Advancing Psychotherapy through Cognitive Neuroscience: A Multimodal Approach to Brain Body Interaction

This project investigates the acute effects of brief mind–body interventions on (stress-) regulation across subjective, physiological, and neural levels. Mind–body interventions such as mindfulness and relaxation are widely used in psychotherapy, prevention, and everyday self-regulation as low-threshold strategies to support psychological and physical well-being. Despite their broad application, the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying their effects remain insufficiently understood, particularly with respect to dynamic brain–body interactions, short-term regulatory processes and differentiation between different specific interventions. Using a shared experimental paradigm, the project compares a mindfulness-based body scan, a relaxation-based safe place imagery exercise, and an auditory control condition (podcast) in a within-subject design. Regulation is examined following a standardized stress induction and during each intervention condition. Multimodal measurements include autonomic physiology (electrocardiography and respiration), subjective ratings of stress and relaxation, neural activity measured with magnetoencephalography (MEG ) and different questionnaire based personal and behavioral data. This combination allows regulation to be assessed across experiential, peripheral physiological, and central neural levels. The project builds on an existing dataset collected in healthy adults (N = 20) as part of a master’s thesis and is embedded within the FTI Impulse Project Advancing Psychotherapy Through Cognitive Neuroscience: A Multimodal Approach to Brain–Body Interaction. Planned extensions include additional healthy participants and clinical samples (depressive disorders and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), using the same experimental paradigm to ensure comparability across analyses. The primary aim of the project is to characterize and differentiate the acute regulatory effects of mindfulness-based and relaxation-based interventions, with a particular focus on autonomic markers of regulation such as different markers of cardiac activity and respiration. Neural measures and brain–body coupling analyses are included to explore mechanistic links between neural dynamics and peripheral physiological regulation. Speech-related measures and interindividual differences are treated as exploratory components. Overall, the project aims to contribute to a mechanistic, neuroscience-based understanding of mind–body interventions and to inform more differentiated and potentially personalized applications of these techniques in daily life, clinical settings and mental health prevention.