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Team Müller

Personality Psychology is the empirical science of the relative enduring individual characteristics im the experience and behavior of people and their underlying structures and processes. They characterize the personality of an individual in a particular stage of life; this does not exclude longterm personality changes. The individual characteristics become clear through the comparison of individuals (interindividual differences) or groups (group differences, ex gender differences) within a specific population. In doing so, the tension between the possible most comprehensible description of the individual case (idiographic method) and the most comprehensive comparison with other members of the population (differential method). Personality Psychology occupies itself primarily with norm variances of individual characteristics and the relationship these norm variances to pathological appearances, which are the subject of clicial psychology. The personality declaration includes individual conditions in the genome, in anatomy and physiology (primary the nervous system) and the environment.


The research focuses of our department are the personality traits of neuroticism and extraversion, and underlying mechancisms of these traits (ex. mechanism of threat and reward processing) as well as associated psychological illnesses (ex. anxiety disorders and depressive disorders).