Maike Luhmann

Ruhr-Universität Bochum | RUB · Faculty of Psychology

Although theory emphasizes that loneliness fluctuates in everyday life, most previous studies focused on the general and stable tendency of feeling lonely. In the present study, we used daily diary data collected over two 4-week periods ( N 1 = 3,309; N 2 = 907) to examine different indicators of temporal dynamics of loneliness in everyday life and...

Abstract Major life events can lead to depression in adulthood. However, as predicted by several depression theories (e.g., Hopelessness Theory of Depression), not only the mere occurrence of major life events but also the way people perceive them determines the onset of a depression. This scoping review aims to provide an overview of how the relat...

Introduction: The Stress Overload Scale (SOS; Amirkhan, 2012, 2018) was introduced as a two-factorial self-report measure of stress to overcome limitations of other scales. Methods: We developed a German translation of the SOS and validated it in addition to a short version and an extra-short version. Furthermore, we tested whether manipulating the...

The idea of a general working model of attachment suggests a high consistency among the attachments to different attachment figures. However, many empirical results show that attachments to different attachment figures differ substantially. In this study, 512 emerging adults rated their attachment quality to one parent, the romantic partner, and se...

How people perceive major life events changes over time. We examined the longitudinal interplay between perceived event characteristics and subjective well-being (SWB) using two short-term longitudinal studies (NStudy1 = 619; NStudy2 = 691). In both studies, perceived event characteristics and SWB were assessed at two measurement occasions 3 months...

People feel lonely when their social needs are not met by the quantity and quality of their social relationships. Most research has focused on individual-level predictors of loneliness. However, macro-level factors related to historical time and geographic space might influence loneliness through their effects on individual-level predictors. In thi...

Embracing has several positive health effects, such as lowering blood pressure and decreasing infection risk. However, its association with general life satisfaction and daily mood has not been researched in detail. Here, we used a smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) approach to monitor the daily number of embraces and daily mood...

Background: Loneliness, or perceived social isolation, is prevalent in both the general population and clinical practice. Although loneliness has repeatedly been associated with mental and physical health, research on interventions that reduce loneliness effectively is still rather scarce. Objective: This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of a...

Major life events can trigger personality trait change. However, a clear, replicable pattern of event-related personality trait change has yet to be identified. We examined whether the perception of major life events is associated with personality trait change. Therefore, we assessed young adults’ personality traits at five measurement occasions wi...

Major life events can lead to changes in subjective well-being (SWB), but people differ in the extent and duration of these changes. Recent research indicates that individual differences in how people perceive major life events can explain some of these differences in event-related changes in SWB. But how events are perceived does not only vary bet...

People differ in how they define and pursue happiness and well-being (HWB). Previous studies suggested that the best way to achieve a high level of well-being might be to pursue different facets of HWB simultaneously. We expand on this idea and introduce the concept of complexity of HWB definitions to describe how many HWB definitions people endors...

Transitions in and out of work are common experiences with major repercussions for people's lives. The complex link between work transitions and psychological adjustment is not well understood, however. In this preregistered study, we analyzed 11 waves of longitudinal data from a representative sample of 13,671 Dutch participants to examine the tra...

Transitions in and out of work are common experiences with major repercussions for people’s lives. The complex link between work transitions and psychological adjustment is not well understood, however. In this preregistered study, we analyzed 11 waves of longitudinal data from a representative sample of 13,671 Dutch participants to examine the tra...

We investigated whether higher internal control beliefs (perceived control, political efficacy) and improved social relationships (lower loneliness, social support availability) mediated the associations between nonpolitical and political volunteering and subjective well-being (SWB; life satisfaction, emotional well-being). Moreover, we examined wh...

Research on major life events and personality change often focuses on the occurrence of specific life events such as childbirth, unemployment, or divorce. However, this typical approach has three important limitations: (1) Life events are typically measured categorically, (2) it is often assumed that people experience and change from the same event...

Introduction: This paper presents a German translation of the 16-item Prosociality Scale. We analyzed its factor structure based on theoretical assumptions regarding the inclusion of empathy as one element of prosociality or as its underlying construct. Methods and Results: We translated the items into German taking into account both the English an...

Judged by the sheer amount of global media coverage, loneliness rates seem to be an increasingly urgent societal concern. From the late 1970s onward, the life experiences of emerging adults have been changing massively due to societal developments such as increased fragmentation of social relationships, greater mobility opportunities, and changes i...

Judged by the sheer amount of global media coverage, loneliness rates seem to be an increasingly urgent societal concern. From the late 1970s onward, the life experiences of emerging adults have been changing massively due to societal developments such as increased fragmentation of social relationships, greater mobility opportunities, and changes i...

