LFE

Profile of the Leipzig Research Center
for Early Child Development (LFE)

If you are interested in one of the topics, please contact the responsible project manager (in brackets after the project name).

Students of the M.Sc. Early Childhood Research can find the guidelines for writing a Master’s Thesis here.

Educational Psychology (AG Saalbach):

Interested students should visit the homepage of the Department of Educational Psychology to find out about research projects in which it is currently possible to work on an academic thesis.
Furthermore, you will find information about registration deadlines and guidelines for writing theses at the Chair of Educational Psychology. Then use the form linked there to register your interest in working on a research project and writing an exam thesis at this chair.

Early Childhood Development and Culture (AG Haun)

1) Project: (Pro-) social interactions and their underlying positive emotions in early childhood.

As previous studies have shown, children’s social behaviour in the first two years of life falls primarily into two categories, joint action and helping. Current debates in the existing literature increasingly revolve around the underlying motivations of these behaviours. Studies also show that children show more positive emotions, as measured by body posture changes, after helping both themselves and others. However, very little is still known about whether both helping interactions and shared actions are intrinsically rewarding from very early in life. This is the question we want to address: Do helping interactions as well as joint actions lead to an increase in positive emotions in young children and how are the responses to both types of interactions related? In order to investigate emotions, we will conduct a behavioural study with 14 and 24 month old children, measuring posture (Microsoft Kinect Technology) after joint actions and helping interactions will be carried out.

Tasks:

  • Conducting a behavioural study with young children in the LFE
  • Data preparation and analysis with statistical software R
  • Writing a thesis

Requirements:

  • Ability to work independently
  • Interest in learning a new method (Microsoft Kinect)
  • High reliability
  • Very good knowledge of German
  • Ideally experience in conducting studies with young children

Planned time period for conducting the study and writing the paper:

  • Start of testing currently planned for April / May this year.
  • Processing time about 10 months
  • The start and processing time depends on the corona situation.

If you are interested, feel free to contact Nele Becker.
We are looking forward to our cooperation.

2) Study on children’s anger in the context of unfairness

Previous studies show that children recognise differences between fair and unfair processes and change their behaviour. The current study investigates whether 7- to 11-year-old children attribute anger to another child when a process (e.g. a competition, or resource sharing) is unfair.

Tasks

  • Practice and conduct a study with children in Leipzig (online or on-site)
  • Preparation/adaptation of study materials
  • Data collection, processing and analysis
  • Preparation of a written final paper

Requirements:

  • High motivation and interest in working with children, scientific work, especially in the field of developmental psychology.
  • Independent working style
  • Good knowledge of German for conducting the study

Planned period:

Piloting from mid-August/beginning of September 2022.
Processing time 4 to 5 months (+ depending on Corona situation)
If you are interested, please contact Süheyla Yilmaz:
sueheyla.yilmaz@uni-leipzig.de

We look forward to working together

Cognitive Anthropology (AG Musholt)

1) Study on the development of intellectual humility in a cross-cultural comparison between Germany and India.

Our project investigates the development of the ability to take into account different epistemic standpoints and their potential contribution. Towards this end, we study the development of balanced evidence seeking in situations of peer disagreement in young children across two different cultural contexts with the help of an online study paradigm. 

Tasks:

  • Conducting a study with children in Leipzig or Jaipur via video call 
  • Preparation/adaptation of study materials • Data collection, processing and analysis • Preparation of a thesis

Requirements:

  • High motivation and interest in working with children and scientific work, especially in the field of developmental psychology.
  • Independent working style
  • Good knowledge of English or German for conducting the study. We are especially interested in someone who would like to contribute to the data collection in India, so excellent  English and, ideally, some knowledge of the cultural background would be an advantage.

If you are interested, please contact Marie Schäfer: marie.schaefer@uni-leipzig.de

Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (AG Schmitz):

Interested students please inform themselves directly on the homepage of AG Schmitz.