Markus Quirin

Technical University of Munich

Interventions can foster personal growth. However, our understanding of the specific mechanisms for change and the types of interventions driving this growth process remains limited. In this study, we focused on emotion regulation ability as a potential mechanism. We examined the effects of an affirmation coaching intervention on changes in emotion...

Personality dynamics have recently revived interest as a subject of systematic investigation in personality science. Personality dynamics theories and research refer to nonstatic phenomena related to personality, such as the regulatory mechanisms and processes involved in the control of behavior and experience related to personality and their inter...

Current brain stimulation protocols for patients with bipolar disorders propose brain stimulation according to a model of opposing cerebral dominance in mania and bipolar depression by stimulating the right or left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during manic or depressive episodes, respectively. However, there is very little observational, rather t...

Personality researchers are increasingly interested in the dynamics of personality, that is, the proximal causal mechanisms underlying personality and behavior (Jayawickreme, Fleeson et al., 2021; Quirin et al., 2020). Here, we review the Zurich Model of Social Motivation (Bischof, 1985, 1993) concerning its potential to explain central aspects of...

Projection is the tendency to falsely attribute one's own feelings, motives, or intentions onto others. Despite its rich theoretical roots and great value in clinical practice, projection is underexplored in empirical research, which may be partly due to the ongoing challenge of adequately measuring projection. The present research shows that indiv...

The achievement motive refers to a preference for mastering challenges and competing with some standard of excellence. Along with affiliation and power motives, the achievement motive is typically considered to occur on the level of implicit versus explicit representations. Specifically, whereas implicit motives involve pictorial, emotional goal re...

Measuring affective experience is paramount to comprehend motivational processes as affect influences goal activation, intensity, and persistence. Nevertheless, affect self-reports come with various problems. The Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT; Quirin et al.,2009) was developed to avoid some of them, previously displayed adequat...

Humans are unconditionally confronted with social expectations and norms, up to a degree that they, or some of them, have a hard time recognizing what they actually want. This renders them susceptible for introjection, that is, to unwittingly or “unconsciously” mistake social expectations for self-chosen goals. Such introjections compromise an indi...

Philosophers and scientists have been puzzling over the potential antecedents and consequences of self-awareness or its relative absence since time immemorial. One major reason is the difficulty of identifying individuals’ actual needs, emotions, or goals and thus making statements about their level of self-awareness. Drawing on a “duality of mind”...

Several psychological approaches concern explaining the dynamic psychological processes and mechanisms that render personality a coherent whole, a “well-sounding concert.” Building upon personality systems interactions (PSI) theory, which explains personality functioning on the basis of interactions among cognitive and affective-motivational person...

Job burnout is a profound concern in modern society producing enormous financial and emotional costs for companies, health insurances, and the individual employee. In this study, we aimed at contributing to the literature on determinants of job burnout by investigating the indirect effects of implicit and explicit motive discrepancies (IED) through...

Individuals sometimes mistake others' expectations or imposed duties for self-chosen goals, even though they are not congruent with their emotional preferences or integrated values—a phenomenon coined as self-infiltration. Previous studies demonstrated that self-infiltration is more likely to occur in individuals with reduced self-regulation abilit...

This study focused on the criterion-related validity of the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT). The IPANAT is thought to be a measure of automatic activation of cognitive representations of affects. In this study, it was investigated whether implicit affect scores differentially predict ratings of facial emotions over and above exp...

Emotion regulation ability (ERA) enables individuals to disengage from negative stimuli. In this study, we investigated the role of ERA in the depression-related negativity bias. Seventy-four individuals with major depressive disorder and eighty-three nonclinical individuals were screened for depressiveness using the Beck Depression Inventory. ERA...

Psychological science has a hard time assessing affective processes of the individuals that they may not recognize or do not like to report on. Here, the authors used the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT; Quirin et al., 2009) to investigate whether reminders of an existential threat induce unpleasant implicit affect in soldiers wa...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.653458.].

We present two openly accessible databases related to the assessment of implicit motives using Picture Story Exercises (PSEs): (a) A database of 183,415 German sentences, nested in 26,389 stories provided by 4,570 participants, which have been coded by experts using Winter’s coding system for the implicit affiliation/intimacy, achievement, and powe...

Prefrontal asymmetry (PFA) has originally been referred to as “affective style” and is said to be associated with an individual’s personality. Therefore, previous research focused on finding a link between PFA and trait variables associated with affective processing, such as the behavioral activation and inhibition systems (BAS/BIS). However, recen...

To cope with changing and unfamiliar situations, individuals process novel information and integrate this information into internal models that were formed through previous experiences. We propose that the continuum of the degree to which people update these internal models when encountering novel information is central to personality dynamics. Per...

