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
Full-time (E 13 according to the TVöD salary scale)

The position is part of the Social Neuroscience Research Group, scientifically headed by Prof. Dr. Tania Singer. The Social Neuroscience Lab investigates the foundations of human social behavior and in particular the developmental and hormonal mechanisms underlying social emotions such as empathy and compassion as well as social cognition and prosocial behavior. Furthermore, the focus is on the increase of resilience, mental health through stress reduction as well as plasticity research of the social brain through different types of mental training (app-supported, mindfulness-based as well as dyadic approaches). The Social Neuroscience Lab is located in the heart of Berlin near the main train station (www.social.mpg.de, www.taniasinger.de).

The successful candidate will be involved in all aspects of research in the field of developmental, biological and social psychology / neuroscience and within this framework the plan­ning, imple­men­tation and evaluation of a project to increase resilience, social skills and mental health in school and health care settings through multi-week online mental trainings in contemplative practices and especially in dyadic partner exercises. Here, we are specifically targeting people such as teachers or doctors / nurses / medical students who are particularly at risk of suffering from burn-out or stress-related illnesses due to their profession.

The successful candidate will develop and implement new measures, experiments and biomarker approaches in this field to investigate the effects of different socio-affective and cognitive mental training forms with a focus on dyads on improving social skills (e.g. empathy, compassion, theory of mind, attention), prosocial behavior as well as mental health (stress, depression, anxiety, burn-out reduction) in educational or health settings. For this, an earlier successful project of the lab, the CovSocial project (www.covsocial.de), which aimed at mental health and its strengthening through online mental training during the Covid19 pandemic, serves as inspiration.

The position is initially designed for three years and devoted to research with no teaching and minimal administrative duties.

Your tasks

• Conduct psychological experiments in education / school or healthcare 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.
• Collect biomarkers (stress markers, immune markers, genetics etc.)
• Participate in designing short-term mental training interventions based on mindfulness techniques, as well as innovative “contemplative dyads”, but adapted to education and healthcare settings
• Interdisciplinary collaboration with experts in the field of psychobiology (e.g. stress physiology) and other disciplines

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 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
• Interest in working with teachers and children and in translational research.
• Interest in working with doctors, nurses, medical students
• 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. Palm Pilots, mobile phones, internet, event sampling)
• In-depth 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 familiar 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 ambit with high commitment. 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 e-mail to job.application@social.mpg.de. Application review will continue until the position is filled. The position is 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.

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