Longitudinal thesis plan

Dear students,

we have been getting more and more requests for thesis supervisions in the past months. As much as we are flattered by your interest in our research and our team, we had to reject many of these requests, as our day only has 24 hours.

So we came up with a long-term strategy to hand out thesis topics more systematically in order to enable analyses of bigger data sets, reduce workload for the advisors, and validate instruments over time. This strategy revolves around emotion regulation, one of our research topics. Specifically, we want to implement a validation of the OASIS picture set with you. Depending on whether you are a Bachelor or Master student, you will develop the paradigm and/or collect data and/or analyze data. The paradigm will be set up using Psychopy, data will be collected with REDCap, and analyzed with SPSS or RStudio. During the winter semester 2021/22, two Bachelor students will develop the paradigm and collect data of 15 participants in a pilot study. After that, our research assistant Patricia will implement the recording of the startle reflex in the paradigm. Consequently, during the summer semester 2022, more participants can be recruited by new students, now including not only the startle reflex measurement, but also personality questionnaires, such as Need for Cognition, Flexible Emotion Regulation, and so on. Over time, we want to collect data of many participants with you, including and swapping out the additional measures, such as subjective effort during emotion regulation, peripheral physiology, or even measure the same participants longitudinally. As a result, future students will be able to analyze bigger data sets, making their conclusions more reliable than the usual N=20 participant thesis studies.

If you are interested in writing your thesis about (a part of) this project, please contact Anne Gärtner (anne_gaertner@tu-dresden.de) or Christoph Scheffel (christoph_scheffel@tu-dresden.de). Please be aware that it is still possible that we decline your request, as there are over a dozen students on our waiting list.