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January 2021 - March 2025
Publications
Publications (49)
According to recent research, self-reported Big Five personality traits are associated with preferences for faces that are representative of certain Big Five traits. Previous research has primarily focused on either preference for distinct prototypical personality faces or the accuracy of trait ratings for these faces. However, the underlying neura...
Background
Social support is a multidimensional construct encompassing emotional support as well as pain-focused care and attention, also known as solicitous support. One the one hand, social support is widely believed to positively influence pain symptoms, their intensity, and the ability to cope and influence pain. On the other hand, social suppo...
Background
Mental health in adolescence is critical in its own right and a predictor of later symptoms of anxiety and depression. To address these mental health challenges, it is crucial to understand the variables linked to anxiety and depression in adolescence.
Methods
Here, we analyzed data of 278 adolescents that were collected in a nation-wid...
In contrast to rational choice theory predicting humans to optimize expected utilities of choices, humans deviate from rational behavior in decision-making paradigms. Hewig et al. (2011) explored affective correlates of decision-making in the ultimatum game (UG) and the dictator game (DG). They found that feedback-related negativity (FRN), subjecti...
Post-COVID syndrome (PCS) describes a persistent complex of symptoms following a COVID-19 episode, lasting at least 4 to 12 weeks, depending on the specific criteria used for its definition. It is often associated with moderate to severe impairments of daily life and represents a major burden for many people worldwide. However, especially during th...
Background: Social support is widely believed to positively influence pain symptoms, their intensity, and the ability to cope and influence pain. Social support is a multidimensional construct encompassing emotional support as well as pain-focused care and attention, also known as solicitous support. On the other hand, social support can be negativ...
Pain is a biopsychosocial phenomenon, resulting from the interplay between physiological and psychological processes and social factors. Given that humans constantly interact with others, the effect of social factors is particularly relevant. Documenting the significance of the social modulation of pain, an increasing number of studies have investi...
Post-COVID syndrome (PCS) describes a persistent complex of symptoms following a COVID-19 episode, lasting at least 4 to 12 weeks, depending on the specific criteria used for its definition. It is often associated with moderate to severe impairments of daily life and represents a major burden for many people worldwide. However, especially during th...
Climate change is one of, if not the greatest, global challenges of this century, as its consequences can have a wide range of impacts on society, the environment, and the personal lives of many individuals. Consequently, many people experience severe psychological burdens in the form of fears, anxieties, or worries, elicited by one, some, or all t...
This article aims to unravel the dynamics of social influence by examining the processes that occur when one person is the target of another’s influence. We hypothesized that these processes are part of a feedback loop system in an individual. This loop involves the situation (input), a goal state (reference), a comparator, a selection mechanism, a...
Previous research on racial ingroup bias in empathy for pain focused on neural responses to a single person’s suffering. It is unclear whether empathy for simultaneously perceived multiple individuals’ pain (denoted as collective empathy in this study) is also sensitive to perceived racial identities of empathy targets. We addressed this issue by r...
Background: Depression and fatigue are commonly observed sequelae following viral diseases such as COVID-19. Identifying symptom constellations that differentially classify post-COVID depression and fatigue may be helpful to individualize treatment strategies. Here, we investigated whether self-reported post-COVID depression and post-COVID fatigue...
This article aims to unravel the dynamics of social influence by examining the processes that occur when one person is the target of another’s influence. We hypothesized that these processes are part of a feedback loop system in an individual. This loop involves the situation (input), a goal state (reference), a comparator, a selection mechanism, a...
Individuals have different preferences to interact with other persons. These preferences may vary depending on the personality of a person and the perceived personality of their interaction partner(s). Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), we tested whether the perception of personality traits in others predicts participants’ preferences for...
UNSTRUCTURED
Pain is a biopsychosocial phenomenon, resulting from the interplay between physiological and psychological processes and social factors. Given that humans constantly interact with others, the effect of social factors is particularly relevant. Documenting the significance of the social modulation of pain, an increasing number of studies...
Psychosocial factors affect mental health and health-related quality of life (HRQL) in a complex manner, yet gender differences in these interactions remain poorly understood. We investigated whether psychosocial factors such as social support and personal and work-related concerns impact mental health and HRQL differentially in women and men durin...
Fairness norms and resulting behaviours are an important prerequisite for cooperation in human societies. At the same time, financial incentives are commonly used to motivate social behaviours, yet it remains unclear how financial incentives affect fairness-based behaviours. Combining a decision paradigm from behavioural economics with hierarchical...
Social buffering, a phenomenon where social presence can reduce anxiety and fear-related autonomic responses, has been studied in numerous laboratory settings. The results suggest that the familiarity of the interaction partner influences social buffering while also providing some evidence for gender effects. In the laboratory, however, it is diffi...
Greed, the insatiable and excessive desire and striving for more even at the expense of others, may be directed toward various goods. In this article, we propose that greed may be conceptualized as a domain-specific construct. Based on a literature review and an expert survey, we identified 10 domains of greed which we operationalized with the DOma...
Valence framing effects refer to inconsistent choice preferences in response to positive versus negative formulation of mathematically equivalent outcomes. Here, we manipulate valence framing in a two-alternative forced choice dictator game using gains and losses as frames to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying valence framing. We appli...
Despite its negative reputation, egoism – the excessive concern for one’s own welfare – can incite prosocial behavior. So far, however, egoism-based prosociality has received little attention. Here, we first provide an overview of the conditions under which egoism turns into a prosocial motive, review the benefits and limitations of egoism-based pr...
