Vorlesungsverzeichnis

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation (Vorlesung)

Termin:
wöchentlich | Donnerstag | 12:15 - 13:45 | 07.04.2025 - 11.07.2025 | C HS 2

Inhalt: Motivation Science is a course that provides students with general knowledge of motivational processes, their origins, and their significant role in human decision processes and behaviors. In this course, you will explore the major factors underlying human actions. What motivates people to perform certain behaviors over others? What gives people the energy and direction to move forward? What keeps people going in the face of challenges and difficulties? This course is about “why” and “how.” Why do people behave the way they do? Why do people regularly fail at their goals? How can people make better plans to increase their chances of success? How do people experience emotions? How do emotions steer people’s motivation and behavior? The course will cover the major theoretical perspectives and methodologies related to the study of motivation. It starts with reflecting on the nature of motivation and attempting to track its evolutionary origins. These themes will be followed by a review of the core human motives of autonomy, competence, and belonging. Further, the course devotes four sessions to the goal attainment process, including discussions on goal setting, goal planning, and goal striving, which highlights the central role of goals in the field of motivation. Students will also be provided with an overview of the emerging work on automatic, unconscious motivation. Subsequently, the issue of emotion will be introduced, followed by a discussion of the effects of individual differences and social situations on motivation. The final lecture will introduce the interdisciplinary nature of motivation science by covering insights made in sustainability psychology. This course features a format that mixes traditional class meetings with autonomous out-of-class learning. Class meetings will include a combination of lectures, activities (e.g., self-scoring the Self-Control Scale by Tangney et al., 2004), and discussions (e.g., peer-to-peer discussion among students). Specifically, class meetings will be used to teach students about a variety of theories, frameworks, and models that explain motivation, to explore extensions and applications of concepts and ideas, and to cover important or intriguing topics that are not addressed in the handbook. Note that reading and preparing are not included in class meetings. These activities are expected of students above and beyond the required meeting times.

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 1 for Major Psych. (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timur Sevincer

Termin:
wöchentlich | Donnerstag | 14:15 - 15:45 | 07.04.2025 - 11.07.2025 | C 14.103 Seminarraum

Inhalt: Why is it sometimes so hard to act in the way we would like to act? To eat less meat or sugar, quit smoking, go jogging, or take the bike rather than the car? Why do some people give up their goals easily? Can we downregulate our impulses? It is well established that a lot of people struggle with more sustainable behavior, reasonable diet, healthy routine, emotions, cigarettes, and alcohol every day, and that people can differ enormously in their ability to succeed in self-regulation. Self-regulation refers to people’s capacity to alter their thoughts, emotions, impulses, and behavior in the service of their goals. No matter what the goal is, effective self-regulation is necessary: people have to continuously regulate their thoughts, emotions, and behavior in order to maintain their goals and stay on the right track. Therefore, an understanding of the process of self-regulation is key to this course. In this seminar, we will discuss cutting-edge research on how people can use self-regulatory skills to bolster their self-control enabling them to successfully pursue goals in various domains, such as sustainability, health, academic, and professional goals. Topics covered in this seminar include basic regulatory processes, the cognitive dimension of self-regulation, nonconscious and conscious self-regulation, interventions and applications of self-regulation, and the role of personality in self-regulation. This course will help students to understand how to best regulate motivation and emotion from both intrapersonal and interpersonal perspectives. The primary teaching format used in this seminar includes a mixture of student presentations and discussions. In each session, scientific articles on a specific topic relevant to self-regulation will be assigned for reading and discussion. Each student will present at least one article during the seminar. The student presentations have been included to benefit both the collective and the individual. From a collective perspective, student presentations expose all students to more articles, enriching their knowledge while reducing the burden of having to read too many papers. From an individual perspective, student presentations help them hone their presentation and communication skills. As such, the students should prepare their presentations as if they were giving the talk at an academic conference. Thus, they will need to first set up the theoretical context and then select the most important studies to present. After each presentation, the discussion of the presentation, the respective article, and related research will be held between students and the instructor.

