Main Research Areas of the Departments

Affective Neuroscience and Psychophysiology

Our main research activities focus on the interplay of emotion, cognition, and motivation in several domains of human information processing, including faces and written and spoken language. Our work aims at identifying the specification of the origins, dynamics, and boundary conditions of these interactions within and between different stimulus domains and modalities, as well as to better define the emotional outcomes of cognitive operations.

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Biological Personality Psychology

The Biological Personality Psychology group is concerned with the assessment, explanation and consequences of differences between individuals in psychological traits. A special focus lies on the biological foundations of individual differences, which we study with evolutionary psychological, behavioral genetic, anthropological, endocrinological, and neuroscientific methods. In addition, we are interested in person perception and the links between personality and social relationships.

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Developmental Psychology

The Department of Developmental Psychology investigates the ontogeny of cognitive abilities in human children (and is interested, from a comparative point of view, in the cognitive development of other primates). Our main focus is on the early development of social cognition, shared intentionality, ‘theory of mind’ and cooperation in infancy and the preschool years.

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Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy

The Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy addresses interdisciplinary, replicable, basic, interventional, and process research, particularly in the fields of eating disorders, obesity, and depression. We use experimental paradigms and a range of psychophysiological measures (e.g., EMG, EDA, eye-tracking), and e-Health/m-Health applications. Our main research interests are: (a) affective, cognitive und psychobiological basic research addressing processes and mechanisms that contribute to the development and maintenance of the above mentioned mental disorders and conditions, (b) the translation of findings from this basic research into novel, technologically and biochemically augmented clinical interventions; (c) pilot studies and large-scale randomised controlled trials that target the efficacy and effectiveness of psychotherapeutic interventions; and (d) psychotherapy process-outcome research using methods such as voice frequency analysis, computerised quantitative text analysis, and machine learning to uncover action mechanisms in psychotherapy.

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The Department comprises an Out-Patient Center for Psychotherapy, the TBZ (Therapie- und Beratungszentrum).

Cognition Sciences

At the department of cognition sciences and psychology about decision-making we pay close attention to higher cognitve processes, that determine our thinking, learning and the way we make decisions.

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Cognitive neuroscience

The Cognitive Neurosciences Laboratory is carrying out research on the neuronal bases of information processing in the brain. The main focus is placed on visual perception, its modulation by cognitive factors, like attention, spatial cognition, decision making and goal-directed action planning. While most of the experiments are aimed at understanding basic phenomena, the results could also be of importance in understanding neurological disturbances, thereby offering the possibility for therapeutical developments.

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Economic and Social Psychology

Economic Psychology deals with the experience and behavior of human beings in an economic context. It is separated into the areas of occupational psychology (e.g. work load and occupational stress/load and stress on the job, selection of personnel, human resource development), market psychology (e.g. advertising effectiveness, market segmentation) and financial psychology (e.g. investor behavior, tax compliance). Our exploratory focus is on financial psychology, particularly escalation on loss making investment decisions as well as price perception (for example in the context of the EURO introduction). Furthermore we analyze „mental satiation“ in the working life from the area of occupational psychology.

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Educational Psychology

The Department of Educational Psychology investigates behavioral and cognitive processes in educational situations. Our work focuses on different cognitive aspects of learning and teaching, e.g., how children and adolescents read texts and how to help people with poor reading skills. In addition, we are interested in the question how learning processes can be improved by the use of digital and instructional media.

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Experimental Psychology

In this department we examine basic cognitive processes of perception, memory and language.

Our courses for BA-students offer introductions in research methods, in psychology of perception an emotion. ...

For MA-students we offer courses in multivariate statistics, in experimental investigation of consciousness, in neurophysiology of perception, and in language and memory.

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Psychology of Language

The Psychology of Language Department examines the neurocognitive bases of language learning and language processing in infants, children and adults. In particular, we are interested in examining the mechanisms underlying word learning and word recognition in different populations learning different languages using behavioural and neurophysiological methods.

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Social Psychology

Department Social and Communication Psychology provides research and graduate teachings in social psychology, communication psychology and economic psychology.

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Translational Psychotherapy

Following the motto “From the laboratory to treatment and everyday life”, our research group pursues a translational research agenda with the vision to better understand the processes and mechanisms of the development and treatment of mental disorders, to optimize existing treatments, and to develop new, individual treatments. To this end, we combine a variety of methods in a translational sense, from laboratory-based learning and decision-making paradigms to smartphone-based everyday assessments to outcome- and process-based psychotherapy trials.

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