Welcome to Biological Psychology at the Institute of Psychology, University of Innsbruck, Austria

With the aim of promoting well-being over the life-span, Olga has been conducting randomized controlled trials, including multi-center longitudinal studies on socio-emotional interventions since 2007. While her earlier work focused on promoting resilience and well-being in adults and older adults (including the Age-Well and SCD-Well trials of the 7 Mio EUR Horizon2020 project Medit-Ageing), Olga recently started to work on the impact of socio-emotional learning interventions on youngsters in non-Western countries (Armenia, Belarus, Gambia, Russia, South Sudan, and Zambia).

In the Bio Happy Schools Global project, the lab is now researching how socio-emotional learning interventions can promote resilience, well-being, peacebuilding behavior and related biological stress and sleep measures of children and their teachers in different contexts. To this end, the lab is currently implementing and carrying out a series of randomized controlled trials on the impact of socio-emotional learning interventions in Ukraine, Vietnam, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria. In each country the lab studies about 100-280 teachers and 5´000 to 10´000 children (aged from 3 years to adulthood).

To enable evidence-based policy changes as well as scalable institutional reforms in the relevant target countries, the lab cooperates with the relevant ministries of education, as well as with the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) of the OECD.

Key partners for the socio-emotional learning interventions are the Eurasia Learning Institute (https://www.elihw.org/), the Eurasia Foundation and Association (https://eurasia-foundation.org/), the Peaceful Bamboo Family (https://eurasia-foundation.org/peaceful-bamboo-family/), and the Red Cross Reference Centre for Humanitarian Education.

By harnessing the information of variability between countries and between individuals, the lab´s work aims at providing evidence-based insights on how to implement educational policy changes that are contextualized for the different country settings as well as to the individual needs of the children and teachers who are taking these programs.

Media coverage

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BBC_arte_Zeit_Spiegel_Gehirn_Geist_Independent_Temps

Examples of Organizations Olga worked with