Research interests
I am a tenured postdoc at the Department of Communication at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In my current research, I specialize in media choice, processes, and effects in different areas (for example, digital communication, entertainment research, and political communication). I focus on the relationship between entertainment experiences and information processing and its potential for learning and behavioral change. Furthermore, I’m interested in how people use media to cope with need threats and stress. Also, I explore the impact of online ostracism and the pressure to be always connected in mobile and social media environments on users’ mental health.
Curriculum Vitae
I studied psychology (diploma) and communication psychology & media education (postgraduate certificate, comparable to M.A.) at the Universities of Constance and Koblenz-Landau, worked in the media research department of the German broadcast station SWR (2001–2004), held an interim junior professorship for methods of empirical social research at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (2005/2006) and was a student assistant and research associate at the Landau Institute for Communication Psychology and Media Education from 2001 to 2013, where I received my doctorate on the topic of subjective movie evaluation criteria in 2012. From 2013 to 2023, interrupted by being an interim chair for media psychology at the University of Hohenheim (August 2014 to March 2015), I worked as a postdoc at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at the University of Mannheim, where, among other things, I led a DFG-funded project in the field of political entertainment research and a subproject in the collaborative research project “digilog@bw – Digitalisierung im Dialog.” From February to September 2023, I was deputy head of the Everyday Media Lab at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM; Knowledge Media Research Center) in Tübingen, and from October 2023 to August 2024, I was Assistant Professor for Youth and Media Entertainment at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam. Since September 2024 I have been a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.