Vanessa Mitschke

Vanessa studied psychology at the University of Vienna (B.Sc. & M.Sc.) within the “Mind and Brain” focus program. During her time at the University of Vienna she was part of the EVA Lab (Empirical Visual Aesthetics) directed by Helmut Leder, and investigated the interplay between attention and preference during the experience of art in everyday and museum contexts. Vanessa obtained her Ph.D. at the MOVE Lab, supervised by Andreas Eder, at the Julius-Maximilians Universität Würzburg. In her dissertation she investigated changes in mental representations of aggressive opponents and the modulation of emotional reactions towards suffering opponents in aggressive interactions.  Since January 2023 she is a postdoc in the Cognition, Emotion and Behavior Lab at the Georg-August-University Göttingen.

 

Current Research Interests

  • Modulation of emotional facial reactions due to social factors
  • Voluntary suppression and inhibition of facial muscle reactions

Recent publications

  • Mitschke, V., Ziereis, A., Manivasagam, S., & Schacht, A. (2025). Laughter regulation in solitary and social contexts varies across emotion regulation strategies. Communications Psychology, 3(1), 180.
  • Dyduch-Hazar, K., Mitschke, V., & Eder, A. B. (2026). Smiling after witnessing provocateur’s suffering: a facial electromyography study. Cognition and Emotion, 40(2), 492-500.
  • Eder, A. B., & Mitschke, V. (2025). Pavlovian to instrumental transfer of control over fight or flight decisions. npj Science of Learning, 10(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-025-00331-4
  • Dyduch-Hazar, K., & Mitschke, V. (2023). Affective preferences in benign masochism. Journal of Research in Personality, 107, 104429. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2023.104429
  • Götz, F. J., Mitschke, V., & Eder, A. B. (2023). Conflict experience and resolution underlying obedience to authority. Scientific Reports, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-38067-z

Projects