PhD Position (m/f/x) in Psychology and/or Social Neuroscience

The Social Neuroscience Lab of the Max Planck Society, located in the heart of Berlin, is offering a

PhD Position (m/f/x) 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. This was inspired by a previous successful project of the lab, the CovSocial project (www.covsocial.de), which focused on strengthening mental health through socio-emotional and mind­fulness-based app-based online training during the Covid 19 pandemic. The Edu:Social project will now focus on strengthening resilience, social skills, and mental health in school and health care settings through several weeks of online mental training using contemplative practices and especially dyadic partner exercises. Both, teachers and doctors are at high risk of burnout and need daily social skills such as empathy and perspective taking for their everyday working life. We will assess the effects of the intervention on outcome measures as varied as psychological laboratory tasks, questionnaires, app-based ecological momentary assessment, biopsychological stress, and immune markers as well as more system-related measures (e.g., burn-out rates, team- or classroom wellbeing, etc.).

Your tasks

You develop, coordinate, and pursue a dissertation project within the Edu:Social research project. You publish your research results and actively participate in the development, implementation, and analysis of the project together with the research group under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Tania Singer.

Your qualifications

• You have successfully completed your master’s degree in developmental, social psychology, social neuroscience, or a related field
• You have a high command of the German language
• You have an interest in contemplative studies (e.g., mindfulness and compassion interventions) and translational field research
• You are interested in the implementation of (bio)psychological experiments and in the use of modern technologies for the collection of psychological data in everyday life including hormonal measures (e.g., mobile phones, app-based methods, and event sampling)
• Interest in working with teachers / children and or doctors, nurses, medical students and in trans­lational field research

Desirable

• Some 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

Your application

Please send us your complete application documents including a letter of motivation, CV in English or German, as well as three references by e-mail to job.application@social.mpg.de. Application review will continue until the position is filled, but latest until January 2024. The position is fulltime, based on the salary group E 13 TVöD (65%), 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.

Social Neuroscience Lab
Max Planck Society

JFK Haus
Bertha-Benz-Straße 3
10557 Berlin

Contact for more information:
Tel.: +49 30 2360-8150
E-mail: office@social.mpg.de