Latent state trait theory (LST theory; Eid et al., 2017; Steyer et al., 2015) is one of the most influential theories in psychology for studying trait change and variability processes. Latent state trait (LST) models are commonly used to analyze complex longitudinal data (e.g., panel data or intensive longitudinal data). In this project, we further develop LST models to include both time-varying and time-invariant variables to explain differences in model parameters representing additive and multiplicative trait changes and/or different variability processes (e.g., intra- versus interindividual differences). The new approach is termed moderated nonlinear latent state trait analysis (MN-LST; Oeltjen et al. 2022) and is performed in a fully Bayesian framework, which allows for the inclusion of prior knowledge and model evaluation by means of posterior predictive checks and leave-one-out cross-validation. MN-LST analysis is currently being extended to causal inference and continuous time models.

Project members:

Prof. Dr. Tobias Koch (FSU Jena)
Fabian Münch (FSU Jena)

We announce a new project in the CELISE titled "A Dyadic Examination of Short- and Long-Term Dynamics in Partner Relationships." The project is dedicated to investigate the interplay between personality characteristics and aspects of partner relationships over time in order to identify factors that contribute to long-lasting relationships. The project is funded by the DFG.

Project members

Prof.Dr. Marcus Mund (University of Klagenfurt)

With increasing age diversity in organizational contexts, traditional age norms with respect to career attainment and occupational status are starting to soften. Status incongruence occurs when age does not align with other status indicators such as hierarchical position (e.g., relatively younger team leader). In this project, we investigate how status incongruence affects team-level processes (e.g., coordination, conflict) and outcomes (team adaptation and performance) in age-diverse teams.

Project members:

Prof. Dr. Mona Weiss (FSU Jena)
Ria Grimmelsmann (FSU Jena)

Climate change, pandemic, wars - we live in times of multiple and concurrent global crises. This can lead to negative emotions and mental distress for many people. A vulnerable group that has not yet received sufficient attention are families (children, adolescents, and parents). Therefore, the focus of the research project Crisis pathways - Impacts of Global Crises on Families and Children is to examine how families emotionally process different global crises. While parents may provide an important source of social support to their children, many also struggle to regulate their own emotions about the climate crisis and other global crises. This can present a barrier to effectively addressing these issues with their children. Thus, research on the effects of parental support and moderating factors is urgently needed. This project addresses these research questions via an experimental laboratory study with parent-child-dyads.

Funding:

FSU Jena

Project members:

Prof. Dr. Julia Asbrand (FSU Jena)
Nora Spirkl (FSU Jena)

Beliefs and ideas about aging begin to form early in life. Many events signal the importance of age for our social selves: birthday parties, entrance to school, or acquiring a driver’s license. Children are sorted into classrooms based on age and the work opportunities available to adults often hinge on age. In this pilot project we investigate how individuals learn about and form attitudes regarding age, ageing, and age-groups, and how these attitudes influence our treatment of those who are older or younger than ourselves.

Funding

Program Line B, FSU Jena

Project members

Dr. Jennifer Bellingtier (Nature)
Prof. Dr. Michaela Riediger (FSU Jena)
Jenny Jaquet (FSU Jena)
Lena-Emilia Schenker (FSU Jena)

Collaborators

Dr. Anna Kornadt (Universitäté du Luxembourg)
Dr. David Weiss (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)

Making inferences and predictions in uncertain, dynamically changing environments is a key aspect of human learning, especially in threatening contexts. This statistical learning requires the formation of internal belief models about the state of our environment and the ability to accurately adapt them when systematic changes occur; a process known as dynamic belief updating (DynBU). Patients with mental disorders often show dysfunctional or negatively biased learning. Anxiety disorders (ADs), for example, are marked by aberrant emotional-associative learning and higher fear generalization. The crucial period for development of ADs is childhood and adolescence leading to questions about both statistical learning during normative development and during the development of disorders. However, research on statistical learning in ADs is scarce, even though it could provide important insights into how these disorders are formed, maintained and, consequently, cured. Consequently, the aim of our project is to investigate how DynBU is altered in clinical ADs. We will focus on the developmental perspective by recruiting children and adolescents between 8 and 17 years and comparing them to young adults.

