Töres Theorell Professor Emeritus

As a retired professor Töres doesn’t take PI responsibility for new projects but he is still active in several projects at the Institute, in particular those based upon the epidemiological data base slosh. He doesn’t take any new doctoral students and has only one doctoral student left, Annica Kempe (child delivery and maternal mortality in Yemen). During later years he has established collaboration with Fredrik Ullén, professor of neurobiology at the Karolinska Institute. A large project within that collaboration which Ullén has the main responsibility for, is the study of musicality and how this can relate to emotional competence and its opposite alexithymia as well as to psychosocial factors. This project is supported mainly by the Tercentenary Fund (Jubileumsfonden) and is based mainly on the Swedish Twin Registry. Töres has initially been responsible for the Swedish part of an international project entitled IPD and is still a member of that network. Hugo Westerlund is now the Swedish leader of that project. A number of cohort studies in Europe have been merged for the examination of psychosocial work environment factors in relation to somatic and mental illnesses (the demand control support model as well as the effort reward imbalance model, long working hours, insecure employment). The number of participants in this study is in the order of 160 000 from Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium. This study has made it possible to study these relationships in subgroups of the populations. Mika Kivimäki in Finland has the main responsibility for the whole IPD study. Töres has also had the main responsibility for the Swedish part of another international study namely a study of health effects for employees of downsizing with participation from Sweden, France, Hungary and Great Britain (PI for the whole study Harvey M Brenner). He has previously been active in priority committees in the Swedish scientific councils and was an expert in the governmental commission on public health 1998-2000. During recent years he has been the chairman of three governmental expert committees (SBU) for examining the scientific evidence of a relationship between different aspects of the work environment on one hand and depressive symptoms, exhaustion, coronary heart disease and stroke.

He has participated in the publication of more than 450 original scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals and he has also been the editor of textbooks. Among his more successful books are Karasek RA and Theorell T Healthy Work (Basic Books) 1990,  Theorell T Psychological health effects of musical experiences (Springer) 2014, and Romanowska J, Nyberg A and Theorell T Developing leadership and employee health through the arts (Springer) 2016

Education: MD PhD, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm

Profile and projects in the Research Database