The Universitäre Psychiatrische Dienste (UPD) provides all aspects of secondary and tertiary treatment in psychiatry across the life span and is responsible for the academic teaching of all psychiatric disciplines at the University. The UPD is committed to progress in the understanding, treatment, and prevention in psychiatry by clinical translational research. In three separate hospitals, the Department covers psychiatric, psychological and caregiving aspects in childhood, adolescence, young to old age adults.
www.upd.ch
December 4, 2025
13:30 − 18:00
Schüür, Gurten – Park im Grünen
15. Berner Gurten Symposium
Anmeldung erforderlich bis am 1. Dezember 2025
Awards
PD Dr phil. Anja C. Gysin-Maillart, head psychologist at the UPD, has been awarded the Inger Salling Prize for Psychiatry 2024/2025. She receives the award for her outstanding research into the flexible application of the brief intervention programme for suicide attempts (ASSIP flex) - an individually tailored therapy for people who have attempted suicide. The award also recognises her work as part of the NePsy study, which deepens our understanding of suicidal ideation and behaviour. The Inger Salling Prize honours special achievements in anthropological and psychotherapeutic psychiatry. It is awarded for outstanding achievements in university and clinical research as well as in practical work.
Research
The age-prospective memory paradox states that younger adults perform better than older adults in laboratory tasks, while the opposite is true for naturalistic tasks. These terms insufficiently characterise tasks and task settings. We therefore revisited the age-prospective memory paradox using a newly developed taxonomy to better understand how task characteristics or task settings contribute to age-related differences in performance. We found that older adults did better than younger adults in ‘close to real-life’ tasks done at home and, particularly, in to-do lists and diary tasks. However, they did worse in ‘far from real-life’ tasks done in naturalistic environments or in simulations of real-life tasks in a laboratory. Results of this meta-analysis suggest that the level of abstraction of a task and familiarity of the environment in which the task is taken can explain some of the differences between performances of younger and older people.
Maria Chiara Piani from PD Dr. Martin Jandl's team won the first poster prize at the EAPPP 2024 conference in Copenhagen where she had the opportunity of presenting the final results of her PhD. Congratulations on this great success!
7 tesla multiscale entropy analysis reveals increased resting-state complexity in key regions for fear and anxiety in spider-fearful individuals. Matthias Grieder, Niklaus Denier, Kay Jann, Werner Strik, Leila M. Soravia, Kristina Adorjan, Marcel Meyer and Elisabeth Jehli have published in July this paper in NeuroImage, a journal of Elevier with an impact factor of 4.7. This study emphasizes the potential of 7T complexity in illuminating and expanding our understanding of symptom-linked alterations in the neural architecture of anxiety disorders.
In this randomized, double-blind, and sham-controlled trial, Prof. Jessica Peter's team evaluated attentional control and prospective memory twice in healthy older adults. At visit two, participants (n=106) received cathodal, anodal, or sham stimulation of the left or right inferior frontal lobe, or the right superior parietal lobe (1 mA for 20 min). They found strong learning effects with task repetition but no additional effect of stimulation. This indicates that if one wants to improve attentional control or prospective memory in older adults, repeating the task may be more efficient than using stimulation. It also indicates that effects of stimulation may be more pronounced when a task is novel and there were not yet substantial learning effects.
In this clinical trial report on the OCOPS-P study, Sebastian Walther's team explored the ability of transcranial magnetic stimulation to ameliorate psychomotor slowing in psychosis. If you want to see the full picture of this amazing journey, check this publication in JAMA Psychiatry
In this research paper, Florian Wüthrich and Stéphanie Lefebvre from Pr Sebastian Walther's team explored the neural correlates of psychomotor disturbance in depression using resting-state functional connectivity and network measures based on graph theory. They showed that agitation and retardation have specific connectivity signatures within the motor network. This compensatory connectivity change disturbs network topology. In contrast, remitted patients with PmD show altered network topology of the motor network in the absence of single connection alterations, suggesting reduced adaptability of the motor network in patients with PmD that persists at the remission stage.
In this Viewpoint, Stephan Heckers and Sebastian Walther explored the possibility that intereffector regions within the motor cortex (recently highlighted by Gordon and colleagues) would be ideal candidates to search for aberrant neural activity in case of psychomotor phenomena across mental illness. Want to know more? check this Viewpoint ("Mapping Psychomotor Behavior in the Brain") in JAMA Psychiatry
Dr phil. Elisabeth Hertenstein, researcher at the University Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy (UPD) and now at the Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Geneva, has won a major grant for her project "Comparative efficacy of bedtime restriction therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia - a randomized controlled non-inferiority trial" as part of the "Ambizione" programme of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). She will be funded for four years with a sum of CHF 955'144.
News
Click here to watch the full Interview with Katharina Stegmayer.
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