ENIGMA-Stress & Resilience

ENIGMA-Stress & Resilience is a new working group within the ENIGMA consortium focusing on the neurobiology of stress, one of the most ubiquitous burdens of our species, and resilience, i.e., a positive mental health outcome despite adversity and stress. We are looking for brain imaging data in the context of psychosocial stress induction, i.e., the experimental manipulation of uncontrollability, social-evaluative threat, and negative feedback. However, we are also interested in data obtained in the course of applying other (physiological) stressors or paradigms to predict resilience.

The aim of our project is to investigate the relationships between brain structure, genotype, and central nervous stress processing. The latter includes blood oxygenation-level dependent measures (task-based responses, resting state pre- and post-stress) as well as subjective, endocrine, and physiological responses to stress (e.g., mood, cortisol, heart rate). The main objective is to understand the interrelation between these entities and to possibly identify correlates of resilience as an active process of adapting to stress.

ENIGMA Stress & Resilience Working Group Memorandum of Understanding (MOU): ENIGMA Stress & Resilience Group members are asked to sign a short MoU agreement that has been standardized across ENIGMA projects and provides basic framework to protect data privacy, facilitate data sharing, encourage academic productivity, ensure appropriate authorship and publication credit, and implements a system to track and archive data, analyses and publications related to the ENIGMA-Stress & Resilience Working Group.

Our call for participation is open!

We are actively searching for international collaborators to join ENIGMA-Stress & Resilience! If you are interested in participating, please complete our short data query poll here, and contact any of the Working Group chairs: Gina-Isabelle Henze (gina-isabelle.henze@charite.de), Henrik Walter (henrik.walter@charite.de).