Michael D. Krämer

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Verified

Michael verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Postdoc at University of Zurich

Researchers and laypeople alike have traditionally viewed personality as being highly stable across the lifespan. Although recent research has supported personality’s malleability, it is unclear how lifespan changes in personality traits compare to changes in other individual differences and how the public perceives this relative stability. Here, w...

Personality traits predict health, well-being, relationship success, and work-related outcomes, but most of the relevant evidence comes from English-speaking populations. The Big Five Aspect Scales (BFAS) are one of the most used English-language personality questionnaires, allowing to assess Big Five domains and aspects validly and reliably. In th...

Informal caregiving provides societally important healthcare functions but can take a toll on caregivers, with negative consequences for well-being. However, little is known about other psychological effects of informal caregiving and their specific temporal trajectories. Here, we focused on personality traits and examined selection (who becomes a...

Informal caregiving provides societally important healthcare functions but can take a toll on caregivers, with negative consequences for well-being. However, little is known about other psychological effects of informal caregiving and their specific temporal trajectories. Here, we focused on personality traits and examined selection (who becomes a...

There is some evidence linking personality traits to the experience of life events in adolescence and emerging adulthood. However, the role of one key life event marking these life stages has not been examined within this context: the first sexual intercourse. Using 10-year longitudinal data from over 5,000 German adolescents and emerging adults (a...

Being romantically partnered is widely seen as societal norm, and has been shown to be positively associated with important life outcomes, such as physical and mental health. However, the percentage of singles is steadily increasing, with more people staying single for life. We used the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (N = 77,064...

Life events have been theorized to elicit personality trait changes. However, the empirical evidence for event-related personality development remains inconclusive. Even comprehensive reviews and meta-analyses are limited by the availability of effect sizes, the control for relevant confounders, and the examination of the temporal unfolding of effe...

How does informal care affect caregivers’ well-being? Theories and existing research provide conflicting answers to this question, partly because the temporal processes and conditions under which different aspects of well-being are affected are unknown. Here, we used longitudinal data from Dutch, German, and Australian representative panels (281,88...

Being romantically partnered is widely seen as a societal norm, and it has been shown to be positively associated with important life outcomes, such as physical and mental health. However, the percentage of singles is steadily increasing, with more people staying single for life. We used the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE;...

Life events have been theorized to cause personality trait changes. However, people differ in their personality trait trajectories after experiencing important life events. Although several studies have examined the sources of these individual differences, a replicable set of variables explaining individual differences in the reaction to major life...

Life events have been theorized to cause personality trait changes. However, people differ in their personality trait trajectories after experiencing important life events. Although several studies have examined the sources of these individual differences, a replicable set of variables explaining individual differences in the reaction to major life...

Personality development theories and descriptive evidence highlight young adulthood as a period conducive to personality change. Young adults experience important transitions, such as starting university education, and establish new relationships. However, few empirical tests of the direct influence of university student peer groups on individual c...

Volitional personality change interventions have been shown to help people change their current personality towards their ideal personality. Here, we address three limitations of this literature. First, we contrast the dominant theoretical perspective of self-improvement with self-acceptance as pathways to reduce the discrepancy between current and...

How does informal care affect caregivers’ well-being? Theories and existing research provide conflicting answers to this question, partly because the temporal processes and conditions under which different aspects of well-being are affected are unknown. Here, we used longitudinal data from Dutch, German, and Australian representative panels (281,88...

Current psychological theories on daily social interactions emphasize individual differences yet are underspecified regarding contextual factors. We aim to extend this research by examining how two context factors shape social interactions in daily life: how many relationships people maintain and how densely people live together. In Study 1, 307 Ge...

Current psychological theories on daily social interactions emphasize individual differences yet are underspecified regarding contextual factors. We aim to extend this research by examining how two context factors shape social interactions in daily life: how many relationships people maintain and how densely people live together. In Study 1, 307 Ge...

People have a need to form and maintain fulfilling social contact, yet they differ with respect to with whom they satisfy the need and how quickly this need is deprived or overly satiated. These social dynamics across relationships and across time are theoretically delineated in the current article. Furthermore, we developed a questionnaire to meas...

Being romantically partnered is widely seen as a societal norm, and has been shown to be positively associated with important life outcomes, such as physical and mental health. However, the percentage of singles is steadily increasing, with more people staying single for life. We used the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (N = 77,06...

