptoms in HCWs, relative to enhanced care as usual (eCAU), amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We conducted an analyst-b...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic as a public health crisis has led to a significant increase in mental health difficulties. Smoking is strongly associated with mental health conditions, which is why the pandemic might have influenced the otherwise decline in smoking rates. Persons belonging to socioeconomically disadvantaged groups may be particula...

Background Positive prospective mental imagery plays an important role in mental well-being, and depressive symptoms have been associated with difficulties in generating positive prospective mental images (PPMIs). We used a mobile app to gather PPMIs generated by young adults during the COVID-19 pandemic and analyzed content, characteristics, and a...

Consistent evidence from human data points to successful threat-safety discrimination and responsiveness to extinction of fear memories as key characteristics of resilient individuals. To promote valid cross-species approaches for the identification of resilience mechanisms, we establish a translationally informed mouse model enabling the stratific...

Introduction: Reappraisal is one of the highly modifiable resilience factors and an important emotion regulation strategy. Reappraisal training can be delivered via mobile apps; however, such apps have typically combined reappraisal with other techniques. To address this gap, we developed ReApp, which engages users solely in reappraisal. Methods: F...

When modeling longitudinal biomedical data, often dimensionality reduction as well as dynamic modeling in the resulting latent representation is needed. This can be achieved by artificial neural networks for dimension reduction and differential equations for dynamic modeling of individual-level trajectories. However, such approaches so far assume t...

Fear conditioning is a widely used laboratory model to investigate learning, memory, and psychopathology across species. The quantification of learning in this paradigm is heterogeneous in humans and psychometric properties of different quantification methods can be difficult to establish. To overcome this obstacle, calibration is a standard metrol...

BACKGROUND Cross-sectional relationships between psychosocial resilience factors (RFs) and resilience, operationalized as the outcome of low mental health reactivity to stressor exposure (low “stressor reactivity” [SR]), were reported during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. OBJECTIVE Extending these findings, we here examined prosp...

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...

Introduction Migrant populations, including workers, undocumented migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, internationally displaced persons, and other populations on the move, are exposed to a variety of stressors and potentially traumatic events before, during, and after the migration process. In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has represented an...

Background: The mobile Agnew Relationship Measure (mARM) is a self-report questionnaire for theevaluation of digital mental health interventions and their interactions with users. With theglobal increase in digital mental health intervention research, translated measures are requiredto conduct research with local populations.Objective: The aim of t...

BACKGROUND The mobile Agnew Relationship Measure (mARM) is a self-report questionnaire for the evaluation of digital mental health interventions and their interactions with users. With the global increase in digital mental health intervention research, translated measures are required to conduct research with local populations. OBJECTIVE The aim o...

Background and aims The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has challenged health services worldwide, with a worsening of healthcare workers’ mental health within initial pandemic hotspots. In early 2022, the Omicron variant is spreading rapidly around the world. This study explores the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a stepped-care programme...

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a major societal disruption, raising the question of how people can maintain or quickly regain their mental health (i.e., be resilient) during such times. Researchers have used the pandemic as a use case for studying resilience in response to a global, synchronously starting, and chronic set of stressors on the...

Measurement practice in experimental psychology is heterogeneous. Psychometric properties of measurement methods are sometimes difficult to establish, leaving researchers with few criteria to select between methods. To overcome this obstacle, calibration is a standard metrological procedure in which well-defined values of a latent variable are gene...

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...

Stress-related psychopathology is on the rise, and there is a pressing need for improved prevention strategies. Positive appraisal style, the tendency to appraise potentially threatening situations in a positive way, has been proposed to act as a key resilience mechanism and therefore offers a potential target for preventive approaches. In this art...

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...

BACKGROUND Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a significant burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies of their treatment and prevention requires knowledge about risk and resilience. This multi-center study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psychological resilience in healthy, but vulnerabl...

Background Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a substantial burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies for the prevention and treatment of mental disorders requires a better understanding of their risk and resilience factors. This multicenter study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psycholo...

Recently, cross-sectional relationships between psycho-social resilience factors (RFs) and resilience, operationalized as an outcome of low reactivity of mental health to stressor exposure (low ‘stressor reactivity’) during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, were reported. Extending these findings, we here examine prospective relationships an...

Recently, cross-sectional relationships between psycho-social resilience factors (RFs) and resilience, operationalized as an outcome of low reactivity of mental health to stressor exposure (low ‘stressor reactivity’) during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, were reported. Extending these findings, we here examine prospective relationships an...

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...

The Spielberger State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), which aims to assess state (STAI-S) and trait anxiety (STAI-T), is the most cited measure of trait anxiety and employed in a wide variety of research contexts over 50 years. Psychometric properties are key criteria for the assessment of questionnaires. For the STAI-T, data on reliability are cur...

Background: Positive prospective mental imagery plays an important role in mental well-being, and depressive symptoms have been associated with difficulties in generating positive prospective mental images (PPMIs). We used a mobile app to gather PPMIs generated by young adults during the COVID-19 pandemic and analyzed content, characteristics, and...

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic might affect mental health. Data from population-representative panel surveys with multiple waves including pre-COVID data investigating risk and protective factors are still rare. Methods: In a stratified random sample of the German household population (n = 6684), we conducted survey...

The dopamine precursor L-DOPA is a promising adjunct to exposure therapy in anxiety disorders. In two magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies we previously showed that a post-extinction administration of L-DOPA reduces the return of fear. However, when aiming to replicate these results outside the MRI scanner, we found weaker effects – albeit with...

Introduction: Robust sensitivity to reward may help preserve positive emotions in the face of adversity and has been proposed as a key resilience factor. We describe the development, feasibility, and efficacy of an mHealth application, Imager, which targets reward sensitivity by training individuals to create mental images of future rewarding exper...

When modeling longitudinal biomedical data, often dimensionality reduction as well as dynamic modeling in the resulting latent representation is needed. This can be achieved by artificial neural networks for dimension reduction, and differential equations for dynamic modeling of individual-level trajectories. However, such approaches so far assume...

Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a significant burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies of their treatment and prevention requires knowledge about risk and resilience. This multi-center study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psychological resilience in healthy, but vulnerable young adu...

Background The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic might affect mental health. Data from population-representative panel surveys with multiple waves including pre-COVID data investigating risk and protective factors are still rare. Methods In a stratified random sample of the German household population (n = 6684), we conducted survey-wei...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic might affect mental health. Data from population-representative panel surveys with multiple waves including pre-COVID data investigating risk and protective factors are still rare.Methods: In a stratified random sample of the German household population (n=6,684), we conducted survey-weighted multiple linear regres...

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...

Background In a recent cross-sectional study, we highlighted psychosocial resilience factors associated with good mental health during the first COVID-19-lockdown. However, dynamic concepts of resilience suggest that people’s response to adversity can change over time. To better understand the emergence of resilience, we here examined individual dy...