Funding:

German Research Foundation (DFG)

Project members:

Prof. Dr. Julia Asbrand (FSU Jena)
Johannes M. Lehnen (FSU Jena)

External Collaborators:

Prof. Dr. Ulrike Lueken (HU Berlin)
Dr. Rasmus Bruckner (FU Berlin)
Leonard Craemer (HU Berlin)

Social interactions have profound effects on human well-being, with stable attachments promoting mental and physical health and social isolation leading to negative outcomes. Our project focuses on the crucial developmental stage of young adulthood, which is characterized by navigating new social dynamics and building important social networks. Through the use of innovative technologies, such as experience sampling methods and Bluetooth-enabled devices, we aim to capture real-time social interactions in various real-world contexts. Through integration with the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we also aim to investigate the complex relationship between social interactions, health outcomes and developmental predictors. This project contributes to the Infrastructure Priority Program "New Data Spaces for the Social Sciences" (SPP 2431, https://www.new-data-spaces.de/en-us/) and advances Research Area 4 by providing new insights through multi-method ambulatory assessment studies. By developing innovative technologies and new statistical methods, we enable researchers to explore with high precision and validity how social interactions influence health and development outcomes.

Project members

Prof. Dr. Tobias Koch (FSU Jena)
Prof. Dr. Michaela Riediger (FSU Jena)
Prof. Dr. Franz J. Neyer (FSU Jena)
Prof. Dr. Jana Holtmann (Uni Leipzig)
Prof. Dr. David Martínez Iñigo (Rey Juan Carlos University)
Prof. Dr. Francisco Serradilla (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)

IMPULS is a project that combines life science, data science, and social science to better understand human aging. One of the project’s aims is to examine the influence of psychological aging on the aging process, and its relation to biological and epigenetic markers of aging (cell age, brain age). The project draws from a large sample of middle-aged and old adults in the age range from 40-90 years who participated in the Ageing-as-Future project to assess different types of aging indicators. With its interdisciplinary approach to aging, IMPULS is a unique project that may lead to a breakthrough in understanding aging mechanisms.

Funding:

Carl Zeiss Stiftung

Project members:

Prof. Dr. Klaus Rothermund (FSU Jena)
Dr. M. Clara de Paula Couto (FSU Jena)
Fabio Selovin (FSU Jena)

Participating Institutions:

Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Leibniz Institute on Aging - Fritz Lipmann Institute
Universitätsklinikum Jena
Leipziger Forschungszentrum für Zivilisationserkrankungen (LIFE)

A randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of individualized music for people with dementia in institutional care.
Aims of the project are to improve well-being, quality of life, and social participation as well as decreasing agitated behavior in older people with dementia in institutional care through playing individualized music to them. The effects, applicability, and acceptance of the individualized music intervention in institutional care will be investigated.

Funding:

Funding: National Association of Statutory Health Insurance, Term: 01.01.2018 – 30.04.2021.

Project members:

Prof. Dr. Gabriele Wilz (Principal investigator, FSU Jena)
Dr. Lisette Weise (FSU Jena)
M.Sc. Elisabeth Jakob (FSU Jena)
Dr. Nils F. Töpfer (FSU Jena)
M.Sc. Mareike Hillebrand (FSU Jena)

Collaborators:

Prof. Dr. Jung Kwak (The University of Texas at Austin)
Manon Bruinsma, European Director Music & Memory EU, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Dan Cohen, Music & Memory, New York, USA
Dr. Eckart von Hirschhausen

Talking to others to share good news, concerns, or recent experiences is part of everyday life. Such interactions provide the stage for important areas of development throughout the entire life course; they may also facilitate and influence individual development. In this DFG-funded project, we use multiple methods to investigate how older adults behave and understand each other during conversations. What interpersonal mechanisms contribute to successful interactions? How do people differ in this regard, and can we influence these differences? How do speakers and listeners contribute to mutual understanding, and what is the role of verbal, paraverbal, and nonverbal signals? We investigate these and other lifespan-related questions using experiments and self-reports as well as linguistic and video analyses.

