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Are our eyes windows into our souls? Solutions to support stress resilience

Marcus Grüschow, Neuroscientist, Entrepreneur and UZH Entrepreneur Fellow, is on a mission to improve individual mental health and combat the devastating effects of stress on our lives.

Marcus and his team have developed a neuroscience-based biomarker that identifies an individual’s stress resilience capacity based on pupil dilation. In addition, pupil dilation was also used to predict and quantify an individual’s emotion regulation success. The team is now developing a preventive pupil-based feedback training regime called Brain Boost that enhances stress resilience and prevents individuals from being affected by stress-related disorders.

Pupil dilation feedback is used because the pupil directly reflects the activity of the stress system. An in-depth knowledge of the function of the arousal system has been developed in the UZH research groups of Prof. Birgit Kleim and Prof. Christian Ruff.

The new technology will equip individuals, companies, and other organizations with an effective tool to prepare for stress exposure. It has the potential to dampen the impact of stress and thereby reduce the psychological and economic burden associated with stress-related productivity decrease and psychopathology.

Marcus Grüschow and his team has developed a cheap and portable method to predict stress resilience by simply looking into the eyes.