Choosing the right behavior can oftentimes be an act of balance between one’s own preferences or tendencies and momentary situational affordances. How do people navigate these potentially different requirements? One way would be to choose the behavior that makes one feel good. Specifically, we argue that fit between personality traits and personali...

The occurrence of major life events is associated with changes in well-being and personality. To better understand these effects, it is important to consider how individuals perceive major life events. Although theories such as appraisal theory and affective adaptation theory suggest that event perceptions change over time and that these changes ar...

Research examining the associations between major life events and personality trait development is mixed. Work that evaluates perceptions of life events and how those perceptions are themselves associated with personality traits may help clarify the existing literature. We used a large student sample (N ¼ 1,509) and a demographically diverse sample...

Personality traits describe how people typically think, feel, and behave. Personality states describe how people think, feel, and behave in a given moment. In their daily lives, people often behave the way they typically do (they enact trait-congruent personality states), but occasionally behave differently from how they typically do (trait-incongr...

Why do some events lead to growth in character strengths and others do not? Past research has addressed this question using a typological approach where adversities are grouped into different types or categories (e.g., daily stressor vs. clinical trauma). This approach has practical and theoretical limitations. In this chapter, the authors propose...

Post-traumatic growth can be understood as positive change in desirable personality traits after adverse life events. However, recent research questioned whether adversity is a relevant, necessary, and sufficient condition for change in desirable personality traits. Using five-wave longitudinal data, this study explored changes in the desirable per...

Post-traumatic growth can be understood as positive change in desirable personality traits after adverse life events. However, recent research questioned whether adversity is a relevant, necessary, and sufficient condition for change in desirable personality traits. Using five-wave longitudinal data, this study explored changes in the desirable per...

Previous research suggests that parental attachment is stable throughout emerging adulthood. However, the relationships between the mutual attachments in the dyads of emerging adults and their parents are still unclear. Our study examines the stability and change in dyadic attachment. We asked 574 emerging adults and 463 parents at four occasions o...

Physical activity and sports participation are positively related to physical and mental health as well as to subjective well-being. Various approaches have been used to explain these associations. In our study, we propose that person-environment fit can partly explain the association between sports and subjective well-being. We examined to what ex...

Personality traits continue to change throughout the lifespan. However, we still know little about when, why, and how personality traits change. In this paper, we review the current state of scientific evidence regarding the nature, sources, and processes of personality trait stability and change. We revisit past disputes over the relative importan...

Transitions in and out of work are common experiences with major repercussions for people’s lives. The complex link between work transitions and psychological adjustment is not well understood, however. In this preregistered study, we analyzed 11 waves of longitudinal data from 13,671 participants (representative of the Dutch population) to examine...

Research on major life events and personality change often focuses on the occurrence of specific life events such as childbirth, unemployment, or divorce. However, this typical approach has three important limitations: (1) Life events are typically measured categorically, (2) it is often assumed that people experience and change from the same event...

Personality traits describe how people typically think, feel, and behave, and personality states describe how people think, feel, and behave in a given moment. In their daily lives, people often behave the way they typically do (they enact trait-congruent personality states), but occasionally behave differently from how they typically do (trait-inc...

People differ in how they define and pursue happiness and well-being (HWB). Previous studies suggested that the best way to achieve a high level of well-being might be to pursue different facets of HWB simultaneously. We expand on this idea and introduce the concept of complexity of HWB definitions to describe how many HWB definitions people endors...

The occurrence of major life events is associated with changes in mental health, well-being, and personality. To better understand these effects, it is important to consider how individuals perceive major life events. Although theories such as Appraisal Theory and Affective Adaptation Theory suggest that event perceptions change over time and that...

Research on the longitudinal association between self-esteem and satisfaction with social relationships has led to ambiguous conclusions regarding the temporal order and strength of this relation. Existing studies have examined this association across intervals ranging from days to years, leaving it unclear as to what extent differences in timing m...

Subjective well-being is often described as a construct that encompasses both stable, trait-like and dynamic, state-like characteristics. In this chapter, we provide a broad overview of theories and empirical evidence on subjective well-being as a dynamic construct. Subjective well-being is dynamic when examined over short time periods. We discuss...

Rationale: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has dramatically altered people’s social lives due to social restriction measures taken to control the coronavirus spread. Early on, increased loneliness has been publicly discussed as a harmful psychological side effect of these measures. Due to the serious adverse health consequences of...

Prior research in non-U.S. samples has found a complex nonlinear relationship between loneliness and age. This research has shown that established predictors of loneliness—poor health, being unmarried, living alone, and having infrequent social interactions—help to explain age differences in loneliness. However, while some variables were found to b...

