Research Program

The Research Program is one of the two pillars of a Research Training Group, along with the Qualification & Supervision concept. Our Research Program contains eleven independent projects under one roof, divided into the sub-areas of flexibility and balance.

Specifically, the RTG will investigate the roles that (a) flexibility (in the context-dependent application of self-regulatory competencies) and (b) balance (vs. imbalance in different considerations relevant to self-regulatory behavior) play in self-regulatory performance and well-being. In essence, flexibility implies that there are no inherently adaptive or maladaptive means for dealing with demands, but that the most adaptive responses vary across contexts. Regarding balance, the general observation is that, in many contexts, different considerations may conflict with each other, but each may be important for goal attainment and well-being in the long run. The implication is that these considerations need to be balanced in an adaptive way. While the importance of flexibility and balance is widely acknowledged, how people manage to regulate accordingly is not well understood.

The Research Training Group is committed to the principles of Open Science.

Research Projects

Each PhD student can apply for up to three of the following research projects. The respective principal investigator (PI) will supervise the PhD student supported by a secondary supervisor and a mentor.

Flexibility

  • Malte Friese (PI)
    Secondary supervisor: Dorota Reis

    This project is concerned with how people resolve self-control conflicts in their everyday lives that they encounter in domains such as eating, media use, exercise, or studying, among others. Previous research has shown that people draw on an abundance of self-regulatory strategies to deal with these conflicts (e.g., situation modification, distraction, inhibition). Recent research suggests that some strategies might work better in certain situations, and other strategies work better in other situations. This idea of regulatory flexibility is the guiding principle of Project F1. Although this idea is helpful in understanding how people deal with self-control conflicts, its further investigation has hit a few obstacles. For example, the data in pertinent research studies quickly become complex, because people rely on a great number of strategies. Second, the context factors that predispose people to rely on certain strategies, but not others, to solve their self-control conflicts, are not yet understood. Third, little is known about how people differ in their ways to flexibly apply certain strategies, but not others. Project F1 will address these and other questions by investigating self-control conflicts as they unfold in people’s everyday lives at home, work, or leisure activities. We will use sophisticated methods that greatly simplify the complexity of the data and let us examine how regulatory flexibility impacts both how well people manage to deal with their self-control conflicts and how they feel after (un)successfully dealing with these conflicts.

  • Laura Dörrenbächer-Ulrich (PI) & Franziska Perels
    Secondary Supervisor: Gisa Aschersleben

    This project aims to investigate the role of flexibility in the context of self-regulated learning (SRL) in a school context. The construct of SRL comprises cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational strategies and is seen as cross-curricular competence. It is positively related to academic achievement for different age groups and to well-being. In the context of flexibility, SRL is defined as adaptation processes regulating which strategies are selected in response to certain situational and subjective demands (e.g., school subjects) and how they are adjusted during learning. SRL-flexibility is hypothesized as important characteristic of highly effective students. No systematic, person-oriented studies on secondary school students and domain specificity (with regard to school subjects) of SRL strategy use exist until now. Therefore, the main idea of the project is to analyze students’ performance as a function of (non-) flexible SRL strategy use when handling the requirements of different school subjects. Moreover, process analyses will be used to analyze SRL strategy use in response to negative (or positive) achievements or specific learning task requirements. F2 will address this topic using a longitudinal design and latent profile analyses within a large sample of sixth-graders. The main methods used in this project will be questionnaires and microanalysis for SRL as well as academic achievement and affective and behavioral measures.

  • Gisa Aschersleben (PI), Laura Dörrenbächer-Ulrich, Franziska Perels
    Secondary Supervisor: Jutta Kray

    This project aims to investigate whether children and adolescents, who can regulate their motivation for learning and therefore flexibly adapt their tendency to delay gratification depending on external requirements (e.g., transitions from primary to secondary school), show successful academic goal achievement in combination with high well-being. The self-regulatory tendency to resist opportunities that would immediately satisfy impulses in favor of pursuing long-term academic goals is coined academic delay of gratification (ADOG). In adult students, ADOG is positively related to the use of self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies, academic motivation, and academic performance as well as to well-being. Evidence from children and adolescents, however, is rare. During academic transitions (naturally occurring critical phases of school careers) motivational components of SRL typically decrease. It is hypothesized that students who flexibly adapt their tendency to delay gratification will show high academic goal achievement as well as high well-being. F3 will address this topic by using a longitudinal design testing two groups (primary and secondary school children) in three waves (wave 1 before the transition, wave 2 and 3 after the transition to secondary school and to university, respectively). The main methods used in this study will be ADOG scales, school grades and standardized school achievement tests and well-being questionnaires.