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag untersucht das Spannungsfeld zwischen Reflexion und Intuition, welches sich durch die hohe Komplexität von Beratungssituationen ergibt. Auf Grundlage der Theorie der Persönlichkeits-System-Interaktionen (PSI) unterscheiden wir eine niedere und eine höhere Form von Intuition, um einer undifferenzierten Verwendung des Begr...

Trait anxiety refers to the stable tendency to attend to threats and experience fears and worries across many situations. According to the widely noticed, pioneering investigation by Etkin et al. (2004) trait anxiety is strongly associated with reactivity in the right basolateral amygdala to non-conscious threat. Although this observation was based...

As self-reports of affect are limited in several regards, an indirect measure of affect, the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT; Quirin, Kazén, & Kuhl, 2009) has previously been developed and adapted to more than 10 languages (Quirin et al., 2018), showing adequate reliability and validity. Based on a sample of 242 Spanish adults (1...

Over the last few decades, most personality psychology research has been focused on assessing personality via scores on a few broad traits and investigating how these scores predict various behaviors and outcomes. This approach does not seek to explain the causal mechanisms underlying human personality and thus falls short of explaining the proxima...

Background: Self-report measures of affective states (i.e., explicit measure) underlie a variety of cognitive biasing factors. Therefore, measures for the indirect assessment of affect (i.e., implicit) have previously been developed, such as the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test. The IPANAT asks participants to make judgments about the de...

We present two openly accessible databases related to the assessment of implicit motives using Picture Story Exercises (PSEs): (a) A database of 183,415 German sentences, nested in 26,389 stories provided by 4,570 participants, which have been coded by experts using Winter’s coding system for the implicit affiliation/intimacy, achievement, and powe...

In this chapter, we present the theory of Personality Systems Interactions (PSI) as a meta framework for analyzing the functional architecture of human motivation and personality functioning. Section 1 delineates how PSI theory integrates various traditional motivation theories into seven distinct levels of human motivation and individual differ...

Objective Findings on the relationship between hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) activity and cognitive performance are inconsistent. We investigated whether personality in terms of emotion regulation abilities (ERA) moderates the relationship between stress-contingent HPA activity and accuracy of intuitive coherence judgments. Method ER...

Emotion regulation influences how and when we experience emotion, impacting our sense of self and well being. While previous brain research on emotion regulation has focused on gray matter correlates of emotion regulation, this study represents a first exploratory study on white matter integrity of brain networks of 'emotional approach' as a bottom...

Neuroimaging research provides evidence of grey matter changes in the prefrontal-limbic network in borderline personality disorder (BPD), yet research scarcely examines the white matter (WM) within this circuitry. The present study aimed to explore WM in prefrontal-limbic brain networks within BPD. Quantitative diffusion tensor imaging (DTI-MRI) me...

Background: Clinical depression is characterized by high levels of negative affect (NA) and attenuated positive affect (PA). Psychological and pharmacological treatments have been shown to reduce NA and to enhance PA in depressed patients. Following dual-process models, two types of affect can be distinguished: explicit (or self-reported) affect,...

Stress-related stimuli may be presented outside of awareness and may ultimately influence health by causing repetitive increases in physiological parameters, such as blood pressure (BP). In this study, we aimed to corroborate previous studies that demonstrated BP effects of subliminally presented stress-related stimuli. This would add evidence to t...

The Oxford Handbook of Human Motivation, Second Edition, addresses key advances made in the field since the previous edition, offering the latest insights from the top theorists and researchers of human motivation. The volume includes chapters on social learning theory, control theory, self-determination theory, terror management theory, and regula...

In everyday life, affective processes occur spontaneously and typically go along with an automatic activation of action tendencies and physiological responses. Because self-reports of affect are also known to be biased by various factors, including deficits in introspection or impression management strategies, an indirect measure, the Implicit Posi...

A functional approach of interacting neuropsychological systems

To cope with changing and unfamiliar situations, individuals process novel information and integrate this information into internal models that were formed through previous experiences. We propose that the degree to which people update these internal models is central to personality dynamics. Personality traits therefore arise at two ends of a cont...

Evidence shows that regular physical exercise reduces physiological reactivity to psychosocial stress. However, previous research mainly focused on the effect of endurance exercise, with only a few studies looking at the effect of resistance exercise. The current study tested whether individuals who regularly participate in either endurance or resi...

Cognitive theories of depression assume biased attention towards mood-congruent information as a central vulnerability and maintaining factor. Among other symptoms, depression is characterized by excessive negative affect (NA). Yet, little is known about the impact of naturally occurring NA on the allocation of attention to emotional information. T...

