WASAD

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone in the WASAD community! 💫❄️🎄

We wish you a peaceful season and a restful end to the year - a time to unwind, reflect, and recognize both the big and small achievements of the past year.

We can't wait to see what 2026 will bring! 🎉

In addition, we want to thank the @lmumuenchen.bsky.social Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, the @mpi-psychiatry.bsky.social, the Gesellschaft für Angstforschung (GAF), the @stressnetworkch.bsky.social, the @gsrnet.bsky.social, and the Flagship UMZH Stress for collaborating with us! 🙏 🎉

As we wrap up our #WASAD2025 recap, we want to offer a big thank you to the organizing & scientific committees, speakers, moderators, and everyone who joined!

Your insightful questions, presentations, and conversations brought the congress and our discussions around stress and anxiety to life ✨

This coupling may reflect a neural mechanism involved in autonomic stress regulation, as it is correlated to both genetic stress-related predispositions, as well as psychometric assessments of stress coping styles.

Their findings reveal a stress-specific dynamic in heart rate-insula coupling, with the posterior insula showing a stress-dependent negative association with heart rate uniquely during a task that robustly modulates cardiovascular arousal.

Congratulations to Mira Erhart, Ronja Brinkmann, and colleagues for their poster award, received for their work exploring “Posterior Insula Coupling with Individual Heart Rate during Acute Stress as a Resilience Marker”! 🫀🧠🏆

While a closer link of anxiety, depression and ADHD with PIU was observed one year after the first lockdown in comparison to the first wave of assessment, the association between PIU and Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) remained constant.

👉 wasad2025.org/wp-content/u...

In their research, they explored how associations between mental health variables and problematic internet use (PIU) may have changed during the pandemic.

Congratulations to Anita Meinke and colleagues for winning one of our poster awards, with their poster “Change in the association between mental health and problematic internet use in adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic”! 📱🏆

However, NSSI events during the sampling period were mostly triggered by real-life events.

These results underscore the need for targeted interventions addressing online interactions to mitigate NSSI behaviors and improve adolescent mental health.

In comparing adolescents with and without a history of NSSI, they showed that for adolescents who engage in NSSI, negative events on social media were more strongly associated with perceived stress, negative affect, and NSSI urges than real-life negative events.

Congratulations to @andreasgoreis.bsky.social and colleagues for winning one of three poster awards for their poster titled “Impact of Social Media on Triggering Nonsuicidal Self-Injury (NSSI) in Adolescents: A Comparative Ambulatory Assessment Study”! 📱💬 🏆

In addition, he outlined promising future directions for the treatment of these trauma-related disorders, for example by using dynamic indicators for treatment planning to identify the optimal timing for trauma-focused interventions.

In his keynote lecture, “Treatment of PTSD: State-of-the-Art and Beyond,” Professor Thomas Ehring @thomasehring.bsky.social, Chair of Clinical Psychology and Psychological Treatment at LMU Munich @lmu-klips.bsky.social, offered an overview of current evidence-based interventions for PTSD and CPTSD.

At #WASAD2025 he primarily addressed the latter with his insightful keynote on "Virtual Reality in anxiety – perspectives and limitations".

His main clinical and research focus is on neurobiology, psychopharmacology and psychotherapy of depression and anxiety disorders, neurostimulation, E-mental Health and Virtual Reality (VR).

Keynote Lecture 4/5:

Professor Dr. Peter Zwanzger is Medical Director of the kbo-Inn-Salzach Hospital, a teaching hospital of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (@lmumuenchen.bsky.social).

Swipe through the photos above for a glimpse into his exploration of the brain-heart connection! 💥🧠🫀.

“Is there a conductor for the orchestrated stress-induced interaction between brain and heart?”

This central question guided the keynote lecture delivered by Karl-Heinz Ladwig, Professor of Psychosomatic Medicine and Medical Psychology at the Technical University of Munich (@tum.de).

His lecture, “Decoding the impact of genetic risk factors and stress exposure on psychiatric disorders,” offered valuable insights into his research on gene–environment interactions, neuropeptide pathways, and other stress-related disease mechanisms. 🧬🧠

The second keynote lecture of #WASAD2025 was held by Dr. Jan Deussing, Head of the Molecular Neurogenetics research group at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry (@mpi-psychiatry.bsky.social) in Munich, Germany.

In her lecture, Professor Penninx shared findings from her research on the prevalence of anxiety disorders, discussing potential reasons for their apparent increase, strategies to alleviate their burden, and the functional component of stress.

“Complete freedom from stress is death.” – Hans Selye

Highlight of the Opening Ceremony was the Hans Selye Lecture, delivered by Brenda Penninx, Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, on the topic “Towards Reducing the Public Health Burden of Anxiety Disorders.”

📊 The scientific program included:

🔹 5 keynote lectures
🔸 15 plenary sessions...
🔹 ...with a total of 61 presentations
🔸 50 on-site posters
🔹 and 5 ePosters!!

First off: #WASAD2025 in numbers! 📊

👉 In total, 227 researchers, clinicians, and psychologists from 19 countries attended the Congress.

The top countries of origin were:
🇩🇪 Germany
🇨🇭 Switzerland
🇦🇹 Austria
…followed closely, however, by 🇨🇿 the Czech Republic.

Thank you all for sharing your impressions of #WASAD2025 during and after the Congress! It was wonderful to see the event reflected through your words and photos.

In the next few posts, we’ll take a moment to look back and recap some highlights 🔆

🔔 Part 7 in our #WASAD2025, @wasadorg.bsky.social, series:

@markusforamitti.bsky.social presented his poster: “Modulating Stress through Sound: The Effects of Historical Metallic Idiophones on Human Responses.”

🎨 Part 6 in our #WASAD2025, @wasadorg.bsky.social, series:

Dr. Anna Fekete presented her poster “Exploring the Impact of Art on Pain and Stress: Multimodal Art and Music Enhance Pain Tolerance, but Do Not Influence Autonomic and Endocrine Markers.”

🫠Part 5 in our #WASAD2025, @wasadorg.bsky.social, series:

@markusforamitti.bsky.social presented his talk “Regulating Collective Emotion Through Music: Diachronic Analysis of Stress, Sentiment, and Complexity in Lyrics (1973–2023)” in the Everyday life stress session.🙃

⏳Part 4 in our #WASAD2025, @wasadorg.bsky.social, series:

@celinebencker.bsky.social presented her talk “Trajectories of everyday life stress across the menstrual cycle” in the Everyday life stress session.