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Thanks to its variability, language helps to build bridges. Photo: Fotolia/hurca.com.

Testing the Limits – A Special Research Area Investigates How Flexible Language Really Is

It’s Friday morning at a weekly market in Berlin. Those who visit the Maybachufer market in the district of Neukölln are treated to a little journey …
Electrodes measure the movements of facial muscles. Photo: Thomas Roese.

Look Into My Eyes?! – A socio-psychological study explores the famous first impression

A glance is enough: in a fraction of a second, we get a first impression of someone – whether we find them likable or unlikable, attractive or …
Prof. Dr. Florian Weck. Photo: Thomas Roese.

Together Against Anxiety – Florian Weck researches excessive fear of disease and how to train good therapists

When does psychotherapy work and when does it not? What makes a good therapist? And how can their competencies be measured? These questions are on …
Since 2005 researchers have been continuously examining the development of children and adolescents in the PIER study. Picture: Karla Fritze

The Risk Inside – Psychologists examine which traits promote critical development.

The first data was collected in 2005. By now about 3,000 children and adolescents have participated in the PIER (Potsdamer intrapersonale …
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Picture: Karla Fritze

Literature As Nourishment – Research on a New Spatial Understanding of the Holocaust

Trauma and space – literary scholar and philosopher Judith Kasper brings these two terms together in a research project funded by the DFG about the …
Picture: Karla Fritze

Learning How to Lose Weight

Psychologists in Potsdam have developed a training program for obese young people

They’ve just grown out of children’s shoes and are already too fat. Unfortunately this no longer a rare situation. Pathological obesity at an early …
Children of different age groups solved memory update tasks in a research project. Photo: Anna Trapp

Interferences

Why human working memory performance differs among people

Working memory is the intermediate storage device for the human brain. Its capacity is limited, even more so for people with learning disabilities …
Pic.: Hannelore Gensel

Reading

Pleasure for Some, Torment for Others

 

For the eyes, reading is a fine motor skill, jumping in quick jerks from one word to the next in just fractions of a second. Depending on one’s …
Picture: Karla Fritze

At the Limits of Resilience

Workplace-Related Anxieties and How They Can Be Treated

It breathes down your neck: it chokes you. There is pressure on your chest. It sends chills down your spine. Anxiety has many faces. A briefly flare …
Image: Anne Springer

Why Love Hurts

About the Relativity of Pain

Pain is a reaction of the body to an objectively measurable stimulus. How we sense pain subjectively, whether we rate it as merely unpleasant or as …