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Research

My research topics and projects are summarized at the interface between empirical educational sciences and (social) psychology. Research and teaching focuses on social justice, flight and migration, determinants of cooperation and civil courage in and outside of school, the experience of threats and cultural identity. In the following I present my projects.

EMPIRICAL TEACHING AND INTERVENTION RESEARCH WITH A FOCUS ON INCLUSION

My research topics and projects are summarized at the interface between empirical educational sciences and (social) psychology. Research and teaching focuses on social justice, flight and migration, determinants of cooperation and civil courage in and outside of school, the experience of threats and cultural identity.

1. Teacher training in the context of current refugee migration (duration: 2018-2023)

  • Access to the teaching profession for refugee academics who come to Germany with a teacher training qualification abroad places special demands on the teacher training system. The look at the group of people who have fled also focuses on psychotherapeutic practice research in the context of trauma and flight.

    In the project "Professional biographical background and professional identity as indicators of professional action by refugee teachers", Syrian refugee teachers from the Refugee Teachers Program of the University of Potsdam are used as an example to describe how the personal and professional biographical identity is interwoven with the professional behavior of migrant teachers. This study is based on data from interviews with eleven refugee teachers, which were conducted in 2018 and 2019. For the refugee teachers from Syria who were interviewed using semi-standardized interviews, the war often meant the end of their teaching activities in Syria, and entry into the Refugee Teachers Program meant the hope of returning to the teaching profession. When asked about their self-assessed professional competence, the teachers primarily describe three challenges during their professional practical experience in Germany: (a) learning the German language to the necessary extent; (b) the sufficient strengthening of professional competence in the new context through practical experience in the orientation internship and (c) the relationships with colleagues at the school, with whom the lessons can be reflected on together. The results reported in the article about the professional background and the current situation of migrant teachers give impetus to better identify possible further training needs and previously hidden resources and to improve the professional integration of teachers.

2. Equal participation through cooperative teaching-learning processes and complex teaching (duration 2019-2024)

  • Implementation and empirical support of a seminar concept for cooperation-promoting teaching-learning methods to deepen the knowledge gained from lectures, workshops, conferences and the Winter Academy 2022 with the teacher training of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP). With its focus on equal participation, participation, shared authority, student responsibility and constructive conflict resolution, complex teaching offers a setting in which children and young people can experience and practice aspects of democracy.

    The heterogeneous composition and equal participation in the group help to explain why some groups perform better than other groups. At this point, many research opportunities open up, but also implications for educational practice. In the continuation and deepening of several scientific exchange rounds with the Stanford Teaching Education Program in the period 2020-2023, a seminar concept for cooperative teaching-learning formats in secondary level I will be developed and empirically supported. The Complex Instruction approach is used for educational support. This is based on (social) psychological findings on intergroup relationships and on the first evaluation results from a workshop in April 2021 and from the Winter Academy 2022.

3. Immigration-related disparities in the transition recommendation and the transition to lower secondary education (duration 2022-2024)

  • The focus of this project is to be on predictors of the type of secondary school attended (high school vs. other types of school). Furthermore, transitional recommendations from teachers at the end of primary school are to be predicted. We want to investigate whether the transition recommendations are subject to bias by examining whether there are differences in the likelihood of receiving a high school recommendation even after controlling for mediating factors such as socioeconomic status (SES) and school performance.

    The aim of the planned study is to examine the extent to which there are differences in the transition recommendation for a Gymnasium and in the type of school actually attended after the transition to lower secondary level between children with and without a migration background. It should also be examined to what extent differences in school performance (performance test values and half-year grades in German and mathematics in class 4) and in social background explain these differences and what effects remain that can be attributed exclusively to the migration background.

4. Educational knowledge, consequences of stress and pedagogical knowledge in the Potsdam practical semester (duration 2020-2023)

  • The cooperation "Expectations of Self-Efficacy, Stress and Demands and Educational Science" examines the development of the pedagogical knowledge of the student teachers during the practical semester. The development of class management skills plays a particularly important role in the practical semester.

    With the long-term study over several semesters, we compare the increase in knowledge that students achieve during their practical semester with the increase in knowledge that students record during a regular university semester in a bachelor's or master's degree. Specifically, we examine how knowledge of dimensions relevant to teaching affects the stress experienced by student teachers and how the pedagogical knowledge of student teachers develops in different teaching and learning formats (orientation internship, seminar, lecture).

SOCIAL AND MOTIVATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

My central research interest in psychology relates to two pillars (pillar 1; pillar 2) of social exchange processes, which can be subsumed in many networks under socially motivated determinants of interpersonal action over the lifespan. What are the central social and affective processes that guide individual behavior and experience in different unequal contexts over time? The central assumption that guides my research is that experiences and influences in the personal, cultural and social environment determine how people react to perceived violations of norms and existential fears. I therefore understand a person's behavior in the tradition of Kurt Festinger as a product of the person's personality traits and their environment. In addition to personality determinants, salient values and norms have a significant impact on how behavior is organized in response to social injustice and existential fears across time and situations, and influence individual functioning. I use a multi-method approach that explores self-report, experimentation, process-oriented studies using experience sampling methods, behavioral measurements, and social-cognitive paradigms.