How do life events affect life satisfaction? Previous studies focused on a single event or separate analyses of several events. However, life events are often grouped non-randomly over the lifespan, occur in close succession, and are causally linked, raising the question of how to best analyze them jointly. Here, we used representative German data...

Lifespan psychological and life course sociological research have long shown that spousal bereavement constitutes one of the most stressful life events in older adulthood that is often associated with marked declines in well-being. It is an open question though whether and how the well-being implications of spousal loss have changed over the past d...

Social interactions are crucial to affective well-being. Still, people vary interindividually and intraindividually in their social needs. Social need regulation theories state that mismatches between momentary social desire and actual social contact result in lowered affect, yet empirical knowledge about this dynamic regulation is limited. In a ge...

Mobile sensing is a promising method that allows researchers to directly observe human social behavior in daily life using people’s mobile phones. To date, limited knowledge exists on how well mobile sensing can assess the quantity and quality of social interactions. We therefore examined the agreement among experience sampling, day reconstruction,...

How do life events affect life satisfaction? Previous studies focused on a single event or separate analyses of several events. However, life events are often grouped non-randomly over the lifespan, occur in close succession, and are causally linked, raising the question of how to best analyze them jointly. Here, we used representative German data...

Social interactions are crucial to affective well-being. Still, people vary interindividually and intraindividually in their social needs. Social need regulation theories state that mismatches between momentary social desire and actual social contact result in lowered affect, yet empirical knowledge about this dynamic regulation is limited. 306 par...

Intergenerational relations have received close attention in the context of population aging and increased childcare provision by grandparents. However, few studies have investigated the psychological consequences of becoming a grandparent. In a preregistered test of grandparenthood as a developmental task in middle and older adulthood, we used rep...

Intergenerational relations have received close attention in the context of population aging and increased childcare provision by grandparents. However, few studies have investigated the psychological consequences of becoming a grandparent. In a preregistered test of grandparenthood as a developmental task in middle and older adulthood, we used rep...

Humans possess a need for social contact. Satisfaction of this need benefits well-being, whereas deprivation is detrimental. However, how much contact people desire is not universal, and evidence is mixed on individual differences in the association between contact and well-being. This preregistered longitudinal study (N = 190) examined changes in...

Humans possess a need for social contact. Satisfaction of this need benefits well-being, whereas deprivation is detrimental. However, how much contact people desire is not universal, and evidence is mixed on individual differences in the association between contact and well-being. This preregistered longitudinal study (N = 190) examined changes in...

Intergenerational relations have received increased attention in the context of population aging and increased childcare provision by grandparents. However, few studies have investigated the psychological consequences of becoming a grandparent. For the Big Five personality traits, the transition to grandparenthood has been proposed as a development...

Although individuals vary in how optimistic they are about the future, one assumption that researchers make is that optimism is sensitive to changes in life events and circumstances. We examined how optimism and pessimism changed across the lifespan and in response to life events in three large panel studies (combined N = 74,886). In the American a...

Although individuals vary in how optimistic they are about the future, one assumption that researchers make is that optimism is sensitive to changes in life events and circumstances. We examined how optimism and pessimism changed across the lifespan and in response to life events in three large panel studies (combined N = 74,886). In the American a...

Longitudinal studies have documented improvements in parents’ life satisfaction due to childbearing, followed by postpartum adaptation back to baseline. However, the details underlying this process remain largely unexplored. Based on past literature, set-point theory, and results from an exploratory sample, we investigated empirically how first chi...

Longitudinal studies have documented improvements in parents’ life satisfaction due to childbearing, followed by postpartum adaptation back to baseline. However, the details underlying this process remain largely unexplored. Based on past literature, set-point theory, and results from an exploratory sample, we investigated empirically how first chi...

Study Objectives To examine the changes in mothers’ and fathers’ sleep satisfaction and sleep duration across pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, and the postpartum period of up to six years after birth; it also sought to determine potential protective and risk factors for sleep during that time. Methods Participants in a large population-representative pan...

Changes in Domain-Specific Life Satisfaction in First-Time Parents and Matched Controls: Findings from a Prospective Study Using the SOEP Data --- Poster at the 30th Association for Psychological Science (APS) Annual Convention

Longitudinal associations between life events and subjective sleep quality --- Symposium talk at the 2nd International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS), Vienna