Learn about the science of motivating people! How can we motivate students, patients, employees, and athletes? What helps us achieve our goals, improve our well-being, and grow as human beings? These issues. which relate to motivation and volition, are familiar to everyone who faces the challenges of everyday life. This comprehensive book by leadin...

This chapter outlines the relationships between motivation and volition and their integration within Personality Systems Interaction (PSI) theory. The original focus on motivation in contemporary times in the USA (Atkinson, McClelland) and in Germany (Heckhausen) shifted towards volitional processes to explain human behavior and experience. We revi...

Although researchers agree that they have to distinguish self-concepts from the entity they refer to (i.e., the self), many still struggle with a clear definition and measure of the self. How well people know themselves (i.e., how much access they have to their implicit self) differs greatly between and within individuals. PSI theory (Kuhl, 2000, 2...

This is the preface to the edited volume 'Why people do the things they do: Integrative perspectives on motivation and volition. A Festschrift in honor of Julius Kuhl'

Different lines of research suggest that individuals differ in accessing self-referential information, that is, to know who they are, what they think, want, need, or feel, and that this construct is positively associated with emotion regulation, adaptive functioning, well-being, and meaning in life. We developed a brief scale of five items, the Sel...

Unilateral hand contraction typically activates the contralateral hemisphere and has led to changes in psychological states and performances in previous research. Based on a right hemisphere model of the implicit self, we hypothesized and found that left hand contraction increases momentary levels of implicit self-esteem (Studies 1 and 2) and impli...

Aims: It has been argued that borderline personality disorder (BPD) is related to an enhanced affective reactivity. According to findings from research based on self-report, individuals with BPD develop and feel more negative and less positive affect than healthy individuals. Implicit affectivity, which can be measured using indirect assessment me...

Several lines of research in animals and humans converge on the distinction between two basic large-scale brain networks of selfregulation. An externally-guided reactive control network responds to immediate emergency challenges and is thus metabolically prioritized by the organism because of the need to survive. Its application is suited under unp...

Engagement, motivation, and persistence are usually associated with positive outcomes. However, too much of it can overtax our psychophysiological system and put it at risk. On the basis of a neuro-dynamic personality and self-regulation model, we explain the neurobehavioral mechanisms presumably underlying engagement and how engagement, when overt...

Previous research has demonstrated that negative affect influences attentional processes. Here, we investigate whether pre-experimental negative affect predicts a hypervigilant neural response as indicated by increased event-related potential amplitudes in response to neutral and positive visual stimuli. In our study, seventeen male participants fi...

Self-report measures of affect come with a number of difficulties that can be circumvented by using indirect measurement procedures. The Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT) is a recently developed measure of automatic activation of representations of affective states and traits that draws on participants’ ratings of the extent to wh...

Social evaluation is a potent stressor and consistently leads to an activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system. Here, we investigated whether individual differences in action orientation influence the relationship between the cortisol response to social-evaluative threat and relative left frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha asy...

Over the last decades, frontal alpha asym- metries observed during resting state periods of several minutes have been used as a marker of affective–motiva- tional states. To date, there is no evidence that alpha asym- metries can be observed in response to brief affective–moti- vational stimuli, as typically presented in event-related designs. As w...

Objective: Implicit self-esteem, which is based on associative learning processes, is considered to be constituted earlier in life than explicit, verbalized self-esteem. While depressed individuals report negative explicit self-esteem, research has predominantly demonstrated equivalent levels of implicit self-esteem of depressed and healthy indivi...

Corresponding author at: VU University Amsterdam, Department of Clinical Psychology, van der Boechorststraat 1, NL-1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

We propose that the fundamental mechanism underlying resilience is the integration of novel or negative experiences into internal schemata. This process requires a switch from reactive to predictive control modes, from the brain's salience network to the default mode network. Reappraisal, among other mechanisms, is suggested to facilitate this proc...

Previous research has revealed affect-congruity effects for the recognition of affects from faces. Little is known about the impact of affect on the perception of body language. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship of implicit (versus explicit) affectivity with the recognition of briefly presented affective body expressi...

Fully functioning persons are characterized by a unity in thought, emotion, and action that amounts to “being someone” or having “an integrated self.” Psychologists have typically treated the integrated self as merely a descriptive term that summarizes significant behavioral achievements. In the present article, the authors seek to place the integr...

Fully functioning persons are characterized by a unity in thought, emotion, and action that amounts to “being someone” or having “an integrated self”. Psychologists have typically treated the integrated self as merely a descriptive term that summarizes significant behavioral achievements. In the present article, the authors seek to place the integr...

