• Cognitive approaches to emotion
• The psychology of surprise
• History of emotion psychology
• Evolutionary psychology of emotion

After acquiring a PhD in Psychology at the University of Salzburg, Austria, I spent a year as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of California, Los Angeles with Bernard Weiner. Subsequently, I was a co-worker of Margret Baltes at the Free University Berlin; a Lecturer in Psychology in Wolfgang Schönpflug's research group, also at the Free University Berlin; a Research Stipendiary of the Thyssen Foundation; and a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Bielefeld, where I worked in Wulf-Uwe Meyer's research team and acquired my "Habilitation" degree in Psychology in 1994. After several years as a stand-in professor for Social Psychology in Bielefeld, I became Professor for General Psychology in the areas of emotion and motivation at the University of Greifswald in 2002 and held this position until my retirement in Sept 2022. Since then, I am a retired professor at the Institute of Psychology, University of Greifswald, where I continue to do theoretical and empirical research on emotion and motivation.

• Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie (German Association for Psychology, DGPs)
• International Society for Research on Emotions (ISRE)
• Gesellschaft für Kognitionswissenschaft (Cognitive Science Association)

• British Journal of Social Psychology (Consulting Editor, 1995-2000)
• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Consulting Editor, 1997-1998)
• Emotion (Consulting Editor, 2004 to 2010)
• Cognition and Emotion (Consulting Editor, 2000 to present)
• Experimental Psychology (Consulting Editor, 2001 to present)
• Emotion Review (Associate Editor, 2014 to present)