The Centre of Excellence for Well-Being Sciences EstWell

Seminar Professor Luiz Pessoa: The entangled brain
2025-06-12 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Tallinn) | University of Tartu, Näituse 2-102, Tartu, Estonia
Luiz Pessoa (University of Maryland) is a leading figure in both psychology and neuroscience. His research has meticulously dismantled the traditional separation of cognitive and emotional processes in the brain, laying the groundwork for integrated human neuroscience.
In this talk, Professor Pessoa will discuss how cognition, motivation, and emotion can only be understood as entangled phenomena.

EstWell seminar Professor Ivo Fridolin: What is the benefit of sensor technologies to wellbeing sciences?
2025-06-09 16:00 - 17:00 | TalTech, Akadeemia tee 3-LIB-109B, Tallinn, Tallinn, Estonia
Well-being sciences are classically associated with the fields such as psychology, public health and social sciences. This is also reflected in the structure of EstWell, where the majority of research groups are representatives of these fields. However, innovation has more favorable opportunities to emerge in an interdisciplinary research environment. The research group Sensor Technologies in Biomedical Engineering at the Department of Health Technologies of Tallinn University of Technology mainly cultivates engineering science, helping to strengthen the cross-disciplinary dimension in the center of excellence for well-being sciences.
Developments in sensor technologies, which enable more miniaturized, portable and non-invasive biomonitoring, offer several interesting options also in the direction of well-being sciences. The lecture aims to reflect this – for example, how sensor technologies could help improve the well-being of patients on end-stage renal replacement therapy and how the photoplethysmographic signal could be used for individual-based assessment of stress levels. It also provides a brief insight into the question “Does the small research group at Tallinn University of Technology have a role in the discovery and patenting of new metabolic biomarkers in the current frenzy of ‘omics’ research?”

EstWell seminar Associate Professor Maie Bachmann: Making Sense of Brain Signals with EEG Markers
2025-06-02 16:00 - 17:00 | TalTech, Akadeemia tee 3-LIB-109B, Tallinn, Tallinn, Estonia
Brain signals recorded with electroencephalography (EEG) may look like random noise at first glance, yet within this “noise” lies valuable information about our mental state. To uncover it, we develop and apply a variety of EEG markers. In the seminar I will present our latest results— which markers have proven more effective, what we have discovered so far, and how this approach paves the way for personalised mental-health care.

EstWell seminar Associate Professor Triin Lauri: From School Choice to Political Choice
2025-05-19 16:00 - 17:00
Why does the issue of school choice tend to spark near-hysterical reactions every spring in Estonia, a country committed to the comprehensive school model? How can school places be distributed in a knowledge society that values diversity of choice — without deepening educational stratification? What are Estonians’ preferences when it comes to education, and how much are these shaped by personal background, fairness perceptions, or the existing school system? And what does all of this have to do with policy feedback effects and political polarization?
This seminar offers a bird’s-eye view of Triin and her co-authors’ recent social scientific perspectives on education research — with a particular focus on school choice and the dynamics of educational inequality.

EstWell seminar Professor René Mõttus: Why assessing psychological traits well matters in well-being research
2025-05-12 16:00 - 17:00
Wellbeing is both a state and a trait. That is, some of the wellbeing variance is within people (change), some between people (stability). Which source of variance is larger? And why does this matter?

EstWell seminar Associate Professor Mare Ainsaar: What influences individual and institutional satisfaction
2025-05-05 16:00 - 17:00
Mare presents results from research conducted in Estonia about factor influencing individual and institutional satisfaction in Estonia. We learn, if satisfaction with health care system is indeed satisfaction with healthcare and what shapes individual life satisfaction.

EstWell seminar Leading Researcher Vitali Syritski: Molecularly imprinted polymers: towards development of sensors for medical diagnostics and environmental monitoring
2025-04-21 16:00 - 17:00
Despite considerable progress in modern biosensors, significant limitations remain in terms of robustness and reusability, primarily due to the use of biologically derived recognition receptors, which are inherently labile and often lack chemical and thermal stability. As a result, replacing biological receptors with fully synthetic analogues has become increasingly important.
A promising alternative is the use of materials prepared by molecular imprinting, known as molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs). These materials exhibit high affinity and selectivity for their target molecules while offering advantages such as mechanical, thermal and chemical stability as well as broad operational versatility.
This seminar will highlight both past and recent advances by our group in developing MIPs to meet the demands of medical diagnostics and environmental monitoring.

EstWell seminar Professor Merike Sisask: Social + health + care = well-being
2025-04-07 16:00 - 17:00 | Tallinna Ülikoolis, Narva mnt 25, Astra maja - Ruum A346
Mental health and wellbeing is not just an individual condition, but is shaped by a combination of social relationships, structural health support and community functioning, among other factors. A problem- and diagnosis-centred approach to mental health focuses too much on treatment and seeks solutions from the health sector, leaving cross-sectoral prevention in the background. The social health care research group focuses on the social determinants of mental health and preventive interventions. There are three main strands of research and development: mental health and well-being in communities across life span, children and young people’s everyday digital lives, suicide research.

