Welcome to the Clinical Stress and Emotion Lab

Welcome to the Laboratory for Clinical Stress and Emotion Research

The Laboratory for Clinical Stress and Emotion Research focuses its teaching and research on the development, maintenance, and treatment of mental disorders with an emphasis on trauma sequelae, anxiety disorders, and affective disorders.

Approaches and methods from clinical psychology, as well as emotion and stress research, are primarily used to uncover etiological and maintenance mechanisms of disorders. These research approaches aim to better understand mental disorders, e.g., by examining cognitive, emotional, psychophysiological, and neurobiological factors in their development and maintenance. Insights gained from these studies are incorporated into the (further) development and efficacy testing of innovative intervention procedures in behavior therapy.

The Clinical Stress and Emotion Research Laboratory is also a teaching laboratory that trains master’s students, doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars in the elicitation and analysis of stress- and emotion-related processes, enabling them to develop an overarching perspective on understanding mental disorders.

Numerous core skills of clinical psychology research are taught in the laboratory, including the performance and analysis of structured clinical diagnostics, psychophysiological (e.g., ECG, EDA, EMG, respiration, pulse), hormonal (e.g., cortisol, progesterone, estradiol), and neural (e.g., fMRI, polysomnography) measurements. Laboratory tests are extended by ambulatory measurements in the context of everyday life (via smartphone app and mobile measuring devices) in order to record psychological symptoms in the daily life of patients in an ecologically valid way.