Research by Dr. Stuart Derbyshire on soccer players’ behaviour and admissions suggests a deliberate strategy of feigning injury for gain.

Under strong pressure to win high-stakes competitions, professional soccer players may change their behaviour to help their team gain an advantage.

In particular, the rules of soccer state that play is stopped if a player is injured. Consequently, players may feign or exaggerate injury nearing the end of matches when their team holds a favourable score, so as to preserve their advantage by running down the clock and wasting time.

To demonstrate that soccer players can successfully feign injury for gain, a study by Dr. Stuart Derbyshire (pictured above) from the Department of Psychology in NUS, in collaboration with Dr. Ilana Angel and Dr. Richard Bushell from the University of Birmingham, reviewed 30 Euro 2008 matches, 90 English Premier League (EPL) matches, and 63 World Cup 2010 matches for the timing and severity of injuries. The matches were divided into six 15-min periods each, and players’ injuries were classified as high, medium, or low severity.

The researchers found that in the first four periods (60-min) of the soccer matches, there were no differences in the number of low-severity injuries sustained by teams with and without a benefit for creating a delay in play.

However, in the final 30-min of the observed matches, low-severity injuries gradually increased for teams approaching more favourable match outcomes. Notably, these teams suffered significantly more minor injuries in the final 15-min of matches, as compared to teams that did not stand to benefit from game stoppages.

In addition, the researchers interviewed seven EPL players and three managers about match influences on players’ behaviour. Four of the seven players directly admitted to “playing up” an injury to gain an advantage in matches by slowing the game. While none of the three managers admitted to instructing such behaviour, one described this tactic as “clever”, another acknowledged that players may play up their injuries to “take the steam out of the game”, and the third admitted to potentially telling a player who had gone to ground to “stay down there and take a breather”.

Dr. Derbyshire commented,

It is often suspected that people will feign injury for gain, but actually demonstrating such is difficult. There are other possibilities, such as the winning team working harder during the match and therefore getting more knocks, but we think the onset of minor injuries at the end of the match, for the team that stands to benefit from stopping play, is fairly suggestive of some conscious decision making. Plus the players admitted as much.

He added, “We were very lucky to have access to top Premiership players and managers (I can’t say who they were, but it was an all star participant pool) and they were all incredibly gracious with their time and candid with their answers. In an age when so much seems to be managed and controlled, their honesty and willingness to chat about football was very refreshing and I am very grateful to them for that.”

As to whether their work may lead to practical changes in the sport, Dr. Derbyshire said, “Football is a high speed, high stakes sport involving physical contact. It is inevitable that players will choose to use the rules as best they can for benefit. But that’s the game (and it is, despite all the money and intensity, only a game), and it is hilarious when a player gets caught obviously feigning an injury! I wouldn’t want to try and manage the game further and lose some of the intensity or the hilarity.”

The researchers are currently broadly interested in whether feigning might be inadvertently encouraged in other situations, such as becoming sick right before a major holiday or test. They are also interested in investigating whether people who deliberately feign pain through acting actually feel some pain when they act, and whether their brain activation during acting is similar to when they receive an actual painful stimulus.

Reference

Derbyshire, S. W. G., Angel, I., & Bushell, R. (2016). When pain brings gain: Soccer players behaviour and admissions suggest feigning injury to maintain a favourable scoreline. Frontiers in Psychology, 7:613. http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00613 

Research by Yoanna Kurnianingsih and Dr. O’Dhaniel Mullette-Gillman identifies the dorsal anterior midcingulate cortex as the neural locus of the value-to-utility transformation.

Given a choice between a 100% chance of receiving $5 and a 20% chance of receiving $30, which option would you pick?

When making a decision, we often translate the objective value of our options to their subjective value (or utility) in order to choose the “best” option. For instance, while the expected objective value of a 20% chance of receiving $30 is $6, people may place a lower subjective value on this option than receiving a certain $5.

Which brain region encodes the information necessary for us to perform such value-to-utility transformations?

