Social Psychology:
Team Barbara Krahé

Chair until 03/2021:  Prof. Dr. Barbara Krahé

Research Focus

The main research activities of Barbara Krahé and her team lie in the field of Applied Social Psychology, in particular Aggression Research, and currently focus on these thematic areas:

1. Impact of violent media on aggression
Longitudinal and experimental studies on the effects of exposure to violence in the media on aggressive cognition, affect and behavior, including the development and evaluation of an intervention program to mitigate the adverse effects of violent media use in adolescence.

2. Sexual aggression: Prevalence and risk factors in a cross-cultural perspective
Large-scale longitudinal and cross-sectional studies in Germany, Poland, Turkey, Brazil, Chile as well as a range of further EU countries on the prevalence and risk factors of sexual aggression from both the victim and the perpetrator perspectives in women and men.

3. Social information processing of sexual assault
Studies on the role of myths and stereotypes about sexual assault in attributions of blame to victims and more generally decision making in a judicial context against the background of high attrition rates in sexual assault cases.

4. Development of aggressive behavior in childhood and adolescence
Longitudinal studies on the role of maladaptive anger regulation, social rejection, academic failure, and affiliation with deviant peers in the development of aggressive behavior and multi-level analyses examining the impact of the peer environment.

5. Prevention of aggression
Experimental studies on the buffering of the effect of frustration on aggression by eliciting internal states, such as humor, that are incompatible with aggression.

International cooperations are in place with colleagues at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Iowa State University, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, University of Granada, and Macquarie University, Sydney.