Elias Neuser studies Medicine at the Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg. Since 2023, he has been a member of the "Translational Neuroscience" research group as a medical doctoral student under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Hein at the Center for Mental Health.

His dissertation deals with research on anxiety, in particular with the principle of "social buffering". In his project he investigates to what extent the presence of virtual avatars affects the anxiety perception of subjects. This study is conducted in virtual reality (VR). A virtual room, created in cooperation with the Human Interactions Network, is used, in which subjects are presented with aversive and neutral sounds. Data will be collected through validated questionnaires, subjective ratings of the stimuli, and physiological skin conductance measurements. The research results are expected to contribute to a deeper understanding of anxiety and anxiety disorders and to provide new insights for the development of modern VR therapies for mental disorders.