Social buffering, a phenomenon where social presence can reduce anxiety and fear-related autonomic responses, has been studied in numerous laboratory settings. The results suggest that the familiarity of the interaction partner influences social buffering, while also providing some evidence for gender effects. In the laboratory, however, it is diff...
To slow down the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 virus, countries worldwide severely restricted public and social life. In addition to the physical threat posed by the viral disease (COVID-19), the pandemic also has implications for psychological well-being. Using a small sample (N = 51), we examined how Big Five personality traits relate to coping with c...
A variety of factors contribute to the degree to which a person feels lonely and socially isolated. These factors may be particularly relevant in contexts requiring social distancing, e.g., during the COVID-19 pandemic or in states of immunodeficiency. We present the Loneliness and Isolation during Social Distancing (LISD) Scale. Extending existing...
Background
There is evidence that extraversion and associated frequent personal and digital social contacts are associated with mental health, reflected in reduced risk for anxiety or depression. However, excessive social media use (SMU) has been related to a decrease of mental health. We test how extraversion moderates the effect of SMU on anxiety...
Previous EEG research only investigated one stage ultimatum games (UGs). We investigated the influence of a second bargaining stage in an UG concerning behavioral responses, electro-cortical correlates and their moderations by the traits altruism, anger, anxiety, and greed in 92 participants. We found that an additional stage led to more rejection...
Costly punishment describes decisions of an interaction partner to punish an opponent for violating rules of fairness at the expense of personal costs. Here, we extend the interaction process by investigating the impact of a socio-emotional reaction of the opponent in response to the punishment that indicates whether punishment was successful or no...
A variety of factors contribute to the degree to which a person feels lonely and socially isolated. These factors may be particularly relevant in times requiring social distancing, e.g., during the COVID-19 pandemic. We present the Loneliness and Isolation during Social Distancing (LISD) Scale. Extending existing trait measures, the LISD scale asse...
While there already is a huge body of research examining the advantages and disadvantages of physical attractiveness in social and economic decisions, little research has been made to explore the role of individual differences in social decision-making with regard to beauty. To close this scientific gap, we conducted a multiparadigm online study (...
Physical and mental well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic is typically assessed via surveys, which might make it difficult to conduct longitudinal studies and might lead to data suffering from recall bias. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) driven smartphone apps can help alleviate such issues, allowing for in situ recordings. Implementing suc...
In this study, we tested the influence of a second bargaining stage in an ultimatum game (UG) concerning behavioral responses, electro-cortical correlates and their moderations by the trait’s altruism, anger, anxiety and greed in 92 participants. We found that an additional stage led to more rejection in the 2-stage UG (2SUG) and that an increase i...
Background
Since the replication crisis, standardization has become even more important in psychological science and neuroscience. As a result, many methods are being reconsidered, and researchers’ degrees of freedom in these methods are being discussed as a potential source of inconsistencies across studies.
New Method
With the aim of addressing...
In human interactions, the facial expression of a bargaining partner may contain relevant information that affects prosocial decisions. We were interested in whether facial expressions of the recipient in the dictator game influence dictators’ behavior. To test this, we conducted an online study (n = 106) based on a modified version of a dictator g...
Physical and mental well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic is typically assessed via surveys, which might make it difficult to conduct longitudinal studies and might lead to data suffering from recall bias. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) driven smartphone apps can help alleviate such issues, allowing for in situ recordings. Implementing suc...
In everyday life, assumptions about our peers' as well as our own personality shape social interactions. We investigated whether self-rated personality and inferences drawn from partners' faces influence economic decisions. Participants (N = 285) played the trust game in the role of the trustor as well as the ultimatum game in the role of the propo...
We investigated the influence of social status on behavior in a modified dictator game (DG). Since the DG contains an inherent dominance gradient, we examined the relationship between dictator decisions and recipient status, which was operationalized by three social identities and an artificial intelligence (AI). Additionally, we examined the predi...
Background
The influence of emotional feedback on social decision-making situations is an omnipresent part of social interaction. Complementing existing research on the impact of approach- and avoidance-related personality traits, we examined the role of sub-clinical depression and fear of negative social evaluation in a modified ultimatum game.
M...
Background
For decades, the nature of emotions has been at the center of psychological research, particularly regarding the underlying mechanisms that enable people to perceive, recognize, and process emotional stimuli. Research has indicated that there are interindividual differences in the processing of emotions. This includes age, which underlie...
A crucial aspect of social decision-making is the ability to learn from the outcomes of preceding decisions. In particular, learning might be influenced by the expectedness of feedback and its valence. Expectedness has largely been operationalized as the frequency of stimulus occurrence and not in terms of its social context. Therefore, we investig...
Emotional feedback is a crucial part of human social interaction, since it may indicate motivations, intentions, and thus, the future behavior of interaction partners. Nowadays, social interaction has been enriched by artificial emotional feedback provided by emojis, which are the means of transporting emotions in many mobile messengers. In this st...
Emojis are nowadays a common substitute for real facial expressions to integrate emotions in social interaction. In certain contexts, emojis possibly could also transport information beyond emotions, reflecting interindividual differences or social aspects. In this study, we investigated the influence of emojis as socioemotional feedback stimuli on...
Altruistic punishment is the attempt to penalize deviant behavior of another person even though it is accompanied by personal costs. Here, we investigated the influence of the reaction on the socioemotional level of the other person following altruistic punishment behavior on future decision making and neural responses. We used a modified ultimatum...
