Tania Singer

Tania Singer ( born December 8, 1969 in Munich) is a German neuroscientist and psychologist.

Life

From 1989 to 1992 Tania Singer studied psychology at the University of Marburg from 1992 to 1996, psychology and the post-graduate media consulting at the Technical University of Berlin. She completed her degree in psychology in 1996 with a diploma. Between 1996 and 2000 she worked as a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. After receiving her doctorate from the Free University of Berlin, she returned in 2000 to go back there.

Tania Singer is the daughter of the neurophysiologist Wolf Singer.

Research

Her research focus is the study of neural and hormonal mechanisms underlying human social behavior is based. Tania Singer is an expert in the field of empathy research. As a postdoc, she did research with Chris Frith at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience and Uta Frith of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London before moving to the University of Zurich in Switzerland as an assistant professor. From 2007 to 2009 she worked as a co-founder and co-director of the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research in Zurich and received in 2008 the founding Chair of Social Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich.

In 2010 she became director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig.

In particular, Singer explores the foundations of social cognition and social emotions such as empathy, compassion, envy and fairness, and further social decision making and communication. In addition, it examines the foundations for cooperation and altruistic behavior and their collapse under certain conditions. My interdisciplinary approach combines researchers neuroscience, psychology, bio- psychology, biology, economics, philosophy and anthropology. The aim is to better understand the influence of environmental factors on social behavior, the underlying cognitive and neural processes and ultimately the associated neurotransmitter systems, hormones and genes.

In a Science article Tania Singer in 2004 showed for the first time that regions in the brain that zugrundliegen 's own pain processing, are also activated when the subjects in the scanner only watched the pain of their partner. Two other studies show that the activation in brain regions that play a role in empathy, can be modulated by the fact that people are perceived as belonging to one's own group or not belonging, or by whether the other person act fairly or not.

Singer is a board member of the Mind and Life Institute and works with Matthieu Ricard together to explore the brain activity under different states of consciousness during meditation. In 2011 she performs a long-term training study at the Department of Social Neuroscience in Leipzig and a satellite laboratory in Berlin in order to provide evidence for the trainability and formability of socio -emotional and cognitive skills.

Awards

  • 2000: Otto Hahn Medal
  • 2011: Honorary Research Fellow at the Laboratory for the Study of Social and Neural Systems at the University of Zurich

Writings

  • Steinbeis, N., & Singer, T. ( 2013). The effects of social comparison on social emotions and behavior - falling on childhood: The ontogeny of envy and gloating predicts developmental changes in equity -related Decisions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2012.11.009.
  • Engen, H. G., & Singer, T. ( 2012). Empathy Circuits. Current Opinion in Neurobiology. doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2012.11.003.
  • Smallwood, J., Ruby, FJM, & Singer, T. ( 2012). Letting go of the present: Task unrelated thought is associated with Reduced delay discounting. Consciousness and Cognition, 22 ( 1), 1-7.
  • Przyrembel, M., Smallwood, J., Pauen, M., & Singer, T. ( 2012). Illuminating the dark matter of social neuroscience: Considering the Problem of social interaction from philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific perspectives. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6 ( 190).
  • Bernhardt, B. C., & Singer, T. ( 2012). The neural basis of empathy. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 35, 1-23.
  • Klimecki, OM, Leiberg, S., Lamb, C., & Singer, T. ( 2012). Functional neural plasticity and associated changes in positive affect, after compassion training. Cerebral Cortex. Advanced Online Publication. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhs142.
  • McCall, C., & Singer, T. ( 2012). The animal and human neuroendocrinology of social cognition, motivation and behavior. Nature Neuroscience. Review, 15 (5), 681-688.
  • Singer, T. ( 2012). The past, present and future of social neuroscience: A European perspective. NeuroImage.
  • Steinbeis, N., Bernhardt, BC, & Singer, T. ( 2012). Impulse control and underlying functions of the left DLPFC mediate age-related and age -independent individual differences in strategic social behavior. Neuron, 73 (5), 1040-1051.
  • Hein, G., Lamb, C., Brodbeck, C., & Singer, T. ( 2011). Skin conductance response to the pain of others predicts later costly helping. PLoS One, 6 ( 8).
  • Leiberg, S., Klimecki, O., & Singer, T. ( 2011). Short-term Training Increases compassion prosocial behavior in a newly developed prosocial game. PLoS One, 6 ( 3), e17798.
  • Lamb, C., Decety, J., & Singer, T. ( 2011). Meta - analytic evidence for common and distinct neural networks associated with Directly experienced pain and empathy for pain. NeuroImage, 54 ( 3), 2492-2502.
  • Bird, G., silanization, G., Brindley, R., White, P., Frith, U., & Singer T. (2010). Empathic brain responses in insula are modulated by levels of alexithymia but not autism. Brain, 133 ( 5), 1515-1525.
  • Hein, G., silanization, G., Preuschoff, K., Batson, CD, & Singer, T. ( 2010). Neural responses to the suffering of ingroup and outgroup members ' suffering predict individual differences in costly helping. Neuron, 68 (1), 149-160.
  • Singer, T., & Lamb, C. ( 2009). The social neuroscience of empathy. The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience 2009: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1156, 81-96.
  • Singer, T., Critchley, HD, & Preuschoff, K. ( 2009). A common role of insula in feelings, empathy and uncertainty. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13 ( 8), 334-340.
  • Singer, T., & Steinbeis, N. ( 2009). Differential roles of fairness- and compassion -based motivation for cooperation, defection, and punishment. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1167 ( 1), 41-50.
  • Singer, T. ( 2006). The neuronal basis and ontogeny of empathy and mind reading: Review of literature and implications for future research. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 30 ( 6), 855-863.
  • De Vignemont, F., & Singer, T. ( 2006). The empathic brain: how when shipped, and why? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10 ( 10), 435-441.
  • Singer, T., Seymour, B., O'Doherty, JP, Stephan, KE, Dolan, RJ, & Frith, CD ( 2006). Empathic neural responses are modulated by the Perceived fairness of others. Nature, 439, 466-469.
  • Singer, T., Seymour, B., O'Doherty, J., chewing, H., Dolan, RJ, & Frith, CD ( 2004). Empathy for pain Involves the affective but not sensory components of pain. Science, 303 (5661), 1157-1162.
  • Singer, T., Kiebel, SJ, Winston JS, Dolan, RJ, & Frith, CD ( 2004). Brain responses to the moral -acquired status of faces. Neuron, 41 (4), 653-662.
  • Singer, T., Verhaeghen, P., Ghisletta, P., Lindenberger, U., & Baltes, PB ( 2003). The fate of cognition in very old age: Six -year longitudinal in the Berlin Aging Study ( BASE). Psychology and Aging, 18 ( 2), 318-331.

Credentials

Wellcome Trust Fair and unfair play Altruism Science (journal) Integrated Authority File
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