Paraskevi Peristera Associate Professor
Contact
Name and title: Paraskevi PeristeraAssociate Professor
Workplace: Department of Psychology Länk till annan webbplats.
Visiting address Room 346Albanovägen 12
Postal address Psykologiska institutionen106 91 Stockholm
About me
I am Associate Professor (Docent) in Psychology and researcher at the Division of Psychobiology and Epidemiology, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University. My research lies in occupational health epidemiology and work and organisational psychology, with a focus on the work environment and how it shapes health, wellbeing and working life over time. A defining feature of my work is the emphasis on advanced statistical methods, and increasingly on machine learning and explainable AI, as tools for answering substantive questions about working conditions and health.
My earlier and ongoing research concerns how psychosocial and organisational working conditions, job demands and control, organisational justice, harassment and violence at work, relate to mental health, sleep, sickness absence, turnover and labour market exit, including how working conditions shape trajectories of health across transitions such as retirement.
My current work centres on the digital transformation of working life and its implications for health and wellbeing. I lead a research project on the implications of the large-scale shift to telework for work-life balance, job quality and health, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. I work on sickness presenteeism and sickness absence under hybrid work, the introduction of generative AI and other digital tools in workplaces and their consequences for trust, job satisfaction and employee health, and, in collaboration with colleagues in Region Stockholm, climate-related stressors and their implications for health and healthcare use.
I have substantial experience of working with large longitudinal surveys and register data, in particular the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH). My methodological work spans advanced longitudinal methods — group-based and B-spline trajectory models, latent transition analysis, Bayesian multilevel modelling — through to machine learning approaches for prediction and for identifying which working conditions matter most for a given outcome. I am particularly interested in how machine learning and explainable AI can be integrated into epidemiological and psychological research in a theoretically grounded and interpretable way.
Education
- PostDoc in statistics, Stockholm University, Sweden
- PhD in statistics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
- MSc in statistics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
- BSc in mathematics, University of Patras, Greece
My PhD work focused on mathematical models of demographic phenomena. I developed models to study differences in fertility, mortality and nuptiality for a wide range of countries.
I teach courses in quantitative methods, organisational psychology, work psychology, and scientific methods at both undergraduate and graduate levels. I supervise students at bachelor, master, and doctoral levels in work and organisational psychology and public health. As a supervisor of PhD students, I have been involved in thesis project of Andreas Sarling.
Policy experience
Before moving to Sweden, I worked as a policy expert at the Research and Development Unit of the Greece Ministry of Employment and Social Affairs, where I performed labour market and population analyses and represented Greece at the European Commission's Experts Demography Group and the Social Protection Committee. Paraskevi acted as a liaison between EU institutions, universities, national stakeholders and civil society.
Other assignments
I am a member of the Review College of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), Belgium (2025–2028), and of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Social Data Network (SoDaNet/CESSDA), Greece.
I review for journals including BMJ Open, Journal of Sleep Research, Aging & Mental Health, Population Studies and Journal of Applied Statistics.
I am principal investigator of a project funded by Forte on telework, work-life balance, job quality and health, and co-applicant in projects on remote work and health-related behaviour, combining informal caregiving and paid work, and climate-related stressors and health in Region Stockholm. I have previously been co-applicant in projects funded by Forte, the Swedish Research Council, AFA Försäkring and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond on organisational injustice and labour market exit, psychosocial working conditions and depressive symptoms, shift work tolerance, and paid work after retirement.
Sarling, A., Leineweber, C., & Peristera, P. (2026). Option better than action? Autonomy over remote work, technostress, and mental health disparities in Sweden during the COVID-19 pandemic. Acta Psychologica, 262, 106185. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2025.106185
Peristera, P., Paulin, J., Cedstrand, E., Johansson, G., & Nyberg, A. (2026). Procedural justice, managerial leadership and gender-based harassment in the workplace: longitudinal cross-lagged associations in a Swedish cohort. Front. Psychol. 17:1783045. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1783045
Peristera, P., Andreasson, A., Kecklund, G., Lekander, M., & Westerlund H. (2026). Do age and birth cohorts influence trends in the job demand–control model, self-rated health, and perceived stress in Sweden? Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 0(0). doi: 10.1177/14034948251381537
Raza, A., Peristera, P., Lanki, T. et al. (2025). Impacts of changing work from home patterns on health behaviours and obesity: insights from the late COVID-19 pandemic. BMC Public Health, 25, 3970. doi: 10.1186/s12889-025-25547-2
Raza, A., Peristera, P., Lanki, T., Hanson, L., Westerlund, H., & Halonen, J. (2025). Health behaviors and obesity impacts of remote work patterns during the late COVID-19 pandemic. European Journal of Public Health, 35, 2. 10.1093/eurpub/ckaf161.1786
Peristera, P., Bergljottsdotter, C., & Leineweber, C. (2025). When Home Becomes the Office: Navigating Challenges and Embracing Possibilities in Telework in Sweden during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic. Frontiers in Psychology. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1516074
