Themen für Masterarbeiten

Beschreibung: Values across cultures and domains have shown remarkable comparability and stability. Nevertheless, while values have been shown to reliably emerge in self-report individuals, even value researchers, have show difficulties identifying specific instantiations of values in text, behavioral artefacts, and behavior. Part of this difficulty rests in the fact that once abstract values have to be realized they are encoded through cultural and idiosyncratic scripts. Work in this area focuses on identifying the processes of value encoding and decoding across cultures, the development of interventions to improve decoding-encoding in realms such as negotiations, and understanding the effects of successful and unsuccessful encoding and decoding. Typical topics in this area include:
How does similarity in values and success in encoding-decoding affect personal relationships either on the individual level or during business/diplomatic relationships?
How are values instantiated in text and behavior and how can they be robustly assessed with computational tools?

Kontakt: Johannes Karl, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Non-ordinary experiences are experiences which are self-identified by individuals of ?breaking the mold? of day-to-day experiences. These can from narratively elaborate such as self-reported supernatural experiences to impactful but unspecific such as outstanding unexpected moments of joy. Historically, these experiences have been treated on a case by case basis. In our group we are taking a feature based approach which aims to understand how individuals construct specific experiences from bottom-up features (out of body experiences, seeing lights, inability to move) and cultural scripts which shape the cognitive integration of these experiences into life-narratives and belief systems. In this area we are also interested in the statistical modeling of sparse and in-frequent events, as well as the possibility to study non-ordinary experiences experimentally. Typical questions in include:
How frequent are specific features of non-ordinary experiences across cultures and what experiences can be identified?
How do non-ordinary experiences related to cultural and individual narratives?
How do non-ordinary experiences relate to well-being and values?
What is the best way to model infrequent phenomena and how can subsequent impacts best be modeled?
Are there reliable, ethical, and safe procedures that can be used to induce specific non-ordinary experiences in the lab and are these comparable to experiences outside of the lab?

Kontakt: Johannes Karl, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Psychologists have come to an increasing awareness that many of the features studied traditionally in psychology show substantial horizontal variation across cultures. Beyond this horizontal variation, researchers have recently highlighted the potential of temporal cultural variation of psychological features. We want to learn how to assess this variability reliably and use historical data to expand the horizon on questions such as the structure of personality beyond contemporary understandings.

Typical questions in this area are:
? How can psychological features be extracted from cultural artefacts such as text, while ensuring measurement equivalence over time?
? How do long-term trends in features such as cultural tightness, values, and social cohesion relate to ecological, economic, and political factors?

Kontakt: Johannes Karl, E-Mail