Emotions & Misinformation Spreading on Social Media

How do social motivations and emotions influence the spreading of misinformation? Could online interventions that consider these psychological mechanisms help reduce belief in and sharing of misinformation?

Collective emotions and mental health

Using social media to measure emotions and mental health in societies at large

Suicide prevention via (social) media

Which features of news media reporting and social media content contribute to suicide prevention, and which have harmful effects on suicidal behavior? Can we use Machine Learning to find out?

Open Science

I helped launch the Horizon 2020 project ON-MERRIT on Matthew effects in academia, industry and policy, coordinating the activities of several research institutions as the project manager. Together with the ON-MERRIT team, I investigated how the open science movement could be shaped so that the scientific system actually becomes more equitable and participatory.

Social and Affective Neuroscience & Social Psychology

My research in neuroscience was inspired by the complex relationship between social and emotional experiences and the body, including hormonal changes and brain activity. I investigated how we perceive others facial expressions, how we react to their non-verbal social signals, and how our own bodily state and and social power influence these social interactions.

Power postures and their effects on social perception and behavior

During my PhD in the Social Cognition Team at ENS (ENS Paris), I explored how body poses expressing social power influence face perception and social interaction. Specifically, I investigated if such power poses influence how well we recognize fearful and angry faces, and if we decide to approach or avoid others expressing these emotions. I also explored if power poses effect how we mentally imagine the faces of others we’d like to interact with (our social preferences). I applied experimental techniques from cognitive science, statistical models and image analyses methods, and analyzed eye and mouse tracking data as well as salivary hormone levels. The “replication crisis” in psychology sparked an intense discussion about the research my project was built on. Really caring about the quality of my own contributions to science, I therefore made my own research as rigorous and reproducible as possible, and became involved in the open science community. In the end, I learned a ton about what good evidence is, and a lot less about actual effects of power poses.

You can have a look at my PhD thesis here: The influence of bodily actions on social cognition and behavior: Assessing effects of power postures

Face perception in the brain

In a lab rotation in the Social and Affective Neuroscience group at ICM Paris, I further analyzed intracranial EEG data to examine the integration of gaze and emotional facial expressions in the superior temporal sulcus, one of the core structures of the „social brain“.

Sexual cognition and the brain

In another lab rotation at the LNCP at ENS Paris, I investigated anatomical brain differences associated with the fraternal-birth-order-effect related to male homosexuality, and prepared seminars about the broader topic of “sexual cognition” and human sexuality.

Gender differences in stress responses (Master thesis)

For my Master thesis, I worked in an fMRI research project on stress at the SCAN-Unit at the University of Vienna. We investigated gender differences and menstrual cycle effects in response to stress. We compared the effects of social exclusion and achievement stress on emotions, hormones and stress responses in the brain. My diploma thesis focused on Sex differences in neural and hormonal responses to achievement stress.