The continuous development and evolvement of sports provide a challenge for researchers who study psychological correlates and consequences of sports, as no single study can include all sports and results cannot easily be generalized across different sports. In this preregistered study, we present a new way of distinguishing sports based on the eig...

Research on the longitudinal association between self-esteem and satisfaction with social relationships led to ambiguous conclusions regarding the temporal order and strength of this relation. Existing studies have examined this association across intervals ranging from days to years, leaving it unclear as to what extent differences in timing may e...

Parental attachment is associated with well-being in early emerging adulthood. The present study is the first to measure attachment from multiple perspectives by obtaining attachment ratings from both children and parents, allowing us to examine discrepancies between both attachments in the relationship and the association of those discrepancies wi...

Research about the associations between major life events and personality trait development is mixed. Work that evaluates perceptions of life events and how those perceptions are themselves associated with personality traits may help clarify the existing literature. We used a large student sample (N = 1509) to conduct exploratory analyses examining...

To better understand the occurrence of major changes in people´s lives like job changes or relocations, we test a model of motivational consequences of life and domain satisfaction using data of the German socio-economic panel study (SOEP) (waves 2005-2015; Ns between 2,201 and 28,720). We examined job and location changes as outcomes that people m...

Major life events are often discussed as triggers of loneliness. However, longitudinal studies with frequent assessments investigating changes in loneliness surrounding major life events are lacking. This preregistered study investigated the associations between various family- and work-related major life events and changes in loneliness, using pro...

Objective: Posttraumatic growth typically refers to enduring positive psychological change experienced as a result of adversity, trauma, or highly challenging life circumstances. Critics have challenged insights from much of the prior research on this topic, pinpointing its significant methodological limitations. In response to these critiques, we...

Posttraumatic growth typically refers to enduring positive psychological change experienced as a result of adversity, trauma, or highly challenging life circumstances. Critics have challenged insights from much of the prior research on this topic, pinpointing its significant methodological limitations. In response to these critiques, we propose tha...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) manifests with progressive memory loss and spatial disorientation. Neuropathological studies suggest early AD pathology in the entorhinal cortex (EC) of young adults at genetic risk for AD ( APOE ε4-carriers). Because the EC harbors grid cells, a likely neural substrate of path integration (PI), we examined PI performance i...

Adolescence and young adulthood are characterized by substantial sociodemographic, family, social, and personality changes that may influence loneliness. Although loneliness is a public health challenge, we know little about how loneliness develops during these periods. Our study addresses this lacuna by using 4-wave longitudinal data from 3,116 No...

McCrae (2020) argues that it is premature to explore interventions focused on personality change. In his commentary, he suggests that interventions should be promoted only if their effects in self-report data are confirmed by the additional opinion of informants. We agree with the essence of his position and would go further by envisioning a new fr...

Previous research has provided contradicting findings on whether valuing and pursuing happiness is beneficial or detrimental to one’s level of well-being. These contradicting findings might be resolved by considering these so-called Happiness Goal Orientations (HGO) as a multidimensional construct. The goals of this paper were (1) to present a new...

What kind of life do people want? In psychology, a good life has typically been conceptualized in terms of either hedonic or eudaimonic well-being. We propose that psychological richness is another neglected aspect of what people consider a good life. In study 1 (9-nation cross-cultural study), we asked participants whether they ideally wanted a ha...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) outbreak has dramatically altered people’s social lives due to strict distancing policies. Increased loneliness has been publicly discussed as a harmful psychological side effect of these policies. However, empirical evidence was lacking. This large scale daily diary study assessed daily loneliness in N = 4,8...

Loneliness has traditionally been studied on the individual level. This study is one of the first to systematically describe and explain differences in loneliness on a fine-grained regional level. Using data from the nationally representative German Socio-Economic Panel Study ( N = 17,602), we mapped the regional distribution of loneliness across G...

Personality traits are strongly related to affect, but the mechanisms accounting for this association remain mostly unclear. We test a new theoretical model that proposes that personality states, situation characteristics, and affective states mediate the relation between personality traits and trait affect. Data from an experience sampling study (...

Loneliness has traditionally been studied on the individual level. This study is one of the first to systematically describe and explain differences in loneliness on a fine-grained regional level. Using data from the nationally representative German Socioeconomic Panel Study (N = 17,602), we mapped the regional distribution of loneliness across Ger...

Major life events (MLEs) are studied in many different areas in psychology such as personality development, clinical psychology, or posttraumatic growth. In all of these areas, a common finding is that MLEs differ in their effects on psychological outcomes. However, a framework that allows a systematic examination of these differences is still abse...

