Research
“How do we become who we think we are?”
Affected beliefs
The way we think about ourselves is shaped by the social world and the feedback we receive in it – that’s the focus of our research. We assume that the processes that play a role in the formation and revision of self-beliefs are not neutral, but are rather influenced by an individual’s learning history (priors), motives and emotional states – in other words, they are affected in three ways (Krach et al., 2024).
Ongoing research projects
Belief formation
In several ongoing research projects, we are developing new experimental approaches to quantify the effects of social feedback on how it shapes the formation of new self-beliefs (see Krach et al., 2024; Müller-Pinzler et al., 2019; Müller-Pinzler et al., 2022). Fundamental to all these projects is the Learning-Of-Own-Performance (LOOP) task that allows to quantify the mechanisms of how people arrive at novel self- and other-related beliefs.
Belief revision
Once self-beliefs are established, the question arises of whether and how they are open for revision (see Schröder et al., 2024). This is another focus of ongoing studies as understanding belief revision not only is fundamental to psychotherapy, but also a key question of ongoing socio-political debates.
Neural mechanisms
But how is self-related information tracked in the human brain? We are investigating this question in several projects using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and pupillometry (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2022). We found that neural and pupil responses mapped the prediction error valence together with the individuals’ affect and learning biases during self-belief formation.
Clinical implications
The above research questions are particularly relevant in the context of clinical symptomatology such as social anxiety or major depression (Czekalla et al., 2024), where feedback is processed in a negatively biased manner and thereby can reinforce negative self-beliefs. In a current study, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), we could show that higher symptom burden in depression was associated with forming more negative self-beliefs and more positive beliefs about others. This bias was driven by reduced learning from positive prediction errors in depression. Neural reactivity of the insula showed increased tracking of more negative self-related prediction errors. One take-away from this study is that the interplay of increased neural responsiveness to negative feedback and reduced learning from positive feedback may be key to the persistence of maladaptive self-beliefs and, thus, the maintenance of depression.
Large groups
In the last year, we have developed a smartphone app version of the Learning-Of-Own-Performance (LOOP) task, available in App Stores under the name “The Estimation Project” (here: App Store for iPhone). This app allows us to examine belief formation processes in larger settings (e.g., school classes, university). In an ongoing project, supported by the Michael-Haukohl-Stiftung, we are currently setting up a school collaboration with the Geschwister-Prenski Schule in Lübeck to examine self-belief formation in adolescents.
Circadian modulation of self-related information processing
In October 25, the first funding period of the Collaborative Research Center 418 “Circadian Medicine” started. In our project, we are investigating the role of chronotype, time-of-day and their interaction on the neurocomputational processes underlying self-belief formation.
Metascience
Science does not happen in a vacuum. Science, similarly to beliefs (see above), is affected by structural barriers. In addition to our focus on “affected beliefs”, our lab is interested in the recursive effects of the scientific process. What constitutes “good” or “methodologically sound” science? What are the implications of our research? And who decides where to go?
From a methodological perspective, we focus on questions related to the reliability or replicability of neuroimaging data (e.g. Frässle et al., 2015), effect size measures (Paulus et al., 2013), or the interpretation of neuroimaging findings (Bedenbender et al., 2011). In terms of implications, our focus is on questions concerning the culturalistic/neo-racist (Martinez Mateo et al., 2012, Martinez Mateo et al., 2013a; Martinez Mateo et al., 2013b), racist (Heinz et al., 2014), essentialist or sexist (Sayyad & Krach, 2020) concepts of neuroimaging research. And finally, from a structural perspective, we focused on potential drawbacks of the highly achievement-oriented academic system (see e.g. “The impact factor fallacy”; Paulus et al., 2016 or “Journal impact factor shapes scientists’ reward signal in the prospect of publication”; Paulus et al., 2015). More recently, we published two Shiny-Apps, GrantInq and SoCostLi, to allow for a simulation of funding systems with regard to their effects on economic burden, quality, and diversity (Luebber et al., 2023). In November 2025, we published data from the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre on the implementation of a lottery-first approach to allocate funding. We could show that submissions and funded projects of female applicants after implementation of the lottery-first approach increased and that the costs of the overall allocation process were significantly reduced (see Luebber et al., 2025).
Past research: Social emotions
Humans as social creatures are susceptible to various social emotions that emerge in the presence of others. Embarrassment is the consequence if one behaves in a bearish, inept way (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2015). Public settings do not only lead to feelings of embarrassment for one’s own misadventures, but can also be the source of embarrassment about other people’s flawed behavior. This phenomenon has been termed empathic or vicarious embarrassment and coined as “fremdscham” or more recently as “cringe” in the German language (see e.g. Paulus et al., 2013, Mayer et al., 2020 or Mayer et al., 2021). For the past few years, we have been studying the neural processes underlying the observation of cringeworthy behaviors (Paulus et al., 2013), its relation to other forms of social pain, and its modulation by personality (Krach et al., 2011). Further, we conceptually distinguished vicarious embarrassment from schadenfreude (Paulus et al., 2018), elaborated how social closeness (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2016) or meditation (Laneri et al., 2017) impacts the experience of vicarious embarrassment and how these emotions are represented in clinical populations (Krach et al., 2015; Stroht et al., 2019). In a recent collaboration with researchers from Michigan State University and Frankfurt am Main we linked cringeworthy behaviors of US representatives to embarrassment spikes on Twitter and reasoned about the implications and consequences (Paulus et al., 2019).