Funding:

German Research Foundation (DFG)

Project members:

Prof. Dr. Michaela Riediger (FSU Jena)
Dr. Antje Rauers (FSU Jena)
Jenny Jaquet (FSU Jena)
Alissa von Großmann (FSU Jena)

External Collaborators:

Prof. Dr. Uwe Altmann (Medical School Berlin)

Based on long-standing experience of the group in research on cognitive aging and its neuronal correlates, as well as with individuals experiencing handicaps of social communication, this project develops and evaluates perceptual and cognitive training programs and tailor-made interventions to improve various aspects of social interaction. Our approach is based on current neurocognitive models of social perception and interaction. Selected sub-projects use current technology to synthesize naturalistic facial and vocal stimuli with paremeter-specific morphing methods. This technology allows us to create stimuli with augmented („caricatured“) social signals which have been demonstrated to be efficient in improving social perception. Individual aspects of this research programme include (1) an assessment of emotion perception abilities in hearing-impaired individuals with a cochlear implant, (2) the development and evaluation of a training program for improving nonverbal vocal communication in older adults, (3) a systematic assessment of the potential of mu-rhythm neurofeedback training to improve socio-emotional communication and its related cortical correlates in adolescents and young adults with autism, and (4) the development of improved methods for assessing central auditory processing disorders (CAPD; dt: AVWS) - a frequent but incompletely understood cause of learning problems for school children. The subprojects of InterTrain are all characterized by use of state-of-the-art digital technology to assess and improve social interaction abilities.

Project members:

Prof. Dr. Stefan R. Schweinberger (FSU Jena)
Dr. Samaneh Dastgheib (FSU Jena)
Celina von Eiff (FSU Jena)
PD Dr. Romi Zäske (FSU Jena)

Adolescents seeking outpatient psychotherapy sometimes wait a long time for a suitable psychotherapy place - in rural areas, waiting times can be up to a year. This waiting time represents a critical period during which there is a risk that difficulties will intensify, manifest themselves or be compounded by other complaints. With the aim of making better use of the time between the search for a therapy place and the start of an outpatient psychotherapy, an app (I-WAIT) is being developed as part of the project to bridge the waiting time in a participatory manner. Subsequently, I-WAIT will be implemented and evaluated in the Psychotherapeutic University Outpatient Clinic for Children, Adolescents and Families (PHAK) at FSU Jena. The focus of this pilot study is on the feasibility and acceptance of the intervention. At the same time, changes in symptom-related measures and measures of mental health literacy are assessed.

Funding:

FSU Jena

Project members:

Prof. Dr. Julia Asbrand (FSU Jena)
Dr. Nele Dippel (FSU Jena)
Hannah-Sophia Boltz (FSU Jena)

Empirical evidence on how affective experiences change over the lifespan paints a heterogeneous picture depending on a variety of factors. One source of variability is the diversity of studied affective facets that range from general well-being over affect dimension (e.g., positive vs. negative affect) to distinct emotions (e.g., anger, sadness). In addition, researchers rely on diverse measures that, amongst others, refer to different time frames of affective experience (e.g., momentary or retrospective) and answering scales (e.g., intensity or frequency). Evidence suggests that these characteristics are associated with variance in individual reports as they depend on different memory systems, require different levels of abstraction, and/or tackle distinct affective features. Hence, they may also be related to differences in affective change over the lifespan. In the present project, we capitalize on existing longitudinal data on mean-level change in affect and apply meta-analytical procedures to address that question.

Project members:

Dr. Anja Blumenthal (FSU Jena)
Prof. Dr. Michaela Riediger (FSU Jena)

Collaborators

Prof. Dr. Cornelia Wrzus (Universität, Heidelberg)

Studying the ebb and flow of affect in daily life provides important insights into psychological functioning and well-being. The MIVA project (“Modeling Intraindividual Variability in Affect”) aims at improving our understanding of why individuals show fluctuations in affect, and in explaining individual differences in the underlying processes that determine affective variability, with a particular focus on age group differences. Research in the MIVA project is based on a newly developed mathematical model that incorporates theoretical ideas about affect generation and regulation. Using this model, we address our research aim by combining different methodological approaches that mutually complement and inform each other. Computational methods provide insights into the model’s behavior and can link theoretically derived parameters to simulated affective fluctuations. Ambulatory assessment methodologies will allow us to measure affective processes as they naturally occur in the daily lives of adults from various age groups. Simulation studies and ambulatory assessments will be complemented with experimental paradigms assessing affective micro-processes in the laboratory.

Project members

Dr. Maria Wirth (FSU Jena)
Prof. Dr. Klaus Rothermund (FSU Jena)

Collaborators

Prof. Dr. Michaela Riediger (FSU Jena)
Prof. Dr. Andreas Voß (Uni Heidelberg)

The MOMO study examines in-situ motivational processes during learning in a sample of university students attending a weekly lecture. It particularly focuses on two types of beliefs that students hold in specific learning situations: Momentary task values (e.g., how useful are the contents taught) and momentary success expectancies (e.g., how well do students think they understand what is taught). The study used smartphone-based electronic diaries to capture these situational values and expectancies in the moment in which they are experienced (Experience Sampling Method).

