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
Full-time / Salary group 65% (E 13 TVöD)

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 dissertation 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. 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.

Your tasks

You develop, coordinate and pursue a dissertation project within the research programme. You publish your research results and actively participate in the research tasks of 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 an interest in contemplative studies (e.g. mindfulness and compassion interventions) and translational field research
• You are interested in the implementation of psychological experiments and in the use of modern technologies for the collection of psychological data in everyday life (e.g. mobile phones, app-based methods and event sampling)
• Interest in working with teachers and children and in translational research
• Interest in working with doctors, nurses, medical students

Desirable

• Good 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. The position is full-time, 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 under represented 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