A recent study by Ph.D. candidate Yoanna Kurnianingsih, and Dr. O’Dhaniel Mullette-Gillman from the Department of Psychology in NUS, has localized the neural mechanisms of such transformations to the dorsal anterior midcingulate cortex (daMCC).

In their study, participants performed a risky monetary decision task while inside a MRI scanner. The task involved choosing between a gamble and a certain option (similar to the choice described earlier), or between two certain options. Participants made such choices in both gains (positive monetary values) and losses (negative monetary values) domains.

Increased daMCC activation was found to correspond to lowered subjective valuation, while deactivation of the daMCC corresponded to enhanced subjective valuation as a function of each individual’s idiosyncratic risk preference. This relationship between daMCC activation and the value-to-utility transformation is pictured above for both gains (top left) and losses (bottom left).

Based on their findings, the researchers have suggested that activation patterns in the daMCC before individuals are presented with the available options determine the value-to-utility transformation of these options, and subsequent decision-making.

In addition, two brain regions—the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and nucleus accumbens (NAcc)—were identified to have significant functional connectivity with the daMCC during value-to-utility transformations across gains and losses (pictured above, right). These brain regions may allow for the integration of contextual information into the daMCC to set the value-to-utility transformation taking place, as well as modulation of valuation signals by outputs.

Reference

Kurnianingsih, Y. A., & Mullette-Gillman, O. A. (2016). Neural mechanisms of the transformation from objective value to subjective utility: Converting from count to worth. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 10:507. http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2016.00507

Speaker: Anne Chong Suet Lin

Title: Friends… Who needs them? A neurobiological approach

Date: 10 February, 1-2 pm 

Venue: AS4/02-08 (Psychology Department Meeting Room) 

Abstract:

Social networks and interactions have profound implications on our mental wellbeing. Using Autism Quotient data in NUS undergraduates, we present evidence that and the CD38/CD157 ADP ribosyl-cyclases in the oxytocinergic pathway contribute to individual differences in social skills from intense social involvement to extreme avoidance that characterize autism. 

Bio:

Anne is a final year PhD candidate supervised by Richard Ebstein with an interest in the biological mechanisms underpinning social behavior.

A Research Scholarship is available at the Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, for prospective Ph.D. students interested in completing research on Family Dynamics in Behavioural Addiction under the supervision of Professor Catherine Tang, with an ideal start date of August 2017.

Interested candidates may refer to the notice below for more details about the scholarship and application procedure.

Speaker: Dr. Tim Dalgleish

Title: Misremembrance of things past: Autobiographical memory disturbances in mood and anxiety disorders and the emergence of memory therapeutics.

Date: 17 February, 1-2 pm 

Venue: AS4/02-08 (Psychology Department Meeting Room) 

Abstract:

Common mental health problems such as mood, anxiety and stress disorders, are characterised by perturbations in the way sufferers represent recollect and reflect upon the autobiographical past. In this talk I outline the nature of these problems, overview a series of basic science findings that seek to elucidate the underlying characteristics and mechanisms associated with autobiographical memory disturbances, and discuss novel low-intensity therapeutic interventions that have emerged from this work, and their preliminary evaluation in clinical trials.

Bio:

Tim Dalgleish is a Research Clinical Psychologist at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, where he also directs the Cambridge Centre for Affective Disorders (C2:AD). His work seeks to elucidate the underlying neurocognitive profiles that characterise mood and anxiety disorders such as depression and PTSD. The research then adopts a translational perspective in seeking both to develop novel psychological treatments for these conditions and to refine existing interventions. He is particularly interested in the processes of autobiographical memory  and  mental regulation in emotionally-laden contexts, in mood and anxiety disorders.

The Department is pleased to announce that Dr. Camilo Libedinsky, Prof Catherine Tang, and A/P Winston Goh have been awarded Tier 2 grants by the Ministry of Education (MOE)!

We extend our warmest congratulations to them on this great achievement, and wish them the very best in their research!

