Dr. Lea Boecker

Lea Boecker is an assistant professor at the Chair of Economic, Social Psychology and Experimental Methods. She completed her psychology studies at the University of Würzburg and received her PhD from the Social Cognition Center Cologne. Her research focuses on social comparisons and on social emotions such as schadenfreude and envy. She explores the influence of social comparisons on emotional reactions to other person's fortunes and misfortunes (envy vs. happy-for-ness and schadenfreude vs. sympathy). She investigates how these reactions relate to inequity aversion. Furthermore, she explores the social function and consequences of these emotions. Another part of her research deals with emotional facial expressions, status (dominance and prestige) and speech production effects. Her research combines self-report with psychophysiological measures such as electromyography (EMG).