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 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 2026-2030

These are the project that the second cohort of PhD students will start working on in October 2026. 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


    When people deal with self-control conflicts in their daily lives this happens in various (social) contexts: The conflicts may be weak or strong. People may be alone or in the presence of others. They may feel happy, sad, tired, or stressed. People demonstrate flexible self-regulation when they systematically adapt their responses to self-control conflicts based on the context. Project F1.2 shares guiding principles with the sister project F1.1, as that both investigate self-regulatory flexibility in daily life. (See the description of Project F1.1 below.) Project F1.2 takes a person-centered approach to self-regulatory flexibility. We will use a variety of sophisticated data collection and data analysis methods to translate indicators of self-regulatory flexibility from the situational, momentary level to the dispositional, person level. Then, we will investigate whether people who tend to regulate flexibly fare better in terms of self-regulatory success, goal achievement, and well-being. Additionally, we will examine which personality characteristics predispose people to regulate flexibly. Taken together, project F1.2 will comprehensively investigate individual differences in regulatory flexibility from various angles and examine the extent to which regulatory flexibility helps people be more successful in life.

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

    As a follow-up to F2.1, which investigated the general flexibility in SRL of secondary school students regarding differing school subjects, this project will focus on secondary school students’ flexibility in SRL within a specific learning episode (a school year and the time between two exams in one subject). Therefore, F2.2 focuses on changes in self-regulated learning processes, applying a longitudinal study design. Using experience-sampling methods and applying process analyses to these data, the project will investigate whether changes in SRL processes differ across school subjects. Moreover, the project aims to examine whether strategies are adapted in response to negative (or positive) achievements and feedback, or to specific learning task requirements, and whether these adaptations have positive effects on performance and well-being-related outcomes. Therefore, metacognitive, motivational, and cognitive learning strategy use will be assessed, as well as well-being-related outcomes on a daily basis using self-report measures. To gain deeper insight into self-regulated learning on a fine-grained assessment level, the flexible use of SRL strategies within a school year will also be assessed by conducting microanalytic assessments of students within specific learning task contexts at three measurement points.

  • More information on this project will be available in the near future.

  • Roxanne Sopp (PI), Tanja Michael
    Secondar supervisor: Anselm Crombach

    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. To this end, we will employ a range of experimental tasks to assess distinct components of regulatory flexibility and examine their relationship with longitudinal symptom burden in individuals working in high-risk occupations. This approach will allow us to evaluate the predictive value of individual flexibility components for trauma-related symptoms. In addition, we will collect psychophysiological measures (e.g., heart rate variability, hair cortisol) to examine their associations with experimental indices of regulatory flexibility.

  • Anselm Crombach (PI)
    Secondary Supervisor: Tanja Michael

    This project aims at understanding the impact of childhood maltreatment and neglect of infants during sensitive development periods on flexibility to cope with new traumatic experiences. 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. Comparisons between the German and Burundian sample will allow a culturally sensitive understanding of the impact of childhood maltreatment on emotion regulation flexibility, and the importance of regulatory flexibility in violent contexts. 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. The project offers the opportunity to conduct research in an international team of German and Burundian mental health experts. An interest in other cultures and a willingness to conduct research in Burundi are required.

  • Frank Spinath
    Secondary Supervisor: Tanja Michael

    In our previous project (F6.1) we took a more in-depth look on how flexible self-regulatory behavior promotes subjective well-being (SWB), and we systematically investigated to which extent different aspects and conceptualizations of flexibility reflected related or unique aspects of behavior. In this new project, we will build on these findings with a focus on studying real-life goal pursuit and the importance of contextual factors.

    In everyday life, when pursuing a goal, individuals constantly face challenging situations and there is no inherently single adaptive strategy to ensure success. Instead, research shows that flexibility is a key element for successful self-regulation. Flexibility can be understood as the ability to match regulatory strategies to situational demands, and also as the ability to adjust goals to the actual situation. Moreover, it is well documented that flexibility shows substantial associations with other constructs, such as self-efficacy and well-being. However, these findings from basic research in flexibility often fall short of capturing the complex and dynamic nature in real-world contexts. This is what we wish to address in our present project.