The importance of personality for predicting life outcomes in the domains of love, work, and health is well established, as is evidence that personality traits, while relatively stable, can change. However, little is known about the sources and processes that drive changes in personality traits and how such changes might impact important life outco...

The importance of personality for predicting life outcomes in the domains of love, work, and health is well established, as is evidence that personality traits, while relatively stable, can change. However, little is known about the sources and processes that drive changes in personality traits, and how such changes might impact important life outc...

Objective: Missed events are defined as the nonoccurrence of expected major life events within a specified time frame. We examined whether missed events should be studied in research on growth by exploring the role of missed events for changes in subjective well-being (SWB) and the Big Five personality traits. Method: The samples were selected from...

Objective: Missed events are defined as the nonoccurrence of expected major life events within a specified time frame. We examined whether missed events should be studied in research on growth by exploring the role of missed events for changes in subjective well-being (SWB) and the Big Five personality traits. Method: The samples were selected f...

This entry describes and illustrates techniques of modeling discontinuous change with hierarchical linear models (also known as multilevel models). To this aim, six models of increasing complexity are presented in a stepwise fashion. The entry discusses discontinuous change models with phase-specific elevation shift, discontinuous change models wit...

This preregistered meta‐analysis (k = 113, total n = 93 668) addressed how the Big Five dimensions of personality (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness) are related to loneliness. Robust variance estimation accounting for the dependency of effect sizes was used to compute meta‐analytic bivariate correlations bet...

Philosophers have been interested in happiness and well-being since the Hellenic period. More recently, psychologists have begun to study how happy people are and what makes people’s lives go well. Today, these fields begin to converge, as philosophers and psychologists are interested in integrating the two disciplines. A central challenge for any...

Media portrayals of a loneliness "epidemic" are premised on an increase in the proportion of people living alone and decreases in rates of civic engagement and religious affiliation over recent decades. However, loneliness is a subjective perception that does not correspond perfectly with objective social circumstances. In this study, we examined w...

Personality traits are powerful predictors of outcomes in the domains of education, work, relationships, health, and well-being. The recognized importance of personality traits has raised questions about their policy relevance, that is, their potential to inform policy actions designed to improve human welfare. Traditionally, the use of personality...

Major life events are often discussed as triggers of loneliness. However, longitudinal studies investigating changes in loneliness surrounding major life events with frequent assessments are lacking. This preregistered study investigated the associations between various family- and work-related major life events and changes in loneliness, using pro...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) manifests with progressive memory loss and spatial disorientation. Neuropathological studies suggest early AD pathology in the entorhinal cortex (EC) of young adults at genetic risk for AD (APOE ϵ4-carriers). Because the EC harbors grid cells, a likely neural substrate of path integration (PI), we examined PI performance in...

Deficits in general emotion regulation skills have been shown to be associated with various mental disorders. Thus, general affect-regulation training has been proposed as promising transdiagnostic approach to the treatment of psychopathology. In the present study, we aimed to evaluate the efficacy of a general affect-regulation as a stand-alone, g...

Personality traits are powerful predictors of outcomes in the domains of education, work, relationships, health, and well-being. The recognized importance of personality traits has raised questions about their policy relevance – that is, their potential to inform policy actions designed to improve human welfare. Traditionally, the use of personalit...

In this study, we examine whether perceived loneliness is greater among the Baby Boomers—individuals born 1948–1965—relative to those born 1920–1947, and whether older adults have become lonelier over the past decade (2005–2016). We use data from the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project (NSHAP) and from the Health and Retirement Study (HR...

This preregistered meta-analysis (k = 113, total n = 93,668) addressed how the Big Five dimensions of personality (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness) are related to loneliness. Robust variance estimation accounting for the dependency of effect sizes was used to compute meta-analytic bivariate correlations bet...

Personality traits are strongly related to subjective well-being, but the mechanisms that account for this association mostly remain unclear. Over the years, several theories of this relation have been proposed and tested, but none of these could provide a satisfactory answer. We propose and test a new model of the personality–affect relation that...

Previous research has provided contradicting findings on whether valuing and pursuing happiness is beneficial or detrimental to one’s level of well-being. These contradicting findings might be resolved by considering these so-called Happiness Goal Orientations (HGO) as a multidimensional construct. The goals of this paper were (1) to present a new...

Sports are typically distinguished in team versus individual sports or ball games versus cue sports. However, these broad distinctions have only limited utility for psychological research on sports and physical activity because they neglect psychologically relevant characteristics. As sports are highly standardized situations following a clear set...