Speaker: Yeo Pei Shi 

Title: Group as a prioritisation signal: Working with similar others facilitates self-control performance following ego depletion.

Date: Friday 3 March, 1-2 pm 

Venue: AS4/02-08 (Psychology Department Meeting Room) 

Abstract:

We often find ourselves exhausted but still burdened with a long to-do list. Even so, we often push through to get work done because our group mates or colleagues need our input for a shared project. Inspired by such instances and the extant literature, I propose that the group can serve as a prioritisation signal after prior use of self-control (i.e., depletion). Our innate need to belong might drive us to favour and invest more effort into group tasks over individual tasks under such draining circumstances. Three experiments support the prioritisation hypothesis. Results also revealed that implicit motivation (but not self-reported motivation) plays a role in explaining why we tend to prioritise group work over individual tasks after prior depletion. 

Biography:

Yeo Pei Shi is a psychology major who is enrolled in the Concurrent Degree Programme (seehttp://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/psy/current/grad_research/programmeinfo.html#concurrent). Together with Dr Jia Lile, her thesis explores the interface between self-control and group processes. This is value in integrating the ego depletion and group dynamics literature given the prevalence of group work and our successive use of self-control in everyday life.

Speaker: Prof Markus Ullsperger

Title: How performance monitoring signals may optimise or bias our behaviour

Date: Friday 10 March, 1-2 pm 

Venue: AS4/02-08 (Psychology Department Meeting Room) 

Abstract:

In my presentation I will discuss mutual interactions of performance monitoring, learning and decision making. After a general introduction of EEG and fMRI correlates of prediction errors, their weighting, and resulting adaptation signals, I will discuss two model-based fMRI studies in which participants make choices that deviate from optimal behavior.

In the first study we used a task that allowed orthogonalizing immediate reward and informational value of action outcomes such that immediate rewards could lower long-term expected value and vice versa. Participants showed suboptimal belief updating compared to an ideal Bayesian learner which, using computational modeling, can be attributed to the influence of model-free reinforcement learning mechanisms. Dissociable brain regions facilitate both types of learning. The model-free, short-term learning is associated with ventral striatal activity, and model-based, long-term learning engages dorsal striatum and frontopolar cortex. Yet, stronger representation of short-term learning by dorsal striatum and frontopolar cortex correlated with optimal long-term belief formation across participants. This suggests that reflection about short-term rewards determines long-term learning success and failure.

In a second value learning study, we found that, when suddenly switched to novel choice contexts, subjects’ choices were incongruent with values learnt by standard learning algorithms. Instead, behavior was compatible with the decisions of an agent learning how good an option was relative to an option with which it had previously been paired. Striatal activity exhibited the characteristics of a prediction error used to update such relative option values.

Biography:

Trained as a physician, Markus Ullsperger obtained his doctoral degree at the Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig, Germany, in 2000. Thereafter he worked as a scientific staff member at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig at Yves von Cramon’s Department of Cognitive Neurology. After his habilitation, Markus Ullsperger moved to Cologne, where he headed the Max Planck Research Group Cognitive Neurology at the Max Planck Institute for Neurological Research. In 2009 he was appointed as full professor of Biological Psychology at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands, and principal investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour. Since 2012, he has been full professor of Neuropsychology at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany. Currently he spends three months as a visiting professor in the Neuroscience & Behavioural Disorders Programme at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore.

The Memory & Speech Lab and Psycholinguistics Lab at the Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, invite applications for the position of Full-time Research Assistant, starting on 31 July 2017.

Interested candidates may refer to the notice below for more details about the position and application procedure.

A Psychology Research Internship is available during the period of 1 May to 30 September 2017, with primary research topics including: Adjustment to challenges in life transition, and behaviour addictions.

Interested candidates may refer to the notice below for more details about the research internship and application procedure.

