Frontiers in Endocrinology
August 4, 2025
Lara M.c. Puhlmann, Veronika Engert
Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have been shown to reduce both subjective experiences and physiological markers of stress, a central pathway to improving health and wellbeing. Yet, understanding of the causal mechanism through which MBIs affect stress-related health outcomes remains poor. Most MBIs rely on training programs that simultaneously target multiple and distinct mental...
Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science
March 1, 2025
Lara M.c. Puhlmann, Pascal Vrtička, Roman Linz et al.
In this study, we investigated whether mindfulness- and meditation-based mental training that improves stress regulation can upregulate BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), an important promoter of hippocampal neuroplasticity, and examined cortisol reduction as a mediating pathway. In a randomized clinical trial, 332 healthy adults were randomly assigned to one of the 3 training cohorts or...
Scientific Reports
May 16, 2023
Annika C Konrad, Veronika Engert, Reyk Albrecht et al.
Practicing mindfulness is associated with stress reduction and with positive effects in the context of learning and teaching. Although effects on student populations have been studied extensively, there are few studies implementing mindfulness exercises in university courses directly. For this reason, we aimed to investigate whether the use of a brief mindfulness exercise in regular university...
Mindfulness
January 28, 2023
Veronika Engert, Katja Hoehne, Tania Singer
Objectives Psychosocial stress is an inherent part of modern lifestyle, and many suffer from chronic stress exposure and the subsequent development of stress-related diseases. In searching for efficient low-cost interventions to reduce stress, we investigated the effects of regular contemplative mental practice on diurnal cortisol activity as an indicator of the basal, everyday stress load....
Frontiers in Psychiatry
2023
Veronika Engert, Olga Maria Klimecki, Philipp Kanske
Research over the past decades has revealed a variety of beneficial effects of meditation training. These beneficial effects span the levels of health and well-being, cognition, emotion, and social behavior. Around the same time, sociologists have shown that traits and outcomes on the individual level have the potential to spread in communities over three or more degrees. This means, for...
Psychoneuroendocrinology
August 2022
Roman Linz, Lara M.c. Puhlmann, Veronika Engert et al.
Mindfulness-based mental training interventions have become a popular means to alleviate stress and stress-associated health risks. Previous scientific investigations emphasize the importance of exploring the effects of such interventions in naturalistic settings to evaluate their implementation into daily life. Therefore, the current study examined the effects of three distinct mental training...
Psychoneuroendocrinology
July 1, 2022
Katja Hoehne, Pascal Vrtička, Veronika Engert et al.
Based on its role in social processing and stress, oxytocin has been suggested to mediate stress reduction of socio-affective, compassion-based mental training. We tested this hypothesis in the ReSource Project, a 9-month longitudinal mental training study. Participants practiced three different types of mental training, targeting either attentional abilities (Presence Module), socio-affective...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
November 13, 2020
Lara M.c. Puhlmann, Pascal Vrtička, Roman Linz et al.
preprint
Objective This study had the objective to investigate the effect of regular contemplative mental training on endocrine indices of long-term stress.
Current Opinion in Psychology
August 1, 2019
Tania Singer, Veronika Engert
Mindfulness interventions have gained much attraction, also due to their promise to improve health and wellbeing. However, not enough attention is devoted to the differentiation between various mental practice types. Here, we summarize findings from the ReSource Project, a 9-month longitudinal mental training study comparing practices focusing on (a) present-moment attention and interoception,...
Science Advances
October 4, 2017
Veronika Engert, Bethany E Kok, Ioannis Papassotiriou et al.
154 citations
Psychosocial stress is a public health burden in modern societies. Chronic stress-induced disease processes are, in large part, mediated via the activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the sympathetic-adrenal-medullary system. We asked whether the contemplative mental training of different practice types targeting attentional, socio-affective (for example, compassion),...