Funding:

FSU Jena

Project members:

Dr. Julia Dietrich (FSU Jena)
Prof. Dr. Bärbel Kracke (FSU Jena)

External Collaborators:

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Julia Moeller (University of Leipzig)
Prof. Jaana Viljaranta (University of Eastern Finland)

In this project, we investigate normative expectations about the ageing process, life in old age, and older people. We focus on two such normative expectations, namely that older adults should remain active and healthy (active aging) and that older adults should behave altruistically towards the younger generations (altruistic disengagement). The project considers the following interrelated research questions (1) How these norms are cognitively represented (domain-specificity of the norms, relation between active ageing and disengagement), (2) which factors influence personal endorsement of these norms (generating arguments, changing perspectives, social consensus feedback), (3) which attitudes and motivations a person develops in response to ageing-related normative expectations, and (4) how ageing-related normative expectations affect behavioural intentions, and actual behaviours. To address these research questions, the project relies on a powerful mix of research designs: analysing available longitudinal survey data and conducting a series of experimental studies.

Funding:

German Research Foundation (RO 1272/15-1), FSU Jena

Project members:

Prof. Dr. Klaus Rothermund (FSU Jena)
Dr. M. Clara de Paula Couto (FSU Jena)
Dr. Maria Wirth (FSU Jena)

Collaborators:

Prof. Dr. Maria K. Pavlova (Uni Vechta)
Sonja Radoš (Uni Vechta)

The 2008-launched German Family Panel pairfam ("Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics") is a multi-disciplinary, longitudinal study for researching partnership and family dynamics in Germany. The annually collected survey data from a nationwide random sample of more than 12,000 persons of the three birth cohorts 1971-73, 1981-83, 1991-93 and their partners, parents and children offers unique opportunities for the analysis of partner and generational relationships as they develop over the course of multiple life phases.
The German Family Panel is a cooperative effort linking the University of Bremen, the Chemnitz University of Technology, the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, the University of Cologne, and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Since 2010, pairfam has been funded as a long-term project by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It is advised by an international board and accredited as a research data center by the German Data Forum (RatSWD). A close collaboration exists with the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and TNS Infratest Sozialforschung.

The Jena team is responsible for the research area of partner relationships and personality development.

http://www.pairfam.de/en/

In a Pairfam satellite project The dynamics of implicit motives in intimate relationships, Dr. Birk Hagemeyer (FSU Jena) and PD Dr. Felix Schöndbrodt (LMU München) investigate the relevance of implicit motives for long-term developmental trajectories and short-term regulatory processes in intimate couple relationships. The satellite project is funded by the DFG (2016-2019).

Project members

Prof. Dr. Franz J. Neyer (FSU Jena)
Dr. Elisabeth Borschel (FSU Jena)
M.Sc. Tita Gonzalez Avilés (FSU Jena)
Anna Braig (FSU Jena)

Collaborators

Prof. Dr. Matthew Johnson (University of Alberta)

A pragmatic trial to evaluate the effectiveness of a graduated-intensity counseling approach with care counseling and telephone-based short-time psychotherapy

Providing qualified assistance in order to sustain family caregiving and improve health and quality of life for caregivers is a major challenge of an aging population. The severe health impacts on family caregivers such as higher morbidity and mortality, higher prevalence of depressive disorders and symptomatology, have been documented in a large number of studies.
The primary aim of the study “ReDiCare” is to evaluate a new counselling approach for distressed caregivers that extends the current counselling delivered by long term care insurances and care support centers. In ReDiCare, a stepped intervention combining care counselling followed by a telephone-based psychotherapy for non-responders is compared with routine care in a translational study. If the emotional burden is persisting after the care counseling over 3 months, the caregivers of the intervention group will be offered further support by psychotherapists over 6 months. To proof the efficacy of the stepped intervention, the participating caregivers are examined by telephone at baseline and after 3, 9, and 15 months. The proof of efficacy also involves a detailed process evaluation.