Speaker: Lee Peiwei

Title: Conditional love: Singaporeans’ pursuit of basic psychological needs satisfaction influences attitudes towards immigrants

Date: Friday 17 March, 1-2 pm 

Venue: AS4/02-08 (Psychology Department Meeting Room) 

Abstract:

Increasing xenophobia among Singaporeans is becoming a pressing concern. The current research, consisting of two studies, uses both Integrated Threat and Basic Psychological Needs Theory to understand what fuels Singaporeans’ attitudes towards immigrants. In both studies, participants rated the extent to which immigrants are seen as (i) realistic and symbolic threats (i.e., intergroup threats), (ii) instrumental to their need for autonomy, relatedness, and competency, and (iii) warm and competent (i.e., attitudes towards immigrants). Study 1, which utilised a sample of undergraduates, suggested that immigrants’ instrumentality to locals’ basic needs predicted attitudes towards immigrants, above and beyond perceived intergroup threats. Intergroup threats also mediated the relationship between perceived instrumentality of immigrants and locals’ attitudes towards immigrants. Similar results were obtained in Study 2, where participants were recruited from the general Singapore population.

Biography:

Lee Peiwei is a psychology major who is enrolled in the Concurrent Degree Programme. Together with Dr Jia Lile, her thesis explores what motivates attitudes towards immigrants in Singapore.

Speaker: Dr. Ding Xiao Pan 

Title: Children’s lying behavior: From emergence to differentiation

Date: Friday 7 April, 1-2 pm 

Venue: AS4/02-08 (Psychology Department Meeting Room) 

Abstract:

Lying is common but complex issue in children. Children begin to tell lies in the preschool years for different purpose, and their tendency to lie changes with age. In the talk, I will first talk about the emergence of children’s lying behavior, different types of lies and their cultural differences. I will highlight the roles of children’s understanding of mental states and social conventions in the development of children’s lying behavior. In addition, I will propose a study that investigates the Singaporean children’s lying behavior and conception.

 Biography:

 Dr Ding Xiao Pan is an assistant professor in Department of Psychology at NUS. Her research interest is children’s moral and cognitive behavior, especially about children’s honest and dishonest behavior.

We are pleased to announce that four of our graduate students have recently won the Graduate Students’ Teaching Award (GSTA) for Semester 1 AY2016/2017!

Our heartiest congratulations to all, who have done our department proud!

Since Elvis and Sarah are first-time winners, we also took the opportunity to find out what makes them such effective teachers.

Elvis

1. What inspires you to teach?

The want to simply experience teaching, to connect, and to make a positive difference in students’ learning journeys.

Along the way, I realised my students also make up a significant part of my inspiration—their willingness and openness to learning often fuels me to go the extra mile in teaching.

2. What are some of the major challenges you face as a teacher?

I am constantly exploring how I can make the learning experience more durable. Students tend to forget much of the content knowledge they learned, so how can we ensure that their learning lasts beyond the module? To overcome this challenge, I make it a point to connect with my students and remind them of more enduring aspects like learning independently, building friendships, and enjoying the process of learning.

In the classroom, I’m working on listening actively to my students’ responses. During classroom discussion, I usually have specific answers in mind and inevitably looked out for them. The challenge then is to really listen to—and engage with—students’ responses. I am constantly surprised by the interesting insights that students can generate, if we only allow them to!

3. Why do you think you are an effective teacher?

Based on students’ feedback, they appreciated my sincerity in reaching out to each of them. I meet my students with a genuine interest in their learning and their lives beyond academics. I also make it a point to convey my faith in them, and offer them words of encouragement when they encounter difficulties.

Students also appreciated the classroom engagement that we had. I believe that students truly learn only when they are engaged. To this end, I use music before and during class, occasionally include revision games and hands-on activities, and frequently encourage students to contribute to the classroom discussion. All these help to establish psychological safety in the classroom, i.e., a conducive environment in which students feel safe to participate and speak up in class.

