PostDoc/Senior Researcher in Psychology and/or 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 (www.edusocial-projekt.de). 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., burn-out rates, social network analyses, team- or classroom wellbeing and climate, system-level change markers etc.).

The position is initially designed for 3 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 wellbeing and performance of an entire school/class-room 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
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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 German language already (help with testing)
• 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.)
• 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 by email 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, E13) 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 iscommitted 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.