Research

Our main area of research is motivation and self-regulation with a special emphasis on future-oriented thinking. For instance, we investigate basic mechanisms of self-regulation strategies (e.g. mentally contrasting a desired future with present reality) to foster motivation and self-regulation in various domains of every-day life such as sustainable consumer behaviour.

We conduct our studies in the lab, the field and online. In doing so, we use a wide variety of research methods including physiological (e.g., cardiovascular) measurements, eye-tracking, implicit measures, behavioural observations, ecological momentary assessment, and analyses of population-level data and historical documents, among others.

Many of our findings were published in top-ranked international journals, such as Psychological Science, Motivation Science, Motivation and Emotion, and the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, among others. Moreover, we authored multiple book chapters and co-edited a volume on the “The Psychology of Thinking about the Future” which includes contributions from many leading experts from the field of motivation psychology (https://bit.ly/3hn7C0L). Our research was founded by multiple grants from several funding institutions such as the German Science Foundation (DFG).