Sarah

1. What inspires you to teach?

Love — a love for learning, people, and life. While browsing the education section in my school’s library as a 14 year-old, I came across a book that instantly caught my attention with its compelling title: “Two Parts Textbook, One Part Love”. This motto has formed the cornerstone of my approach to teaching over the years, and continues to inspire me.

I love connecting with my students when we actively construct knowledge and discuss big picture ideas in the larger context of Life. It is always a joy witnessing my students’ Aha! moments of insight! We often think of teaching as imparting knowledge, but I have found it equally true that we learn by teaching—my students have taught me many wise lessons on finding meaning in higher purposes and helping others to find theirs, and it is an honour to share this journey with them.

2. What are some of the major challenges you face as a teacher?

The art of teaching involves a fine balance between simplifying abstract knowledge for our students and empowering them with the opportunity to work these concepts out for themselves. As teachers, we have often already gone through the steep learning process of deconstructing abstract ideas, and may want to spare our students from learning the hard way. Yet, simply transmitting our mental models of the world without giving our students a chance to build their own is a disservice to learning. I strive to tread this balance by modelling problem-solving skills while encouraging my students to explore ideas and make knowledge truly their own. It is my hope that such experiences will cultivate a love for independent, lifelong learning in my students.

As a teacher whose time is currently divided amongst teaching, research, and admin work, it can be an uphill task managing these responsibilities all at once. Still, the journey is fulfilling not in spite of, but because of its challenges. I am grateful for the support of the department, my fellow Cognition and Education Lab teammates, and my students, who always make it all worthwhile.

3. Why do you think you are an effective teacher?

As a teacher, I aspire to bring learning to life, and Life to learning.

In particular, I have found that positive energy in the classroom is essential to build community within it and encourage lifelong learning beyond it. I see it as part of my mission to excite students about concepts and ideas they encounter with a generous dose of humour and enthusiasm, and to challenge my students to think deeply and critically.

At the same time, recognising the boundaries of my current knowledge propels me to seek mastery, and also helps me to be genuine with my students in validating their individual struggles that could once have been or are still mine, even as I maintain high standards for both my teaching and my students’ learning. It is my hope that as we come to see mistakes as positive opportunities for growth and development, we may together overcome our fear of failure to make quantum leaps in our learning and forge ahead to pursue our larger life ambitions.

Speaker: Dr. Oliver Sng

Title: The Crowded Life is a Slow Life: Population Density and Life History Strategy

Date: Thursday, 22 June at 10am 

Venue: AS4/02-08 (Psychology Department Meeting Room) 

Abstract: 

The world population has doubled over the last half century. Yet, research on the psychological effects of human population density, once a popular topic, has decreased over the past few decades. Applying a fresh perspective to an old topic, we draw upon life history theory to examine the effects of population density. Across nations and across the U.S. states (Studies 1 and 2), we find that dense populations exhibit behaviors corresponding to a slower life history strategy, including greater future-orientation, greater investment in education, more long-term mating orientation, later marriage age, lower fertility, and greater parental investment. In Study 3, experimentally inducing perceptions of increasing density led individuals to become more future-oriented. Finally, in Studies 4 and 5, manipulating perceptions of increasing density seemed to lead to life-stage-specific slower strategies, with college students preferring to invest in fewer rather than more relationship partners, and an older MTurk sample preferring to invest in fewer rather than more children. This research sheds new insight on the effects of density and its implications for human cultural variation and society at large.

Biography:

Oliver received his BA in Psychology from the National University of Singapore and his MA/PhD from Arizona State University. His work focuses on two fundamental questions: (1) Why are there psychological differences across human groups? (2) Why do we hold the social stereotypes that we do? Specifically, he explores the intersection between how ecological factors (e.g., population density, pathogen prevalence, resource availability) influence people’s behavior, and how people think ecologies influence the behavior of others. He draws upon a variety of frameworks, including behavioral ecology, life history theory, and affordance management. He appreciates not being asked what he does in his free time. He has none.

