The working group introduces itself

Our student employee Joelle Kramer has been accepted into the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. The Studienstiftung is the largest and oldest organization for the promotion of gifted students in Germany and supports students with outstanding achievements and social commitment. In addition to financial support, it offers a diverse programme of ideal support, including interdisciplinary academies, seminars, language courses and international exchange opportunities that foster professional and personal development. We warmly congratulate Joelle on her acceptance and wish her every success!

Further information on the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes can be found here

On January 20, 2026, from 3 to 6 p.m., the workshop “How Psychological Research Works” took place as part of the Siegen Talent Network. Participants gained practical insights into key methods of psychological research and successfully replicated the primacy-recency effect. The workshop was conducted by Kai Horstmann and supported in its preparation by students Joana Lang and Joelle Kramer.

Further information on the TALENTNETZ SiWi can be found here

This year's Christmas party took place on December 1. Together with the "General Psychology" working group, we first visited the ice skating rink at the Siegen Christmas market. Afterwards, we baked cookies together and weighed books. We reviewed the past year over punch. We are now looking forward to the coming year and many exciting projects.

Kai Horstmann was awarded 3rd place in the "Professor of the Year 2025" competition by the UNICUM Foundation in the natural sciences/medicine category. The award recognizes professors who support their students far beyond the classroom.
Kai Horstmann is committed to ensuring that students can develop their potential regardless of their personal or social background. Through individual mentoring and application training, he strengthens students in the development of their professional and personal skills and makes it possible to experience how theory and practice interact through lectures and insights into his day-to-day research.

Anabel Büchner has been awarded the prestigious "Heritage Dissertation Research Award" by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). The award recognizes promising doctoral projects in personality and social psychology and highlights the scientific significance and quality of her research project. The award also provides financial support in the amount of USD 2000, which Anabel Büchner will use for her ongoing PACE study. The study records the behavior and experience of students in Germany, the USA and Canada in everyday life over several weeks using the experience sampling method. The aim of the study is to investigate how often people have several stable behavioral tendencies, between which they switch in everyday life, and to gain a better understanding of people with such personality traits.

Information about the award

In July, Karla Fliedner took part in the conference of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (ISSID) in Vienna. As part of the symposium "How life experiences can influence personality differences and development (or vice versa)", she gave a presentation on the connection between self-reported and externally reported perceptions of formative life events.

Here you can find more information about the conference

In July, Kai Horstmann and Karla Fliedner took part in the European Conference on Psychological Assessment (ECPA) in Barcelona.
Karla Fliedner presented a project to develop a questionnaire that captures the subjective perception of everyday events and presented the results of an accompanying diary study.
In another presentation, Kai Horstmann presented the results of a study in which automatically generated 3D items for capturing mental rotation were examined in the context of performance diagnostics.

Here you can find more information about the conference

The intervention study on changing mental models in relation to regenerative liquid fuels came to an end at the beginning of June. The preregistered study was institutionally funded by the DLR Institute of Transport Research and implemented as a collaboration as part of Vera Fahrner's doctorate at the University of Siegen. Almost 450 participants answered questions on renewable liquid fuels, vehicle, environmental and political attitudes in an online format for six consecutive weeks. In some weeks, they received text or AI-based information as an intervention, for example on the availability of eFuels, whereby the information could be positive, neutral or negative. At the same time, the survey coincided with the German parliamentary elections, which makes it all the more interesting to observe political attitudes over time. By June, a post-measurement was carried out with another 342 of the participants in order to check how stable any changes are. We are looking forward to the results!

Pre-registration of the study: https://osf.io/mc2s9