    Over the past few years, individual differences research has shifted focus from stability-oriented paradigms to change-oriented research, including volitional personality change in non-clinical samples. Recent findings from a large study using a 6-week intervention (Haehner et al., 2025) indicate that volitional decrease of trait neuroticism is possible showing lasting effects even one year later. Less is known, however, about the of role individual differences in flexible self-regulation regarding success or failure under such circumstances, although first empirical evidence indicates the possible role of personal attributes such as self-efficacy and growth mindset.

    To address this interesting research question, we intend to investigate individuals pursuing real-life goals (e.g., successful voluntary behavior change or achieving an educational degree) to determine the importance of flexible self-regulation, taking into account contextual factors that either facilitate or interfere with reaching these goals.

Balance

  • Dorota Reis (PI)
    Secondary Supervisor: Cornelius König

    This project investigates how people flexibly use affect regulation strategies when facing demands from work and personal life, and how this flexibility relates to their experience of work-nonwork balance. Building on research on regulatory flexibility, which suggests that the adaptiveness of emotion regulation depends on adjusting strategies to situational characteristics, Project B1.2 examines whether people adapt their regulation to the type and intensity of demands they currently face and whether such flexible adjustment is associated with higher well-being, lower strain, and a greater sense of balance across life domains. A central concept is the resource-demand mismatch: When people detect a discrepancy between their available resources and the demands of their current situation, do they adjust their regulatory response, and does this adjustment improve subsequent affective and energetic states? Using a measurement-burst design with repeated experience-sampling phases, the project addresses these questions through two complementary analytical approaches. First, multilevel latent profile analysis will identify within-person configurations of demands and affect regulation strategies at the momentary level. Latent transition analysis will then capture how people move between these configurations, providing a person-centered operationalization of regulatory flexibility. Second, dynamic structural equation modeling will be used to model regulatory feedback loops—from the detection of resource-demand mismatches to strategy deployment to affective outcomes—operationalizing flexibility as the strength of situation-strategy coupling. The measurement burst structure also allows testing whether regulatory dynamics and their links to balance remain stable or shift as life and work conditions change. Comparing the two analytical approaches will advance the methodological toolkit for studying regulatory flexibility in intensive longitudinal designs.

  • Cornelius König (PI)
    Secondary Supervisor: Malte Friese

    Balancing different goals at work, such as meeting performance demands while maintaining health and well-being, is a daily challenge for employees. Work breaks play a key role in this balancing process. Taking a break can signify smart self-regulation and responsible energy management, but it can also be interpreted as shirking, self-indulgence, or even “time theft.” Project B2.2 explores how employees navigate this ambivalence: when and why do breaks feel legitimate and restorative, and when do they provoke guilt or social disapproval? The project examines how individual beliefs, social expectations, and organizational norms shape how breaks are experienced and evaluated. Likely using a combination of qualitative interviews, vignette experiments, and experience sampling, B2.2 investigates both the psychological and social consequences of break-taking for well-being, performance, and workplace relationships. The findings will contribute to understanding what healthy goal balancing looks like in everyday work life and how organizations can create climates that support effective and stigma-free recovery behavior.

  • Axel Mecklinger (PI)
    Secondary Supervisor: Dirk Wentura

    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 a top-down control system mediated by the prefrontal cortex that is capable of downregulating  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 top-down control processes is considered ([1]). However, recent studies using electrophysiological indicators of self-control attainment revealed mixed results regarding self-control success in real world settings ([2]). In this project we will use EEG/ERP indices of control and impulsive behavior to predict self-control attainment in real world settings. We hypothesize that EEG/ERP measures do predict self control outcome in every day life only in those specific outcomes that closely resample the processes reflected in the ERP/EEG measures. Contingent upon its successful validation this approach could also be applied to adolescents, a population highly sensitive to reward and emotional processing.