Pillar 1: Cognitive and affective determinants of moral courage across the lifespan

  • The first pillar of social exchange processes addresses the question of why people are motivated to act prosocially: Which situations, personal norms and social values influence the decision as to when and why people help each other?

    Determinants anchored in social psychology, such as the mood of the person helping, as well as more general psychological factors, such as causal attributions, are tested and replicated in my studies to predict prosocial behavior. A theoretical and practical gain in knowledge could be shown for a special form of prosocial behavior, namely civil courage: civil courageous behavior compared to helping behavior cannot be explained by positive or negative mood, but by intra-personal courage and sensitivity to justice. This result follows empirical findings , which describes civilly courageous behavior as courageous behavior accompanied by anger and indignation, which helps to enforce social-ethical norms without regard to one's own social costs.

Pillar 2: Reactions to the experience of threats

  • The second pillar of social exchange processes relates to the psychological processes triggered by social threats such as perceived loss of freedom, thoughts of death, and societal change. In particular, their consequences and effects on interpersonal interactions are empirically documented in my writings.

    If, for example, the exchange process with another person threatens or eliminates one's own freedoms, psychological reactance arises, ie an aversive motivational state. This condition aims to secure or restore threatened freedom. My research shows that restrictions on freedom trigger reactance, especially when they threaten a person's culturally or situationally relevant self-concept. Another robust phenomenon found is that mortality salience is self-threatening and motivates to defend important beliefs, protect one's self from attack, or appear positive to others.

Reactance (reactions to restrictions of freedom)

  • One form of perceived threat is the threat to one's own freedom from another person. As a result, insecurity and psychological reactance arise. Research I have conducted at the Department of Social Psychology shows that restrictions on freedom trigger reactance, especially when they threaten a person's culturally or situationally relevant self-concept. The distinction between independent versus interdependent parts of the self-concept is particularly fruitful here.

    Reactance aims to secure or restore threatened freedom. Reactance leads to arousal, resentment and resistance and also to the devaluation of interaction partners. Information is then distorted in a certain direction, ideas and concerns that may be objectively justified are devalued. The reactance theory (e.g. Brehm & Brehm, 1981) states that people react to individual restrictions of freedom with an effort to restore their freedom. The cultural identity or the cultural self also plays an important role here. So whether reactance occurs or not depends heavily on whether the threat to freedom affects important aspects of the self. This is particularly evident in cultural research on reactance. Regarding the question of the universality of reactance in different cultures, it has been shown that, depending on the cultural context, it matters whose freedom is restricted. People from a so-called individualistic culture with an independent self focus primarily on personal attributes that are independent of others, for example on their individual uniqueness, their independence and their personal usefulness (commonly represented in Western countries such as the USA or Western Europe ). In contrast, people from a more collectivist background, who tend to have an interdependent self, see their identity primarily in connection with other people or groups of people and emphasize interdependent cohesion and the well-being of the group (this cultural view is often found in Asia or South America; Triandis, 1995). Accordingly, studies found that students and staff at an American university reacted more strongly to restrictions on individual freedom than people with a collectivist background (Taiwanese, Mexicans, Chinese), who were more likely to react to restrictions on collective freedoms with resistance (Jonas et al., 2009 ). Interestingly, this resistance could also be reduced in an economic context analogous to the cultural self. Collectivist people support an economically important measure to a lesser extent if a restriction of the group is justified with the benefit for the individual. For individualistic people, on the other hand, the opposite pattern emerged: they reacted most strongly to the individual cost condition and accordingly showed the least willingness to help (Niesta-Kayser et al., 2023).

OTHER PROJECTS

Affiliationsmotivation

  • The project "The Influence of the Color Red on Perception and Social Exchange Processes" (Ni 1115/2-1), funded by the German Research Society, built on research findings that showed that colors, especially the color red, have psychological effects on interpersonal cognitions , affects and behavior show. According to Elliot and Maier's (2012) color-in-context theory, viewing colors leads to evaluation processes in which stimuli are judged to be friendly or hostile by the viewer.

    According to Elliot and Maier's (2012) color-in-context theory, viewing colors leads to evaluation processes in which stimuli are judged to be friendly or hostile by the viewer. These appraisals trigger appetitive or aversive motivations, which in turn lead to cognition and behavior. Rating a stimulus as affectionate promotes appetitive affects (ie, joy, hope), cognitions (ie, flexible, global processing of information), and behavior (ie, open approach), whereas rating a stimulus as hostile promotes aversive affects (ie, anxiety, fear), cognitions (ie, rigid, detailed processing of information), and behavior (ie, overt avoidance). Building on these investigations, the present project pursued three goals: (1) The context-specific framework is to be determined in more detail with regard to the type of interpersonally triggered motivation, ie approach vs. avoidance motivation as a result of the color red. (2) On a theoretical level, it was discussed to what extent the observed red effects can be traced back to conditioning processes and/or a biological basis. The studies designed should make a contribution to this discussion. (3) Most research on this subject tests its hypotheses on self-report procedures. As part of this project, more behavioral and psychophysiological data were collected that go beyond the self-report.