List of Zurich Fellows

Laura Bechtiger (LIFE Fellow since 2019)
I am a PhD student in Clinical Developmental Psychology and a doctoral research associate in the Risk & Resilience research area of the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development, headed by Prof. Lilly Shanahan. My research interests are at the intersection of developmental, clinical and health psychology and focus on influences of social relationships on adaptive and maladaptive psychological and physiological developmental processes in children and adolescents. I am also interested in longitudinal research methods. I received my Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in psychology at the University of Zurich, and also studied abroad at the University of Padua, Italy. In my master’s thesis, I examined how sympathy and self-disclosure in friendships mutually influence one another from ages 15 to 21 using a prospective-longitudinal sample representative of youth in the German- and French-speaking parts of Switzerland. In my dissertation research, I am drawing on several long-term prospective-longitudinal datasets to examine how maternal depression during childhood is associated with children’s and adolescents’ later well-being, including in the domains of academic achievement and health.

University of Zurich
Department of Psychology
Clinical and Developmental Psychology
Binzmuehlestrasse 14
8050 Zurich
Switzerland
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Sabrina Beck (LIFE Fellow since 2021)
In 2015, I received my master’s degree in Psychology at the University of Zurich and started training in Psychotherapy (CBT and Interpersonal Psychotherapy) at the Klaus-Grawe-Institute. For the next five years, I worked as a psychotherapist with children, adolescents, young adults and their families. During this time, I learned a lot about the impact of family cohesion, parental agreement and parenting practices on children’s individual developmental trajectories. Driven by the motivation of using my clinical experience and knowledge for a better understanding of these interactions on a scientific level, I applied for a PhD program at the chair of Developmental Psychology: Infancy and Childhood as well as the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development at the University of Zurich, headed by Prof. Dr. Moritz Daum. In my dissertation project, I want to investigate the impact of parenting practices and parental agreement on children’s socio-emotional development. For this purpose, I will use a smartphone-based application called the “kleineWeltentdecker-App”. This ambulatory assessment tool allows parents of children from birth to 6 years to track the ongoing development of their children’s skills in different domains by answering questions that are matched to the children’s age, thereby covering the entire period in which changes of particular skills are expected to occur.

Developmental Psychology: Infancy and Childhood and Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Developmen; advisor: Prof. Dr. Moritz Daum
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I am a doctoral student in the team of Assistant Professor Nora M. Raschle at the Developmental Neuroscience Lab at the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development at the University of Zurich. I obtained my Bachelor's degree in Chemistry at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. In 2019, I graduated as Master of Science in Translational Neuroscience, a joint program of Heinrich-Heine University in Dusseldorf and Research Center Julich. During my Master’s studies, I was involved in different projects employing neuroimaging methods to investigate embodied cognition, working memory, decision making, emotion recognition, incentive processing and reinforcement learning. For my graduate studies, I seek to embrace the challenges in conducting research particularly with children and in this way to foster valuable scientific progress in the research area of developmental neuroimaging. My projects will throw the spotlight on the intergenerational transfer effects of socioemotional and cognitive brain development. In particular, I will tackle questions on brain similarity, in terms of structure and function, between children and their parents and how this changes over the course of the developmental trajectories. I am also involved in a meta-analysis study examining the effect of neural synchrony between children and their caregivers as a predictor of learning and cognitive outcomes.

Dissertation project: Intergenerational transfer effects on socioemotional and cognitive brain development (Advisor: Assistant Professor Nora M. Raschle)

Developmental Neuroscience Lab
Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development
University of Zurich
Andreasstrasse 15
8050 Zurich
Switzerland

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During my studies in Clinical Psychology at Free University of Berlin, two research fields particularly piqued my curiosity: the investigation of risk factors for mental disorders on the one hand and the use of digital technologies in psychological interventions on the other. In order to gain more insights into these fields, I started working with several international research groups (e.g., Jutta Joormann’s lab, Yale University). During this time, I realized that the combination of both of my research interests – namely using digital psychological interventions to tackle these risk factors – has an enormous potential to effectively prevent individuals from developing a mental disorder. However, I also noticed that while there is a lot of research on innovative online-based treatment approaches in younger adults, such research on older age groups is lacking. Since these new treatment approaches have been shown to be highly effective, I am convinced that it is important to make them available and suitable for all individuals across the lifespan. Therefore, in my PhD project, I am developing an online-based intervention for alleviating loneliness in the group of older adults, being one of the main risk factors for the development of depression (supervisors: Andreas Maercker, Eva Heim).

Advisor: Prof. Andreas Maercker, Chair: Psychopathology and Clinical Intervention

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I received my master's degree in psychology (minor: biology) at the University of Zurich in 2018. Currently, I am a PhD student at the University of Zurich, and my project is set at the chair of Developmental Psychology: Infancy and Childhood supervised by Prof. Dr. Moritz M. Daum as well as the Department of Psychology at th Chinese University of Hong Kong supervised by Prof. Dr. Urs Maurer. In my PhD project (funded by the SNF as part of their Doc.CH programme), I plan to investigate cultural differences in normative cognitions during childhood. Primarily, I want to look at how different cultural values influence the knowledge about norms, the acceptance of norms and norm violations, as well as the enforcement of norms in children aged four to eight years. My current research project ties in with earlier research I conducted during my master's thesis and as a research assistant at the University of Zurich. During this time, I investigated differences in gesture perception and production as well as cultural differences in moral norm enforcement in mono- and bicultural children and became interested in cross-cultural research.

Dissertation project: Cultural differences in normative cognitions in childhood

Zita Mayer (LIFE fellow since 2018)
I am a doctoral student at the University of Zurich, working under the guidance of Alexandra M. Freund (chair “Developmental Psychology: Adulthood”). My research interests center on self-regulatory processes involved in successful development across the life span. In my master’s thesis, I sought to elucidate how people guide their development through selecting, maintaining, and ending personal goal pursuits within and in interaction with their diverse developmental contexts. To this end, I explored how goal-directed actions and neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics intersect in positive youth development. In my dissertation research, I plan to examine life-span variation in self-regulatory actions people employ to adaptively manage multiple goal pursuits. Currently, I am especially interested in exploring psychological benefits and costs of temporarily prioritizing some goal pursuits over others. I am also interested in exploring within- and between-person dynamics of motivational attention in young, middle-aged, and older adults, using data from an intensive longitudinal study headed by Alexandra M. Freund and Derek M. Isaacowitz. I completed both my bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Modern History (2015) and my master’s degree in Psychology (2017) at the University of Zurich.

University of Zurich
Department of Psychology
Developmental Psychology: Adulthood
Binzmühlestrasse 14/11
8050 Zurich
Switzerland

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I am a doctoral student at the University of Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Alexandra M. Freund (Department of Psychology – Developmental Psychology: Adulthood). My research interests lie in the area of motivational processes across the lifespan, including goal pursuit, self-regulation, exhaustion, and recovery. I received my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in psychology from Sigmund Freud University Vienna. For my bachelor’s thesis, I investigated the understanding of “life” in preschool children. For my master’s thesis, I examined self-regulation, family influences and subjective theories about autonomy development in adolescence. Afterwards, I completed the postgraduate training in clinical psychology at a psychiatric clinic in Austria. In May 2019, I joined the NCCR LIVES as a doctoral student at the University of Zurich. My doctoral project revolves around processes of exhaustion and recovery in different life domains. I focus on subjective expectations about exhaustion and recovery in middle adulthood by investigating the antecedents and consequences of the segmentation between work and leisure.

Dissertation project: Work and Leisure – A Matter of Subjective Expectations About Exhaustion and Recovery?