Themen für Bachelorarbeiten

Beschreibung: Non-ordinary experiences, including the "third man factor" (sensing an unseen presence during extreme situations), mystical experiences, and altered states of consciousness, appear across all cultures but are interpreted and expressed through different cultural lenses. This literature review will examine how cultural scripts, religious frameworks, and local meaning systems shape the reporting, interpretation, and integration of non-ordinary experiences. The thesis should explore cross-cultural variations in how these experiences are conceptualized, valued, and incorporated into personal and collective narratives. This work should be written in English.
Relevant Literature:
Maraldi, E.O., Taves, A., Moll, J. et al. Nonordinary Experiences, Well-being and Mental Health: A Systematic Review of the Evidence and Recommendations for Future Research. J Relig Health 63, 410?444 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-023-01875-8
Taves, A., & Barlev, M. (2023). A feature-based approach to the comparative study of ?nonordinary? experiences. American Psychologist, 78(1), 50?61. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000990

Kontakt: Johannes Karl, E-Mail

Beschreibung: The language we use to name and describe emotions is not fixed: emotion concepts, and the words that carry them, shift across historical time, and a term that seems stable can change in meaning, salience, and value from one era to the next. Drawing on the emerging field of historical psychology, this review will in a structured fashion examine how the language of emotion has changed over historical time and what this reveals about emotional life, focusing on: (1) the theoretical and methodological foundations of historical psychology, including the use of large historical text corpora to reconstruct past mental life, along with the assumptions and limitations of this approach; (2) documented historical shifts in emotion vocabularies and in the frequency, valence, and expression of emotion words across centuries; (3) what such changes imply for debates about the universality versus the historical and cultural construction of emotion, and for how words of similar meaning come to be valued differently across periods and contexts. This work should be written in English.

Relevant Literature:
Atari, M., & Henrich, J. (2023). Historical psychology. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32(2), 176?183. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214221149737
Morin, O., & Acerbi, A. (2017). Birth of the cool: A two-centuries decline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction. Cognition and Emotion, 31(8), 1663?1675. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2016.1260528
Kontakt: Johannes Karl, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Cross-cultural psychology has produced a proliferation of dimensions intended to capture systematic variation between societies, including individualism?collectivism, tightness?looseness, power distance, and relational mobility, among others. While each axis was developed to explain distinct patterns of behavior, cognition, and social organization, they frequently draw on overlapping theoretical foundations and, in some cases, generate competing or contradictory predictions for the same outcomes. This literature review will synthesize the major cultural axes by examining their theoretical origins, the empirical predictors and antecedents proposed for each (such as ecological, historical, economic, and pathogen-related factors), and the degree to which these constructs converge or diverge. The thesis should critically compare where the axes make redundant, complementary, or conflicting predictions, clarify the conceptual boundaries between them, and assess whether they are best understood as distinct dimensions or as partial reflections of a smaller set of underlying factors. The review should give particular attention to cases in which two or more axes predict opposing effects, and to how the field has attempted to adjudicate such tensions empirically. This work should be written in English.

Minkov, M., & Kaasa, A. (2022). Do dimensions of culture exist objectively? A validation of the revised Minkov-Hofstede model of culture with World Values Survey items and scores for 102 countries. Journal of International Management, 28(4), Article 100971. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intman.2022.100971
Kaasa, A., & Minkov, M. (2022). Are different two-dimensional models of culture just a matter of different rotations? Evidence from the analysis based on the WVS/EVS. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 53(2), 127?156. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220221211072790
Kontakt: Johannes Karl, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Equanimity, broadly conceived as an even-minded, non-reactive stance toward experience that remains stable across pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral states, has gained increasing attention in psychological research, particularly within the study of contemplative practice and well-being. Despite this growing interest, the construct is operationalized inconsistently, is often conflated with related notions such as mindfulness, acceptance, emotion regulation, and affective flattening, and is assessed through a heterogeneous set of self-report instruments with varying conceptual assumptions. This literature review will examine how equanimity has been defined and measured in psychological research, comparing existing scales and methodologies with respect to their underlying conceptualizations, psychometric properties, and discriminant validity relative to neighboring constructs. The thesis should additionally survey the proposed predictors and correlates of equanimity, including contemplative training, dispositional traits, and emotion-regulatory processes, and evaluate the extent to which measurement choices shape the conclusions drawn about its antecedents. The review should highlight points of conceptual disagreement and consider what an adequate operationalization of equanimity would require. This work should be written in English.

Desbordes G, Gard T, Hoge EA, Hölzel BK, Kerr C, Lazar SW, Olendzki A, Vago DR. Moving beyond Mindfulness: Defining Equanimity as an Outcome Measure in Meditation and Contemplative Research. Mindfulness (N Y). 2014 Jan 21;2014(January):356?72. doi: 10.1007/s12671-013-0269-8. PMID: 25750687; PMCID: PMC4350240.
An?layo, B. Relating Equanimity to Mindfulness. Mindfulness 12, 2635?2644 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-021-01671-z
Kontakt: Johannes Karl, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Right now, Stoicism is experiencing a revival, both in popular understandings and in psychological research. Nevertheless, psychologist and philosophers have a difficult time agreeing on what is being talked about under the label of Stoicism. This thesis aims to track the conceptual evolution and measurement of Stoicism in psychology through a literature review to understand how psychologists use lay understandings and existing labels to derive new constructs. This work should be written in English.
Relevant literature:
LeBon, T., Brown, G., DiGiuseppe, R. et al. The Development and Validation of the Stoic Attitudes and Behaviours Scale. Cogn Ther Res (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-025-10635-9
Karl, J. A., Verhaeghen, P., Aikman, S. N., Solem, S., Lassen, E. R., & Fischer, R. (2022). Misunderstood stoicism: The negative association between stoic ideology and well-being. Journal of Happiness Studies: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Subjective Well-Being, 23(7), 3531?3547. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-022-00563-w

Kontakt: Johannes Karl, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Psychology is increasingly recognizing the value of historical texts as data source to understand past societies and gain a long-term understanding of psychological dynamics. The aim of this thesis is to write a systematic literature review which summarizes the state of the art how psychologists have gone and are going about extracting psychological information from text. This work has to be written in English.
Relevant Literature
Atari, M., & Henrich, J. (2023). Historical Psychology. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32(2), 176-183. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214221149737 (Original work published 2023)
Du, A. H., Karl, J. A., Fetvadjiev, V., Luczak-Roesch, M., Pirngruber, R., & Fischer, R. (2023). Tracing the evolution of personality cognition in early human civilisations: A computational analysis of the Gilgamesh epic. European Journal of Personality, 38(2), 274-290. https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070231161869 (Original work published 2024)

Kontakt: Johannes Karl, E-Mail