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 2 for Major Psych. (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Hong Zhang

Termin:
wöchentlich | Donnerstag | 08:15 - 09:45 | 07.04.2025 - 11.07.2025 | C 11.308 Seminarraum

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 3 for Major Psych. (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timur Sevincer

Termin:
wöchentlich | Donnerstag | 16:15 - 17:45 | 07.04.2025 - 11.07.2025 | C 14.201 Seminarraum

Inhalt: Why is it sometimes so hard to act in the way we would like to act? To eat less meat or sugar, quit smoking, go jogging, or take the bike rather than the car? Why do some people give up their goals easily? Can we downregulate our impulses? It is well established that a lot of people struggle with more sustainable behavior, reasonable diet, healthy routine, emotions, cigarettes, and alcohol every day, and that people can differ enormously in their ability to succeed in self-regulation. Self-regulation refers to people’s capacity to alter their thoughts, emotions, impulses, and behavior in the service of their goals. No matter what the goal is, effective self-regulation is necessary: people have to continuously regulate their thoughts, emotions, and behavior in order to maintain their goals and stay on the right track. Therefore, an understanding of the process of self-regulation is key to this course. In this seminar, we will discuss cutting-edge research on how people can use self-regulatory skills to bolster their self-control enabling them to successfully pursue goals in various domains, such as sustainability, health, academic, and professional goals. Topics covered in this seminar include basic regulatory processes, the cognitive dimension of self-regulation, nonconscious and conscious self-regulation, interventions and applications of self-regulation, and the role of personality in self-regulation. This course will help students to understand how to best regulate motivation and emotion from both intrapersonal and interpersonal perspectives. The primary teaching format used in this seminar includes a mixture of student presentations and discussions. In each session, scientific articles on a specific topic relevant to self-regulation will be assigned for reading and discussion. Each student will present at least one article during the seminar. The student presentations have been included to benefit both the collective and the individual. From a collective perspective, student presentations expose all students to more articles, enriching their knowledge while reducing the burden of having to read too many papers. From an individual perspective, student presentations help them hone their presentation and communication skills. As such, the students should prepare their presentations as if they were giving the talk at an academic conference. Thus, they will need to first set up the theoretical context and then select the most important studies to present. After each presentation, the discussion of the presentation, the respective article, and related research will be held between students and the instructor.

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 1 for Major GESS (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Aymara Victoria Llanque Zonta

Termin:
wöchentlich | Donnerstag | 08:15 - 09:45 | 07.04.2025 - 11.07.2025 | C 12.013 Seminarraum