EstWell seminar Associate Professor Taavi Tillmann: Can low well-being make you physically ill?
2025-03-17 16:00 - 17:00
Which illnesses are more common among people with low well-being? Are these associations causal? Let’s go one step back and look at the causes of well-being, such as a person’s physical environment, income, occupation, unemployment, educational and social resources, experience of discrimination – if these factors increase the risk of illness, then does this mechanism manifest itself via the “well-being” pathway, or other pathways? Which interventions exist that can break these causal chains, to improve well-being and prevent disease?

EstWell seminar Professor Kirsti Akkermann: Personality-based profiling as the way forward to understand psychopathology
2025-03-03 16:00 - 17:00
The treatment of mental health problems is related to how psychopathology is diagnosed. As people rarely fit into a single diagnostic category in terms of their symptoms and mental disorders often co-occur, alternative models have been developed alongside traditional categorical classifications of disorders. In the seminar we aim to discuss how a dimensional approach and more specifically personality-based profiling can help to predict the symptoms, course, and potential treatment response.

EstWell seminar Professor Kairi Kreegipuu: Truly National Electricity: Brain Biopotentials
2025-02-17 16:00 - 17:00 | University of Tartu, Näituse 2-102, Tartu, Estonia
In the presentation, I will introduce the research and recent findings of our team in the field of measuring brain biopotentials. It turns out that these psychobiological signals reflect ongoing information processing, human states, and sometimes even some of our national characteristics. In any case, these are studies that cannot yet be replaced by re-analyzing information in big data repositories, as the exploration of what do they show is still ongoing. However, by combining rich background information and careful experimental studies, new opportunities for understanding humans may emerge.

EstWell seminar Professor Peeter Ross: Patient Generated Health Data
2025-02-10 16:00 - 17:00 | TalTech, Akadeemia tee 3-LIB-109B, Tallinn, Tallinn, Estonia
Healthcare data has traditionally been collected and stored by medical professionals. Decisions concerning a person’s health are made based on this data. In the digital age, health data are stored in various healthcare institutions’ databases. In Estonia, for example, the electronic medical records of hospitals or family doctors or the Estonian Health Information System. At the same time, these so-called health information systems mainly contain disease data, which, with a few exceptions, have been collected when a person has complaints or health conditions.
Our research group aims to find suitable data sets and tools for person-generated health data and to explore how to share this data with healthcare professionals. This would allow for an overview of a person’s health status when they are not sick , or their chronic condition is under control and to find data patterns that would help identify potential risks and prevent the development of diseases.
In the first half of the seminar, we will explore the existing digital environment for capturing and exchanging health data and information, and in the second half, we will add to them the part of the data generated and collected by the person himself and the research of this domain.

EstWell seminar Professors Tiia Tulviste & Eve Kikas: Learning, development and well-being at home and school
2025-01-27 16:00 - 17:00 | Tartu Ülikool, Näituse 2-118, Tartu, Estonia
The first part of the presentation focuses on why developmental psychologists recommend limiting children’s screen time and whether infants should avoid using screen devices altogether. The second part discusses how to measure motivation and what is the role of motivation in learning and well-being.

EstWell seminar Professor Andero Uusberg: Keeping our science applicable and our applications scientific
2025-01-20 16:00 - 17:00 | University of Tartu, Näituse 2-102, Tartu, Estonia
I will share my thinking about and experiences with using behavioral sciences to change behavior.

EstWell seminar Karin Streimann & Triin Vilms (National Institute for Health Development): Blind Spots in Prevention Science
2025-01-13 16:00 - 17:00
„When cooperation with the university is not possible in ensuring the scientific basis of preventive intervention, how can the practical and academic common ground be created? It is possible to buy in expert assessment as a service, but it is difficult, everyone is busy, etc. … After all, public universities should contribute back to society … What is their responsibility?”
This question was asked by the local level prevention expert and illustrates the expectation to think about intervention evaluation with higher education institutions, but perception that it is difficult at the moment. Majority of the prevention research originates currently from a handful of high-income countries; there are only some feasibility and effectiveness studies completed in Estonia. In addition, researchers, implementers, developers and decision-makers understand prevention research differently: for funders the effectiveness study might mean evaluating satisfaction with the intervention, for implementers it can mean observation and relying on intuition while the scientist usually thinks about the randomized controlled trial.
Prevention science focuses on the development of effective interventions that reduce risk factors and enhance protective factors to improve the health and wellbeing of people in different settings. In this workshop we will discuss the blind spots in prevention science and pull on the thinking hats of different stakeholders to understand their perspectives. We will discuss how to bring more prevention research into Estonian scientific landscape and inspire researchers to study feasibility, efficacy and effectiveness of preventive interventions implemented in Estonia.