Funding:

Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Term: 01.09.2017 – 31.08.2021, Grant number: 01GL1702B

Project members:

Dr. Klaus Pfeiffer (Principal investigator, Robert-Bosch-Hospital Stuttgart)
Prof. Dr. Gabriele Wilz (Principal investigator, FSU Jena)
M.Sc. Doreen Rother (FSU Jena)
M.Sc. Maximilian Diepold (FSU Jena)
Dipl.-Psych. Grit Stößel (FSU Jena)

Collaborators:

Prof. Dr. Dietrich Rothenbacher (Ulm University)
Prof. Dr. Thomas Heidenreich (Hochschule Esslingen)
Prof. Astrid Elsbernd (Hochschule Esslingen)
Prof. Dr. Christian Ernst (Hohenheim University)
AOK Baden-Württemberg (Dr. Christopher Hermann, Stuttgart)
AOK Bayern (Dr. Helmut Platzer, Munich)

More and more people in Germany live alone (currently approximately 20% of the adults). The aim of the RIKSCHA project (funded by the German Research Foundation) is to identify the psychological and social conditions under which living alone can succeed and foster individual well-being. More specifically, we aim to investigate the dynamic transactions between social motives and personal relationships in the individual social networks of middle-aged individuals living alone.

Project members

Prof. Dr. Franz J. Neyer (FSU Jena)
Prof.Dr. Marcus Mund (University of Klagenfurt)
MSc Philipp Kersten (FSU Jena)

In several projects, we develop and evaluate short interventions (e.g., counseling feedback, exercises) for supporting socio-emotional and cognitive competences of different age groups, covering lifespan from early childhood to retirement age.
Some short interventions we focus on include, amongst others:
• The online survey ‚Bildungs- und Erziehungstest für TagesElternBetreuung (BET)‘ (‘Educational and Parenting Test for Home-Based Child Care’, EPT);
• The online platform ‘Fühlerei’, providing digital emotion-related exercises for different target groups;
• Classic courses to increase emotional competencies and stress management skills in young adults in attendance;
• The cognitive training programs by Karl Josef Klauer and colleagues for different age groups;
• Socio-emotional competence and resilience trainings (e.g., by Franz Petermann et al.).

Our main research questions are:

How can we foster emotional competencies in different age groups?
How can we foster cognitive competencies in different age groups?
Which (age or social) groups of people should particularly be addressed to foster competencies?
To answer these questions, we apply various methods such as quasi-experimental studies, surveys, psychometric tests, video observations, as well as pre-, post-, and follow-up-test designs with interventions and meta-analyses.

Project members

Dr. Antonia Baumeister (TU Chemnitz)
Dr. Laura Ackermann (TU Chemnitz)
Dr. Avelina Lovis Schmidt (TU Chemnitz)

This ongoing longitudinal project investigates how individuals perceive, construe, and prepare for their old age and ageing. We address this topic from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining different methodological approaches that mutually complement and inform each other (questionnaires, online assessments, in-depth interviews, experiments). The project has an international format, with data collection in five different countries (Germany, USA, Hong Kong, Czech Republic, Taiwan), which allows us to study and compare processes of ageing across different societal contexts. The major topics of our project center around the following interrelated themes: Views on ageing, perceived age discrimination, preparation for old age, ageing during the “fourth age”, attitudes toward longevity, and time management in old age.

Funding

VolkswagenStiftung (93 272, 86 758), funding program "Issues for Academia and Society"

Project members

Prof. Dr. Klaus Rothermund (FSU Jena)
Dr. M. Clara de Paula Couto (FSU Jena)

Collaborators

Prof. Dr. David Ekerdt (The University of Kansas)
Prof. Dr. Helene Fung (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Dr. Sylvie Graf (University of Bern)
Dr. Jaroslava Hasmanova Marhankova (University of West Bohemia)
Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess (NC State University)
Dr. Anna Kornadt (Universitäté du Luxembourg)
Prof. Dr. Frieder Lang (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Prof. Dr. Stephan Lessenich (Institut für Sozialforschung Frankfurt)
Prof. Dr. Jana Nikitin (Universität Wien)

The Medit-Ageing/Silver-Sante study investigates how interventions based on meditation training, foreign language acquisition or health training can contribute to healthy ageing. The work package Emotion investigates the role and plasticity of emotional processes and associated neural functions in old age. To this end, we have developed an innovative task to measure brain activation during and after emotionally challenging events - the Socio-affective Video Task Rest (SoVT-Rest; Baez-Lugo et al., 2023; Nature Aging). Using this paradigm, as well as other behavioural tests, questionnaires, partner surveys and neuro-biological measures, we examine how positive emotions contribute to mental and physical well-being in old age over time.

Project member:

Dr. Olga Klimecki (FSU Jena)

External Collaborator:

Silver Sante Study