BackLab Team
© AE Back

Welcome to the lab of Prof. Dr. Mitja Back. My associates, students and I are interested in the interplay of personality and social relationships.

Our research focuses on how personality affects the initiation and maintenance of social relationships and how, in turn, social relationships feed back into the development of social identities. We are also developing methods to capture and analyze personality and social relationship dynamics.
Latest projects, cover topics such as self-enhancement, the popularity, self-esteem and affective states of narcissists, the conceptualization, assessment, and development of social skills, the determinants and accuracy of interpersonal judgments, social interactions and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic, personality and speed-dating, personality and the development of friendships and social status, behavioral, affective, and cognitive state variability, methodological developments for testing discrepancy hypotheses (e.g., response surface analysis), the development of extraversion and self-esteem in social context, as well as perceived societal marginalization, conspiracy mentality and threat towards refugees.

In teaching, we provide a comprehensive B.Sc.- and M.Sc.-program in personality psychology and psychological assessment, including lectures and courses on psychodiagnostics, test theory, differential psychology, performance, ability and personality tests, test construction, and psychological examination.

PhD and PostDoc positions

Read this pdf for information about available PhD positions and this pdf for information about available PostDoc positions!
Also see: "Join us"

Hilfskraftstellen

Read the pdf for information about available student assistant jobs!

Stellen für Forschungspraktika

Read the pdf for further information!

Latest news

See all our news entries here.

A new paper by Michael P. Grosz, Gabriel Olaru, Mitja D. Back & John F. Rauthmann is now in press in "Collabra: Psychology": Assessing the ABCDs of Machiavellianism: Development and validation of the M4 scale using ant colony optimization. publications

A new paper by Tanja Joan Schmidt, Marvin Mergen, Bernd Romeike, Anna Junga, Henriette Schulze, Lukas Mayer, Ole Hätscher, Robert Speidel, Marie-Christin Willemer & Marcel Meyerheim is now in press in "GMS Journal for Medical Education": Status quo von Virtual Reality in der medizinischen Ausbildung der DACH-Region. publications

A new paper by Anna Junga, Philipp Bozdere, Ole Hätscher, Sönke Scherzer, Paul Schmidle, Henriette Schulze, Leon Pielage, Pascal Kockwelp, Marcel Meyerheim, Marvin Mergen, Benjamin Risse, Bernhard Marschall, Tina Glückselig & Kathrin Ungru is now in press in "Virtual Reality": Rethinking interaction design: Special implications for interaction concepts in medical education using virtual reality. publications