Postdoc (m/f/x) or Senior Researcher (m/f/x) in Psychology and Social Neuroscience

The Social Neuroscience Lab of the Max Planck Society, located in the heart of Berlin, is seeking to recruit an excellent

Postdoc (m/f/x) or Senior Researcher (m/f/x) in Psychology and Social Neuroscience

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 project. This was 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 contemplative dyadic partner-based practices. Teachers are at high risk of burnout and need daily social skills such as empathy and 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.).

The position is initially designed for three years and devoted to research with no teaching required (but possible) and minimal administrative duties.

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
• Develop new paradigms to assess system-related changes in well-being and performance of an entire school / classroom or department / hospital
• Collect biomarkers such as autonomic measures, stress markers, or novel 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

Your qualifications

• You have successfully completed your dissertation and may already have experience as a postdoc. You have already successfully published at a high scientific level and made other excellent scientific achievements.
• You have expertise in biological, developmental, social psychology, and/or social neuroscience and an interest in contemplative studies (e.g., mindfulness and compassion interventions) and trans­lational field research.
• You have preferably a high command of the German language (help with testing).
• You have an interest in working with teachers and children in translational research.
• You have experience in the development and implementation of psychological experiments and in the use of modern technologies for the collection of psychological data in everyday life (e.g., web app, voice decoding technology, EMA, etc.).
• You have in-depth excellent 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.).
• You are proficient with 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.
• You enjoy to work in an academic environment with high commitment to work as well as high ex­pec­tations of work quality. You are able to work independently but also to work in a team and your com­munication skills are excellent.

Your application
Please send us your complete application documents in English or German, including a letter of motivation, your CV, as well as three references via e-mail to job.application@social.mpg.de. Application review will continue until the position is filled.

The position is a full-time position and based on the gross salary levels of the public sector (TVöD, E 13) and for a duration of three years with possible extension. Shortlisted candidates will be invited to Berlin, Germany, or interviewed online.

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.