EstWell seminar Associate Professor Kadri Leetmaa: How rural elderly learn about digital world – methodological reflections from a recent learning experiment with elderly population in Estonia rural localities
2024-12-16 16:00 - 17:00 | University of Tartu, Näituse 2-102, Tartu, Estonia
The seminar will be conducted by Associate Professor of Human Geography at the University of Tartu, Kadri Leetmaa, and Lecturer in Cognitive and School Psychology, Triin Liin.
Digital transformation has fundamentally changed the way how society functions. Digital life is no longer just a means of communication, but instead, ‘digital’ has become ‘natural’, making hard to distinguish digital transactions from our general presence in the society. What has received relatively little attention, is who remains excluded from this transformative change. To compensate the gap digital transformation should be examined more from the perspective of the ‘margins’ of the society, through the places and people that are usually not at the centre of defining the smartification trends.
In the ongoing research project, we focus on rural areas and older people—we explore how elderly people in peripheral rural areas adapt to the increasingly digitalized life.
In the EstWell seminar we present our first methodological reflections from the ongoing learning experiment (Sept-Dec 2024, follow-up focus groups planned in Jan/Feb 2025) with rural elderly in four Estonian municipalities. We formed small local community study groups, where prepared digital learning took place on tablets in the experiment and control group setting, coordinated by local community researchers. In the seminar we mainly reflect the methodological aspects of the learning experiment.

EstWell seminar Associate Professor Kelli Lehto: What can our genes tell us about mental health and well-being?
2024-12-09 16:00 - 17:00 | TÜMRI hoone, Riia 23, ruum 116, Tartu, Estonia
What can our genes tell us about mental health and well-being?
Mental health problems affect nearly half of the population during their lifetime, but still remain challenging to prevent, detect and treat due to our limited understanding of their etiology. In this seminar, I will discuss how large biobanks and genetic data can help make progress. Specifically, I will:

Explore the role of genetics in mental health conditions and traits;
Discuss phenotypic heterogeneity as the key challenge in research on mental health and well-being;
Introduce the Estonian Biobank “Well-Being and Mental Health” Study which includes data from over 86,000 Estonians — approximately 10% of Estonia’s adult population; and
Outline future directions and ethical considerations for integrating genetics into personalized health care for mental health problems.

EstWell seminar Professor Katrin Tiidenberg: Participatory cultures of mental health on social media - belonging, support and attention
2024-11-26 16:00 - 17:00 | University of Tallinn, Mare maja, Uus Sadama 5-M131, Estonia
Mental health discourse is increasingly pervasive on social media. There are content creators who focus entirely on the topic (e.g. stress, anxiety, depression, ADHD, autism, OCD), but speaking about personal struggles with mental health is also common among creators whose focus lies elsewhere (e.g. fitness, study advice, productivity advice, beauty, finance). This serves to destigmatize mental ill health and normalize talking about it. However, it also generate a sense of relatability and authenticity among audiences, thus serving the content creator well within the densely populated attention economy of social media. This talk explores the complex intersection of advice seeking, support and belonging, medical misinformation, alternative interpretations and de-stigmatization of mental health in a context where the need for mental health is on the rise, the availability of it is insufficient and people increasingly turn to social media.

EstWell seminar Associate Professor Vladimir Tomberg: Implementing health behaviour change with digital health interventions
2024-11-11 16:00 - 17:00 | Tallinna Ülikoolis, Narva mnt 25, Astra maja - Ruum A346
Digial health interventions encompass a wide range of technological solutions, from mobile applications and wearable devices to online platforms and virtual coaching programs. Through the collection and analysis of user data, these interventions can identify patterns, track progress, and offer customized strategies to help individuals overcome obstacles and sustain their healthy behaviours.
The seminar will explore the role of behavioural science and user-centred design in the development of effective digital health interventions. By incorporating behaviour psychology and human-computer interaction, these interventions can be designed to leverage cognitive biases, foster intrinsic motivation, and create engaging user experiences that inspire long-term behaviour change.

Well-being Machines in Your Pocket - EstWell Opening Conference
2024-11-08 09:30 - 17:00 | TalTech, Akadeemia tee 3-LIB-109B, Tallinn, Tallinn, Estonia
Today, technology and information systems serve as essential artificial collaborators in collecting and managing human data. At the conference, we will present insights from the Centre of Excellence’s researchers on studying various aspects of well-being and ways to support it. We will especially focus on how different technical applications can enhance human well-being. Additionally, we will feature international speakers at the forefront of well-being sciences, who focus on the intersection of behavior and genetics, as well as digital life and well-being.
Founded in 2024, the Centre of Excellence for Well-Being Sciences brings together social and natural scientists in search of new ways to measure, understand, and influence human well-being. Researchers from the University of Tartu, Tallinn University, and Tallinn University of Technology have joined forces for an interdisciplinary, in-depth exploration of well-being.

EstWell seminar Professor Uku Vainik : Personality of 7% of adults in Estonia – what has been found and what to look forward to
2024-10-30 16:00 - 17:00 | University of Tartu, Näituse 2-102, Tartu, Estonia
The big personality study is almost 3 years old and, we have found many intriguing results! I am looking forward to sharing the greatest hits of the personality science we have done so far — from well-being to geography, from genetics to covid vaccination, from job preferences to fathers and sons. Time permitting, we may also discuss the predictability of well-being https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-024-00294-2