Inhalt: Global warming has brought the bio-physical limits of our planet into the international spotlight, highlighting the urgent need for structural changes in capitalist production models, sustained by a modern-colonial gender matrix. This system functions not only as a geopolitical apparatus but also deeply influences the minds and hearts of those inhabiting these territories. This is not a matter of science fiction, but a crisis whose consequences we are already experiencing. It is predicted that without a significant reduction in carbon emissions, global temperatures could rise by more than 2 degrees. Media outlets have repeatedly depicted the devastating consequences of climate change: hurricanes, storms, fires, floods, droughts, pandemics, and people facing starvation and the need to migrate. This apocalyptic scenario does not signal the end of the world but rather the end of the modern-colonial matrix as we know it. This perspective generates feelings of hopelessness, fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and helplessness, triggering defense mechanisms and, in more privileged sectors, a growing disconnection from the impacts affecting distant bodies and territories. The antifuturist manifesto, "dear colonizer, your future is gone," signed by an ancestor, challenges us to reflect: Why do we imagine the end of the world and not the end of colonialism? The worlds around us shape and inhabit us. This course will explore how our perception of the environment stems from an internal representation, an inner psychic landscape co-created through interactions and interdependent relationships between human and non-human communities. Extractive actions, through which we marinate our knowledge, generate representations of nature from an individualistic and anthropocentric perspective. Capitalism not only colonizes the space we inhabit, what we consume, how we dress, and how we use time, but also deeply configures desire and lack. Civilizational paradigms such as personal success, authorship, social ascent, racial supremacy, consumption, and accumulation, form part of social imaginaries and identity construction, fostering increasingly authoritarian, segregating, and excluding forms. We will revisit Wilhelm Reich's perspective, who proposed a psychoanalysis of fascism a century ago, as its implications remain relevant today. Colonized worlds are supported by fascist political practices that reveal the links between authoritarian forms of power and capitalist accumulation. In this context, we will delve into obedience and submission, mechanisms intertwined with psychic structures, relationships with authority, and unconscious processes that shape individual subjectivity. The urgency of dialogue between human and non-human actors grows, focusing on how to restore conditions to guarantee justice for all living entities on the planet. This process challenges the foundations of anthropocentrism, as it decentralizes the human as central to nature—one who uses and owns it. We will examine contemporary feelings toward nature, in a world where we have become more disconnected from it than ever, ignoring the natural cycles and interconnections that sustain the "ethics of the land," a concept emerging from ecofeminism. This ethics represents an ecological consciousness in response to overexploitation issues. We will explore social movements such as Cimarrón Antifuturism, which uses metaphors of a future already passed to propose alternatives from deep ecology, the power of interactions, dark ecology, and community feminisms. These movements invite us to rethink body-territory and pluriverse perspectives, stimulating an openness toward an ecological mental becoming that builds new representations of happiness in alignment with the other, recognizing the other, and co-existing with the other. For Amerindian ontologies, transformation involves constructing the "ancestral future," understood as the revitalization of everyday practices that connect us with nature, within nature and as nature. From Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism to Lacanian postulates on symbolic and social reality, we will learn about situated knowledge, where both Amazonian Amerindian worldviews and critical constructivism return subjecthood to all living entities. Viveiros de Castro's call to position perspective within a bio-cultural relationship with the world comes from the desire to understand knowledge through a plurality of visions that navigate contaminated worlds. We will also explore Anna Tsing’s (2015) perspective on contamination, which in a broader sense refers to the contact and mixing between species, cultures, and ecosystems in a world of tensions. Tsing argues that when global and local dynamics intersect, friction is created, a process of interaction that is not necessarily harmonious. This friction, especially at points of contact between capitalist globalization and local forms of life and knowledge, provides fertile ground for transformation. Thus, plurality can be seen as the social glue of being, resisting neoliberal recognition technologies that aim to absorb all cultures into a single model. Furthermore, we will analyze the critique of consumerist idealization, masking enjoyment while questioning how to ensure long-term well-being in a sustainable world. We will shift the focus from the individual as the sole creator of desire to the interactions, relational effects, and language in the production of meanings for consumption. We will also explore narcissism, anthropocentric views, and love for nature. Capitalism, especially global neoliberalism, promotes our narcissistic identity as consumers and erodes affectionate feelings toward nature, fostering the belief that we have the right to exploit it without considering the consequences. We will critique the separation of nature-culture, learning about the concept of multinaturalism in Amerindian ontologies. Finally, we will explore how human communities can take responsibility for the friction generated by the capitalist model and what actions can be taken. We will consider both individual and communal psychological components. This course will study psychoanalysis, social movement perspectives, Indigenous thought, and decolonial critical philosophical frameworks, focusing on how we establish relationships between our bodies and territories we inhabit, with the intention of re-signifying our bond with nature, from nature, within nature, and as nature. From the perspective of the Naza indigenous people in Colombia, "I am because we all are," this phrase invites us to imagine a continuous process of becoming as inhabitants of the planet in community, communalized, in interdependent and cooperative relationships between humans and more-than-humans. This principle, rooted in Amerindian ontologies, informs how we understand being, doing, and knowing, where agency is intertwined with territories. In this course, we will address the work of Arturo Escobar (2015), who argues that plurality refers not only to distinct human cultures (a relativist view) but also to non-human life forms, ecosystems, and entities that coexist in the world. The diversity of forms of existence, arising from different worldviews, should not be hierarchized or reduced to singular categories as they respond to codes and large signifiers, reflecting heterogeneous existences beyond modern universalism. Understanding plural worlds will also lead us to reflect on how we construct subjects within this context. The framework of Paladines (2024) contributes to this discussion by developing the idea of transmodern subjects—those who inhabit colonial modernity on their own terms. Binary logics such as tradition/modernity, woman/man, young/old, indigenous/white are insufficient to understand the multiple worlds guiding the present in human communities. Finally, we will analyze psychoanalytic contributions regarding aesthetic value and the creative process in art as a form of expression of other possible worlds. "The deepest is the skin" (Octavio Paz, 1950) will be used as an exercise to dismantle the components intervening in the enjoyment of the dissatisfied subject, suffering from disconnection with their desire. We will also explore which aesthetic mechanisms can contribute to new meanings related to a living, sustainable world. This phenomenon will be analyzed through a photographic exercise, as part of Walter Benjamin's recent past archaeology, to understand the social imaginaries transmitted in a world on fire and explore possibilities for connecting art with emotional, aesthetic processes of systemic transformation.