Speaker: Dr. Joshua J. Clarkson

Title: Influencing Those Who Influence Us: The Role of Expertise in the Emergence of Minority Influence

Date: Friday 7 July at 2:30pm 

Venue: AS4/02-08 (Psychology Department Meeting Room) 

Abstract:

While consumers are often influenced by experts, consumers themselves can be experts—and, in such instances, it is important to understand who influences their decisions. That is, to whom do experts turn to for guidance in their own decisions? The present research proposes the rather paradoxical hypothesis that, while novices are more influenced by majority endorsements, experts are more influenced by minority endorsements. This hypothesis is based on the premise that majority endorsements match the preferences basis of novices—namely, what is prototypical and conventional. Conversely, minority endorsements match the preference basis of experts—namely, what is novel and innovative. As such, novices and experts are more confident in the option endorsed by the majority and minority endorsements, respectively, because these sources represent preferences that match their own. Importantly, however, this effect is bounded to domains where the criteria for evaluation are subjective and thus minority endorsement is considered favorable. Six experiments support this framework and, in doing so, offer novel insight into the role of social influence in impacting the decisions of experts. 

Biography: 

Dr. Joshua John Clarkson (Ph.D. in Social Psychology, Ph.D. in Marketing) is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Cincinnati. He specializes in the areas of persuasion and self-control. His research has been published in various journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and his findings have been featured in media outlets from business magazines and news articles to pop-psychology books and edited academic volumes. He has recently received the Early Career Award in Attitudes and Social Influence from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. 

Dr. Choi Ji Yeh joined our department in July 2017. She received her Ph.D. in quantitative psychology at McGill University, Canada. She is interested in addressing diverse issues and topics in psychology and other social sciences by developing and applying statistical and computational methods. Particular research interests lie in areas of structural equation modeling, functional data analysis, multivariate statistics, high-dimensional data analysis, cluster analysis, and Bayesian statistics.

Her current focuses are on 1) developing a statistical method that integrates the component-based structural equation modeling into a Bayesian framework, 2) extending data reduction techniques for functional data, where observations are measured continuously over a large number of occasions, and 3) understanding and capturing cluster-level respondent heterogeneity inherent to data.

The Infant and Child Language lab at the National University of Singapore has funds for several research positions:

• 2 postdoctoral fellowships (start date: February 1, 2018 to August, 1, 2018)
• 1 funded PhD scholarship (start date: January 2018 to August 2018)
• 1 full-time lab manager (start date: January 2018; a requirement for this position is to be proficient in Mandarin, but not for the other positions)

The sponsored projects focus on cognitive and language processing in bilingual infants, acquisition of lexical tones in infancy, and demographic determinants (e.g., SES) of bilingual acquisition.

Interested candidates may contact A/P Leher Singh at psyls@nus.edu.sg for more details.

“Big Data in Psychology: Methods and Applications”
A Special Issue of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie
https://conferences.leibniz-psychology.org/index.php/bigdata/bigdata2018/schedConf/cfp

Guest Editors: Mike W.-L. Cheung and Suzanne Jak

An associated conference will take place at ZPID – Leibniz-Institute for Psychology Information in Trier, Germany, on June 7-9, 2018: http://bigdata2018.leibniz-psychology.org

Focus of the Special Issue, Aims, and Scope
The availability of Big Data is more and more common in many fields including business, computer science, government, social and behavioral sciences, and psychology. Since it is hard to clearly define what Big Data is, we do not impose a strict definition of Big Data in this special issue.

There are three key characteristics that may qualify data as Big Data, namely Volume, Velocity, and Variety. High-volume data refers to the size of the dataset is too large that may lead to problems with storage and analysis. High-velocity data means that the data come at a high rate and/or have to be processed within a short period of time (e.g., real-time and interactive processing). High-variety data are data consisting of many types of structured and unstructured data with a mix of text, pictures, videos, and numbers. Another characteristic for Big Data is the veracity, which indicates the importance of the quality (or truthfulness) of data. Some examples of Big Data that may be relevant for Psychology are social media data, health/physiological tracker data, geolocation data, dynamic public records, travel route data, behavioral and genetic data. Papers submitted to this special issue may focus on one or more of these features in Big Data.

