PhD in Developmental Psychology and/or Social Neuroscience

The Social Neuroscience Lab of the Max Planck Society, located in the heart of Berlin, is seeking to recruit an excellent PhD Candidate in Psychology and Social Neuroscience (m/f/d). The position is part of the Social Neuroscience Lab, scientifically headed by Prof. Dr. Tania Singer (www.social.mpg.de, www.taniasinger.de).

The successful candidate will be involved in all aspects of research in the field of a new project, the Edu:Social School project. This is inspired by a previous successful project of the lab, the CovSocial-project (www.covsocial.de) which focused on strengthening resilience, social skills and mental health in school and educational settings through several weeks of online mental training using mindfulness and especially a novel type of contemplative dyadic partner-based practice. We now bring these programs into the educational setting. Teachers are at high risk of burnout and need daily social skills such as empathy, perspective taking, and listening abilities for their everyday working life. We aim to assess the effects of these interventions on outcome measures as varied as psychological laboratory tasks, questionnaires, app-based ecological momentary assessment, biopsychological stress-, autonomic and voice markers as well as more system-related measures (e.g., burnout rates, social network analyses, team- or classroom wellbeing and climate & system-level change markers etc.).

Your Tasks

• Conduct psychological experiments in education/school settings to measure the effects of mental training in different domains (e.g. theory of mind, attention, compassion, emotion regulation, prosocial behavior and cooperation).
• Implement modern technologies to measure subjective well-being and socio-emotional experiences in everyday life, e.g. mobile phone and app-based methods and event sampling/EMA.
• Develop new paradigms to assess system-related changes in wellbeing and performance of an entire school/classroom.
• Collect biomarkers such as autonomic measures, stress-markers or novel AI-based voice-markers able to infer emotional processes from voice recordings in natural settings via the app.
• Develop new paradigms involving assessment of dyadic synchronicity via voice markers as well as autonomic system measures
• Use network analyses to measure system-changes
•  

Your qualifications

• You have successfully completed your Master’s degree in developmental, social psychology, social neuroscience or a related field.
• Good knowledge of modern statistical analysis methods (e.g. time series analysis, structural equation models, etc.) and the use of software packages (e.g. SPSS, R, MATLAB, etc.).
• First experiences in conducting psychological experiments to measure the effects of mental training in different domains (e.g. theory of mind, attention, compassion, emotion regulation, prosocial behavior and cooperation).
• First experiences in the analysis of longitudinal data using linear mixed models and latent growth / latent change models and have experience with structural equation models in the lavaan framework.
•  

We offer:

• A full-time position based on the salary group 65% E13 and benefits according to German TVöD Bund. The position is initially designed for 3 years and devoted to research with no teaching required (but possible) and minimal administrative duties. The position include support to attend workshops and conferences. The new team of researchers will further profit from a large support team and previous lab experience, as the lab is just running a first large pilot study (study 1) within Edu:Social with more than 200 teachers involved under the guidance of a team of three project coordinators and 12 mental mindfulness and Dyad trainers who just finished their training in the intervention protocols. Furthermore, the lab developed a project-specific app which is serving as backbone for the research and interventions.

Your application:

• Interested individuals are encouraged to apply by submitting a cover letter (making sure to indicate the position of interest), their curriculum vitae, three work certificates/reference letters, proof of severe disability (if applicable), a list of publications and a research statement (maximum 3 pages) describing past accomplishments and an overview of the research program they would anticipate conducting within the Edu:Social School project. Applications should be sent to  job.application@social.mpg.de. Interviews will start in calendar week 45. The position can be filled immediately. Please indicate in the cover letter when you could start.
• The Max Planck Society is committed to increasing the number of individuals with disabilities in its workforce and therefore encourages applications from such qualified individuals. Furthermore, the Max Planck Society seeks to increase the number of women in those areas where they are underrepresented and therefore explicitly encourages women to apply.