  • Jutta Kray (PI)
    Secondary Supervisor: Axel Mecklinger

    Adolescence is characterized as a developmental period marked by heightened vulnerability and increased sensitivity to immediate rewards. This heightened reward sensitivity often manifests in sensation-seeking behavior and frequent failures of self-control in everyday life. Such failures are commonly reflected in risky decision-making and engagement in unhealthy behaviors (e.g., binge drinking). Neurobiological imbalance models attribute these behavioral tendencies to an asynchrony in the maturation of two key brain systems: a relatively early-developing reward system and a later-developing cognitive control system. This developmental mismatch is assumed to peak during mid-adolescence, resulting in a pronounced imbalance that favors reward-driven behavior over controlled, goal-directed action.

    To experimentally induce an imbalance between the reward and cognitive control systems, the present project manipulates reward sensitivity by varying both the valence (gains, losses, neutral outcomes) and magnitude (high vs. low) of feedback in tasks requiring adolescents to adapt their behavior to changing rules. Failures of self-control will be assessed using both behavioral indices (e.g., error rates) and neurophysiological markers of error and feedback processing, specifically the error-related negativity (ERN) and feedback-related negativity (FRN). Based on the assumptions of imbalance models, we hypothesize that mid-adolescents will exhibit heightened sensitivity to high rewards. This increased sensitivity may facilitate the learning of novel rules, reflected in reduced error rates and enhanced amplitudes of ERN and FRN. Furthermore, recent evidence suggests that the ERN, in particular, may serve as a predictor of self-control in everyday contexts (e.g., [1]). Accordingly, this PhD project aims to investigate whether ERN and FRN measures can predict real-life self-control outcomes, including the propensity to engage in risky and unhealthy behaviors.

  • Dirk Wentura (PI)
    Secondary Supervisor: Axel Mecklinger

    The central idea of Project B.5 is both simple and powerful: effective self-regulation may rely on balanced attention—not only deliberately, but through subtle, largely involuntary processes (“automatisms”). A key yet often overlooked distinction in attention research is the difference between external and internal attention. While most research has focused on how we attend to the outside world, this project turns inward—toward how we prioritize information within our own minds. This PhD project will investigate internal attention to goal-related information. Imagine pursuing an important goal (Goal A), while another goal (Goal B) lingers in the background—planned, but not yet acted upon. Why is it sometimes so hard to stay focused? One possibility is that Goal B remains highly accessible in memory, subtly pulling attention away from Goal A (e.g., [1]; [2]). The project aims to uncover how such internal goal competition unfolds. Specifically, it asks: When does a not-yet-pursued goal become a cognitive distraction—and why? To answer this, we will use experimental paradigms that capture how easily goal-related information comes to mind. A particularly promising tool is the working memory updating task (e.g., [3]; [4]). In this task, participants encode two sets of information but are later instructed to keep only one in mind. Crucially, items from the now-irrelevant set (“lures”) tend to linger—they are harder to dismiss than entirely new information. This makes the task a powerful window into how the mind handles competing internal representations. Interestingly, although the paradigm is widely used to investigate fundamental working memory processes (e.g., [5]), its application to questions of emotion and motivation has been largely restricted to the domain of dysfunctional, negatively valenced processes. Specifically, it has predominantly been adapted to study ruminative processing in depression (e.g., [3]; [6]; [7]), where negative lures are rejected particularly slowly. Building on this foundation, the project will extend the paradigm to the domain of goal pursuit. The overarching aim is to better understand how competing goals shape internal attention—and, ultimately, how the mind maintains (or loses) focus in complex, goal-driven environments.

Research Projects 2024-2028

These are the projects that the first cohort of PhD students started working on in October 2024.

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.