Research plays an exciting role in the activities and offerings of the psychology department. Our research projects link our faculty to the most recent developments in the exciting world of psychology. They allow us to integrate students in state-of-the-art projects and teach them a love for systematically exploring the answers to psychological questions. They make the things we teach in our classes come alive. And finally they make our classes lively by enriching them with current insights into fascinating aspects of how people think, feel, act, and decide in a variety of different situations and contexts. 

A number of highly innovative research projects have been conducted by the members of the psychology department in recent years, with research ties to, and collaborations with researchers from, such prominent institutions as Brandeis University, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Stanford, University of Cologne, and University of Vienna.

Research conducted in the Psychology Department centers around two main research areas:

1. Psychological/behavioral decision making
2. Psychological aspects of counseling and psychotherapy (e.g., psychotherapy, organizational psychology, coaching, supervision, consulting, teams, groups, and leadership)

Within these areas, concrete research topics of our in-house research faculty have ranged from psychological factors in financial decisions, to the decisions of currency traders, to the psychology behind ethical and unethical behavior, to how empathy is learned and whether it can be actively taught, to the role of unconscious metaphors in financial markets and in psychotherapy. Our interest in social and economic psychology has ranged from questions of macro threats and work performance to tax morality, from social cognition in severe psychopathology to social constructivism.

In addition, next to being state-of-the art practitioners in a variety of psychological fields, the members of our adjunct faculty are also active researchers who research psychosocial and counseling issues around HIV/AIDS, psychotherapy with various diagnostic groups, treatment and well-being of mentally ill persons, the psychology of the internet and of self-disclosure on social networking sites, burn out, sleep and sleep disorders, nightmares, dreams, lucid dreaming, gestalt theory, individual and organizational creativity, social pedagogics, the person centered approach, identity of adolescents in various cultures, the period of adolescence, baby observation, and psychotherapy issues from psychotherapy outcome to such approaches as psychoanalysis and the humanistic psychology of gestalt therapy and the person centered approach.