The overall aim of this special issue is to address methods and applications using Big Data in Psychology. The topics covered may address (but are not limited to):

• Methodological and statistical issues in collecting, handling, processing, and analyzing Big Data in psychology.
• Applications and illustrations of how Big Data are used to address psychological research questions.
• Psychological interventions making use of Big Data.
• Inference models taking Big Data into account.
• Comparison of Big Data versus ´traditional´ data sources (e.g., self-reports, peer-reports, etc.).
• Combining traditional data sources with Big Data.
• Implications of Big Data for research infrastructures in psychology and related areas.

How to Submit
There is a two-stage submissions process. Initially, interested authors are requested to submit extended abstracts of their proposed papers. Authors of the selected abstracts will then be invited to submit full papers. All papers will undergo blind peer review.

Stage 1: Structured Abstract Submission
Authors interested in this special issue must submit a structured abstract of the planned manuscript before submitting a full paper. The goal is to provide authors with prompt feedback regarding the suitability and relevance of the planned manuscript to the special issue.

The deadline for submitting structured abstracts is November 15, 2017. Feedback on whether or not the editors encourage authors to submit a full paper will be given by December 15, 2017.

Submission guidelines for structured abstracts:
Structured abstracts should be within four pages and may encompass information on each of the following headings: (a) Background, (b) Objectives, (c) Research question(s) and/or hypothesis/es, (d) Method/Approach, (e) Results/Findings, (f) Conclusions and implications (expected).

Structured abstracts should be submitted by e-mail to both guest editors at mikewlcheung@nus.edu.sg and S.Jak@uva.nl.

There will be an international conference on “Big Data in Psychology: Methods and Applications” on June 7-9, 2018 at ZPID – Leibniz-Institute for Psychology Information in Trier, Germany. Authors who are encouraged to submit a full paper will be invited to present their manuscripts at the conference. Further information about the conference can be found here: http://bigdata2018.leibniz-psychology.org

Stage 2: Full Paper Submission
For those who have been encouraged to submit a full paper, the deadline for submission of manuscripts is February 28, 2018.

Full manuscripts will undergo a blind peer-review process.

Submission guidelines for full papers:
Maximum 8,500 words (approx. 60,000 characters, including spaces) in 12-point Times New Roman font, formatted in APA style (http://www.apastyle.org/), A4 paper format, 1-inch margins. Figures should be in grayscale only.

The title page should contain title, authors, and affiliations, including a complete address for correspondence (including e-mail address). An abstract of 150 words or less and a list of up to five keywords should follow the title page.

On page 3 of the manuscript, repeat the title, but not the names, to permit anonymity during the reviewing process. Please do not include any footnotes at the bottom of the pages or at the end of the text.

Timeline

• November 15, 2017: Extended abstract submissions due
• December 15, 2017: Feedback to authors of extended abstracts due
• February 28, 2018: Full paper submissions due
• March 15, 2018: Invitation to present at conference in Trier due
• June 7-9, 2018: International conference on “Big Data in Psychology: Methods and Applications” at the ZPID – Leibniz-Institute for Psychology Information, Trier, Germany. Further information about the event can be found here: http://bigdata2018.leibniz-psychology.org
• July 30, 2018: Feedback to authors of full paper submissions
• October 30, 2018: Revised manuscripts due
• December 1, 2018: Editorial decision about acceptance/refusal of revised papers due
• 2019/2020: Publication of special issue

About the Journal

The Zeitschrift für Psychologie, founded in 1890, is the oldest psychology journal in Europe and the second oldest in the world. One of the founding editors was Hermann Ebbinghaus. Since 2007 it is published in English and devoted to publishing topical issues that provide state of- the-art reviews of current research in psychology. For detailed author guidelines, please see the journal’s website at www.hogrefe.com/j/zfp