Oswald Kothgassner

I have devoted my research career to understand chronic and acute stress responses and its consequences from childhood to young adulthood and how this is related to the development and maintenance of mental disorders. I have been particularly interested in the cognitive, physiological and hormonal underpinnings of stress and their influence on psychopathology and social behavior. I try to achieve high scientific quality by developing and using innovative technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) for experimental stress research or ecological momentary assessment (EMA) for collecting data outside the laboratory. Furthermore, I focus on the developement and evaluation of new tools for psychological therapy to treat stress-related disorders in adolescence and young adults (e.g. computer-based treatments). My research fields are experimental psychopathology (e.g. self-harm, post-traumatic stress) and research on the efficacy of new therapeutic interventions for stress-related disorders (e.g. clinical trials, meta-analyses). My focus is especially on comprehensive meta-analytic approaches to comprehensively compare data from RCTs/CCTs and thereby promote tailored and patient-oriented interventions. I try to contribute for innovative approaches in therapy of stress-related disorders and enable transfer of innovative methods to clinicians in the field.