VIBE Group

Value·Interaction·Behavior·Emotion

Research Focus

The VIBE Group investigates how social interactions and emotional processes shape human cognition, decision-making, and mental health. The group is led by Dr. Martin Weiß and embedded in the Chair of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy (Prof. Dr. Katja Bertsch). Bridging social and affective neuroscience and clinical psychology, the group pursues a translational agenda: findings from controlled laboratory experiments are systematically carried into everyday-life settings, so that they hold up where they matter most – in people's real lives.

Core research areas

• Value-based social decision-making: How fairness, cooperation, reputation, and trust unfold in economic games, and how monetary incentives, social cues, and emotional feedback shape these choices.
• Self-belief formation and revision: How beliefs about the self are formed, revised, and maintained, and how these processes relate to affect, motives, and mental health.
• Personality and individual differences: How the Big Five and other personality traits moderate social decisions and unfold in daily life.
• Social processes in everyday life and health: Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies, i.e., repeated real-time surveys and sensor data collected in people's daily lives, showing how social contact and social support shape anxiety, loneliness, emotion regulation, and autonomic responses.
• Mental health across contexts: Machine-learning-based identification of symptom constellations in depression and anxiety, gender-specific psychosocial network effects, and digital, smartphone-based assessment.

• Climate and mental health: How people emotionally experience and process the threat of climate change, how climate-change-related distress can be measured in a domain-specific way (e.g., the Climate Change Distress Scale), and under which conditions it turns into paralyzing anxiety or motivates pro-environmental action.

Methodological toolkit

We combine behavioral experiments, EEG and fMRI with standardized processing pipelines, ecological momentary assessment paired with physiological sensors, computational modeling of social decisions, virtual-reality paradigms, large-scale smartphone-based surveys, psychometric scale development and validation, and network analyses of psychosocial variables.

Open and reproducible science

Transparency and reproducibility are part of how we work: we develop and share open-source analysis tools, contribute to big team science via the Interest Group on Open and Reproducible Research (IGOR), and favor pre-registration and open data wherever possible.