  • Roxanne Sopp (PI), Tanja Michael
    Secondar supervisor: Einat Levy-Gigi

    This project aims to investigate the role of flexible self-regulation in coping with repeated trauma exposure. While the majority of the world population will experience a potentially traumatic event at some point in their life (e.g., assaults, natural disasters, accidents), some populations – such as individuals working in high-risk occupations (e.g., firefighters, police men, paramedics) - are regularly exposed to such events over prolonged periods of their life. Despite this significant trauma burden, research surprisingly shows that most individuals working in high-risk occupations are able to adapt to these working conditions while only a minority is affected by chronic mental health problems. In this project, we aim to investigate whether regulatory flexibility, that is the ability to alternate between different responses in accordance with situational demands, is a core element of successful coping with repeated trauma exposure in individuals working in high-risk occupations.
    Previous research suggests a buffering effect of regulatory flexibility in this population. However, findings are cross-sectional, which severely limits interpretation. The current project aims to overcome this limitation by investigating the longitudinal impact of regulatory flexibility on trauma symptoms and the predictive power of individual flexibility components.

  • Anselm Crombach (PI)
    Secondary Supervisor: Tanja Michael

    This project aims at understanding the impact of childhood maltreatment during sensitive development periods, including neglect of infants, on the development of emotion regulation flexibility, and its’ association with trauma-related disorders in violent contexts. Intending to demonstrate how reduced emotion regulation flexibility might explain the association between childhood maltreatment and trauma-related disorders, and to provide evidence for the utility of emotion regulation flexibility in non-western cultures, the project will recruit young adult female survivors of sexual and domestic violence in Germany and Burundi. In addition to assessing different types of childhood maltreatment, the project intends to build on previous work and studies regarding brain development to assess physical balance as a proxy for neglect of infants. Using a cross-sectional design his association, and measures of emotion regulation flexibility will be validated across cultures. Furthermore, the predictive power of childhood maltreatment and impaired balance for emotion regulation flexibility and trauma related disorders will be tested including potential mediation effects to explain the association between childhood maltreatment and trauma-related mental health symptoms. In a longitudinal design with the Burundian sample, we will test whether emotion regulation flexibility moderates the impact of newly experienced traumatic life events on trauma-related symptoms, and in how far new traumatic experiences lead to changes in regulatory flexibility.

  • Elisabeth Hahn (PI) & Frank Spinath
    Secondary Supervisor: Tanja Michael

    This project is taking a more in-depth look on how flexible self-regulatory behavior promotes subjective well-being (SWB) in the context of goal achievement and goal adaptation strategies. F6 will investigate phenotypic associations as well as genetic and environmental pathways using a multivariate behavior genetic approach in a twin sample of adolescents and young adults.The project idea builds on a common finding, that the basic capacity to self-regulate behavior promotes SWB, as it promotes the achievement of long-term goals. However, research has also been shown that rigid applications of certain self-regulatory strategies (e.g., inhibition) are not always effective suggesting that regulatory flexibility might play an important role in the relation between self-regulation and SWB. Moreover, given that there is not one goal at a time, but mostly various goals with certain meanings in a hierarchical order of importance, it seems promising to investigate flexibility in self-regulation in the context of the dynamic between goal achievement and goal adaptation behavior which includes not only long-term goal pursuit but also (occasional) hedonic goal pursuit. So far, different aspects and conceptualizations of flexibility in the context of goal management and achievement strategies have been proposed but they have not yet been systematically investigated in a joint approach. F6 will address this by investigating the degree to which these different conceptualizations of flexibility exert joint and unique effects in the prediction of SWB. In addition, the question of whether there is an optimal balance between, for example goal adaptation and hedonic goal pursuit (incl. interindividual differences therein) will be explored. Building on this phenotypic approach, the relative contribution of genetic and environmental factors on interindividual variation in flexibility and its relation to SWB will be investigated by applying multivariate behavior genetic models.

Balance

  • Dorota Reis (PI)
    Secondary Supervisor: Cornelius König

    This project seeks to understand how people balance demands from different domains in daily life and whether they flexibly use affect regulation strategies (e.g., reappraisal) to deal with demands. Previous research on emotion regulation shows that some strategies help more than others to improve affective states, but their efficacy might depend on situation characteristics. At the substantive level, Project B1 applies this concept of regulatory flexibility to investigate whether such flexible use of affect regulation strategies is adaptive when people face work and personal demands, that is, whether it predicts higher (satisfaction with) work-nonwork balance, lower strain, and higher well-being in daily life. Here, using experience sampling, we will advance research in occupational health psychology, focusing more on direct operationalizations of flexibility. Methodologically, Project B1 will identify latent profiles of demands and strategy use and examine their adaptiveness and the associated stressor-related processes. In addition, we will look at different operationalizations of balance, that is, balancing as a process versus balance as a self-reported outcome.