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 2 for Major GESS (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Ulf Hahnel

Termin:
wöchentlich | Donnerstag | 14:15 - 15:45 | 07.04.2025 - 11.07.2025 | C 14.201 Seminarraum

Inhalt: In this seminar students will gain insights into how human behavior and its psychological underpinnings contribute to the emergence and mitigation of pressing global issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss. We will discuss research on motivation, emotion, communication, self-regulation, and decision-making with a specific focus on contemporary empirical research from the field of environmental psychology. Through project-based learning, the acquired knowledge will be applied to a real-world case involving external stakeholders. In their projects, students will develop evidence-based interventions and communication strategies to foster more sustainable individual and collective action.

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 1 for Major UWI (deutsch/Englisch) (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Ulf Hahnel

Inhalt: In this seminar students will gain insights into how human behavior and its psychological underpinnings contribute to the emergence and mitigation of pressing global issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss. We will discuss research on motivation, emotion, communication, self-regulation, and decision-making with a specific focus on contemporary empirical research from the field of environmental psychology. Through project-based learning, the acquired knowledge will be applied to a real-world case involving external stakeholders. In their projects, students will develop evidence-based interventions and communication strategies to foster more sustainable individual and collective action.

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 2 for Major UWI (deutsch/Englisch) (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Ulf Hahnel

Inhalt: In this seminar students will gain insights into how human behavior and its psychological underpinnings contribute to the emergence and mitigation of pressing global issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss. We will discuss research on motivation, emotion, communication, self-regulation, and decision-making with a specific focus on contemporary empirical research from the field of environmental psychology. Through project-based learning, the acquired knowledge will be applied to a real-world case involving external stakeholders. In their projects, students will develop evidence-based interventions and communication strategies to foster more sustainable individual and collective action.

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 3 for Major UWI (Blockveranstaltung - deutsch/Englisch) (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Esther Meyer

Inhalt: - Rolle von Kommunikation und Organisationen für sozial-ökologische Transformation - Einblicke in aktuelle Publikationen und Diskurse zu Nachhaltigkeitskommunkation und Organisationsentwicklung - in Kleingruppen Organisationsformen und Themen der nachhaltigen Entwicklung entdecken

Vorlesungsverzeichnis

Lehrveranstaltungen

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation (Vorlesung)

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 1 for Major Psych. (Seminar)

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 2 for Major Psych. (Seminar)

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 3 for Major Psych. (Seminar)

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 1 for Major GESS (Seminar)

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 2 for Major GESS (Seminar)

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 1 for Major UWI (deutsch/Englisch) (Seminar)

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 2 for Major UWI (deutsch/Englisch) (Seminar)

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 3 for Major UWI (Blockveranstaltung - deutsch/Englisch) (Seminar)