Research
The way we think about ourselves is shaped by the social world and the feedback we receive in it – that’s the focus of our research. We hypothesise that the processes involved in forming and revising self-beliefs are not neutral, but are instead affected by an individual’s learning history, motivations and emotional state.
Affected beliefs
Maintaining a positive social image is a strong motivating force for people (see Müller-Pinzler et al., 2015). Therefore, the opinions and judgements of others about us, or our assumptions about these opinions and judgements, are so important in our daily lives that they influence how we feel, what we think and how we behave. In our research projects, we are developing new approaches to quantify the effects of social feedback and model how it helps us form new self-beliefs (see Krach et al., 2024; Müller-Pinzler et al., 2019; Müller-Pinzler et al., 2022). These research questions are particularly relevant in the context of clinical disorders such as social anxiety or depression (Czekalla et al., 2024), where feedback is processed in a negatively biased manner and thereby can reinforce negative self-beliefs. We are also interested in how acute stress affects self-related feedback processing (Czekalla et al., 2021), how the presence of others affects social learning (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2019), how newly established beliefs can be revised (Schröder et al., 2024), and how these processes are manifested in the brain (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2022).
Elements of control
Subjective beliefs about control over the social and non-social environment are central to well-being and health. When we believe that we have brought about a positive outcome relevant to ourselves, such as achieving a personal goal, the associated affect (e.g. pride) has a lasting impact on our development. The loss of the idea of being the architect of one’s own future is in turn closely linked to depressive symptoms such as learned helplessness, diminished self-esteem and lack of motivated behaviour. Some forms of addiction can also disrupt otherwise functioning processes and lead to an unwarranted sense of control. In our research projects on this topic, we seek to develop new approaches to understand the neural systems underlying control beliefs, self-efficacy and affective consequences in order to explain the variability in human behaviour and psychiatric symptoms. (see Stolz et al., 2020).
Metascience
Science does not happen in a vacuum. Science, similarly to beliefs (see above), is affected by structural barriers. Similar to beliefs (see above), science is affected by structural barriers. In addition to our content-related topics, our laboratory is interested in the recursive effects of the scientific process. What constitutes “good” or “methodologically sound” science? What are the implications of our research? And who decides where to go?
From a methodological perspective, we focused on questions related to the reliability or replicability of neuroimaging data (e.g. Frässle et al., 2015), effect size measures (Paulus et al., 2013), or the interpretation of neuroimaging findings (Bedenbender et al., 2011). In terms of implications, our focus was on questions concerning the culturalistic/neo-racist (Martinez Mateo et al., 2012, Martinez Mateo et al., 2013a; Martinez Mateo et al., 2013b), racist (Heinz et al., 2014), essentialist or sexist (Sayyad & Krach, 2020) concepts of neuroimaging research. And finally, from a structural perspective, we focused on potential drawbacks of the highly achievement-oriented academic system (see e.g. “The impact factor fallacy”; Paulus et al., 2016 or how the “Journal impact factor shapes scientists’ reward signal in the prospect of publication”; Paulus et al., 2015). More recently, we published two Shiny-Apps, GrantInq and SoCostLi, to allow for a simulation of funding systems with regard to their effects on economic burden, quality, and diversity (Luebber et al., 2023).
Past research: Social emotions
Humans as social creatures are susceptible to various social emotions that emerge in the presence of others. Embarrassment is the consequence if one behaves in a bearish, inept way (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2015). Public settings do not only lead to feelings of embarrassment for one’s own misadventures, but can also be the source of embarrassment about other people’s flawed behavior. This phenomenon has been termed empathic or vicarious embarrassment and coined as “fremdscham” or more recently as “cringe” in the German language (see e.g. Paulus et al., 2013, Mayer et al., 2020 or Mayer et al., 2021). For the past few years, we have been studying the neural processes underlying the observation of cringeworthy behaviors (Paulus et al., 2013), its relation to other forms of social pain, and its modulation by personality (Krach et al., 2011). Further, we conceptually distinguished vicarious embarrassment from schadenfreude (Paulus et al., 2018), elaborated how social closeness (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2016) or meditation (Laneri et al., 2017) impacts the experience of vicarious embarrassment and how these emotions are represented in clinical populations (Krach et al., 2015; Stroht et al., 2019). In a recent collaboration with researchers from Michigan State University and Frankfurt am Main we linked cringeworthy behaviors of US representatives to embarrassment spikes on Twitter and reasoned about the implications and consequences (Paulus et al., 2019).