  • Cornelius König (PI)
    Secondary Supervisor: Malte Friese

    Achieving a balance between different goals at work poses a significant challenge as they are often in conflict with each other. Self-licensing might be a strategy to achieve such balance. It means that people allow themselves to indulge (i.e., pursue a hedonistic goal) after investing time and energy in one goal because they feel 'they deserve it.' For example, employees might self-reward themselves by chatting with friends after working hard to reach a deadline. While self-licensing has often been viewed as an excuse for a lack of self-control, B2 challenges this limited perspective. B2 will demonstrate the relevance of this phenomenon in the workplace and assess its effectiveness in balancing goals while considering both positive and negative consequences. To do so, project B2 will use different methods (a qualitative study, experimentally manipulated vignettes, and an experience sampling study). The results will surely be of interest not only to debates within the academic self-regulation literature but also to practitioners who want to develop interventions supporting employees in their daily struggle to perform without being stressed.

  • Axel Mecklinger (PI)
    Secondary Supervisor: Jutta Kray

    Research in cognitive neuroscience suggests that successful self-control involves a momentary imbalance between bottom-up processes that represent rewarding or emotional aspects of stimuli and top-down processes mediated by the prefrontal cortex that exert control over these processes. Several brain imaging studies have mapped brain systems involved in control and impulsive behavior and a recent brain-as-predictor study demonstrated that self-control outcomes in real world settings can be best accounted for when the balance between brain measures of both, impulsive and inhibitory control processes is considered as compared to approaches in which only one kind of process is considered (Lopez et al., 2017). In this project we will use ERP indices of control and impulsive behavior to predict self-control in real world settings. The P3b, CNV and ERN could serve as proxies of cognitive control, while the P3a, FRN and the N200 are candidates for proxies of reward processing and/or impulsivity (see Luck & Kappenman, 2012). We hypothesize that an imbalance in favor of control processes over reward processes (as revealed by the respective ERP measures) will be predictive for self-control success, whereas an imbalance in favor of impulsive processes over control processes will predict self-control failures.

  • Jutta Kray (PI)
    Secondary Supervisor: Franziska Perels

    Adolescence is characterized as a period of high vulnerability. Higher sensitivity to immediate rewards calls for the need of behavioral adjustment. Failures of self-regulation are often reflected in risky decisions and unhealthy behavior (alcohol consumption). Neurobiological imbalance models explain such behavior by an imbalance in the maturation of two brain systems, the early developing reward system and the later developing cognitive control system. Empirical evidence directly testing whether this imbalance is a critical predictor for risky decisions in adolescence is fully missing, which will be the main objective in B4. One dissertation project will examine (a) cross-sectionally whether the imbalance between both systems, or either of both systems is the driving force for risky decisions in adolescence, and (b) longitudinally whether changes in imbalance from early adolescence to early adulthood determine age-related changes in self-regulation on the basis of an existing multi-method data set, including self-reports, behavioral, and neuronal indicators of both systems.

  • Dirk Wentura (PI)
    Secondary Supervisor: Axel Mecklinger

    The leading hypothesis is that self-regulatory balancing processes have their basis in bal-anced attention processes (i.e., involuntary processes; “automatisms”). We want to study this balance by experiments in which established paradigms of attention research are adapted for game-like situations that plausibly induce regulation processes. To elucidate with two examples: (1) Goal A is associated with high incentives, but the difficulty of the task in-creases over the course of the experiment (i.e., the expectancy value decreases); Goal B is associated with low incentives and constant low difficulty. Initially, Goal A is attentionally priori-tized over Goal B; but we expect that attentional prioritization will respond to the changes of expectancy values. (2) Goal A is to monitor a simulated technical device and to make a (time-consuming) correction if needed (e.g., in a fishing game the boat has a "leak"; water must be scooped). If the level gets out of control, the entire session is considered a failure (i.e., no monetary payout). Goal B is to earn points in a reaction time task that will later be converted into a cash payout as long as Goal A is fulfilled. We expect that attentional prioritization with regard to Goal A and B responds to the demands of the task in a functional way (i.e., prioriti-zation of Goal B as long as everything is copacetic for Goal A but prioritization of Goal A if not). The cueing paradigm is the prime candidate to begin assessing these attentional dynamics. Beyond, we plan to adapt eye-tracking and EEG.