The social psychological literature on threat and defense is fragmented. Groups of researchers have focused on distinct threats, such as mortality, uncertainty, uncontrollability, or meaninglessness, and have developed separate theoretical frameworks for explaining the observed reactions. In the current chapter, we attempt to integrate old and new...

It is unclear whether reflective awareness of emotions is related to extent and intensity of implicit affective reactions. The present study is the first to investigate automatic brain reactivity to emotional stimuli as a function of trait emotional awareness. To assess emotional awareness the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) was administ...

According to recent insights, humans might not be aware of a substantial part of their cognitive stress representations while these still have prolonged physiological effects. ‘Unconscious stress’ can be measured by implicit affect (IA) tests. It was shown that IA predicts physiological stress responses, in fact better than explicit (‘conscious’) a...

This article reviews, for the first time in the Spanish Language, a recent personality integrative theory, which has generated and continues to generate a great amount of research, not only in Germany but internationally: The Personality Systems Interactions (PSI) theory (Kuhl, 2000, 2001). In this paper the main elements of the theory are describe...

Mortality salience (MS) strengthens cultural values but individuals might differ in whether this process operates at a superficial, explicit level only or also at a profound, implicit level. Two studies investigated whether explicit and implicit attitudes toward Muslims after an MS induction vary as a function of threat-related action orientation (...

In the present paper, we will apply the predictive and reactive control systems (PARCS) theory as a framework that integrates competing theories of neural substrates of awareness by describing the “default mode network” (DMN) and anterior insula (AI) as parts of two different behavioral and homeostatic control systems. The DMN, a network that becom...

Objective Both theoretical approaches and empirical evidence suggest that negative affect fosters analytic processing whereas positive affect fosters holistic processing, but these effects are inconsistent. We aim to show that (a) differences in affect-regulation abilities (“action orientation”) and (b) implicit more so than self-reported affect as...

Self-report measures for the assessment of trait or state affect are typically biased by social desirability or self-delusion. The present work provides an overview of research using a recently developed measure of automatic activation of cognitive representation of affective experiences, the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT). In...

This article presents for the first time in Spanish a recent integrative theory of personality, which has generated and continues to generate a great amount of research, not only in Germany but internationally: The Personality Systems Interactions (PSI) theory (Kuhl, 2000, 2001). In this paper the main elements of the theory are described: The seve...

Previous research on relationships between affective-motivational traits and hemispheric asymmetries in resting frontal alpha band power as measured by electroencephalography (EEG) focused on individual differences in motivational direction (approach vs. withdrawal) or behavioral activation. The present study investigated resting frontal alpha asym...

Alexithymia is a personality dimension that involves both cognitive deficits, including difficulties in recognizing, describing, and distinguishing feelings from bodily sensations of emotional arousal, and affective deficits, including difficulties in emotionalizing and fantasizing. Alexithymia has been the focus of considerable research. However,...

Previous studies investigating affective reactions to pictures that elicit a specific effect have mainly focused on the dimensions valence and arousal. Using an event-related picture-viewing paradigm in electroencephalography, we investigated whether erotica - that is appetitive, evolutionarily relevant stimuli - have effects on early stages of att...

Previous research demonstrated that affiliation primes facilitate intuitive thought (Kuhl & Kazén, 2008). We investigated whether trait tendencies toward affiliation also predict intuitive thought. Thirty-nine students filled in the operant motive test for the assessment of social motives, a variant of the Thematic Apperception Test, and correspond...

Power versus affiliation motivations refer to two different strivings relevant in the context of social relationships. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine neural structures involved in power versus affiliation motivation based on an individual differences approach. Seventeen participants provided self-reports of power...

Although we agree that a constructivist approach to emotional experience makes sense, we propose that implicit (visceromotor and somatomotor) emotional processes are dissociable from explicit (attention and reflection) emotional processes, and that the conscious experience of emotion requires an integration of the two. Assessments of implicit emoti...

Cortisol has been found to increase in response to social evaluative threat. However, little is known about the cortisol response to induced anger. Thus, in the present study, we investigated the cortisol response to anger induction and its effects on performance and explicit memory. A variant of the Montreal Stress Imaging Task (MIST; Dedovic et a...

Oxytocin facilitates stress regulation but little is known about individual differences in this effect. The present study investigates whether the effect of intranasal oxytocin on stress-contingent cortisol release differs between individuals with high vs. low emotional regulation abilities (ERA). In a double-blind study thirty-six healthy male stu...

Emotions have long been seen as counteracting rational thought, but over the last decades, they have been viewed as adaptive processes to optimize human (but also animal) behaviour. In particular, positive affect appears to be a functional aspect of emotions closely related to that. We argue that positive affect as understood in Kuhl's PSI model of...

Upregulation of implicit positive affect (PA) can act as a mechanism to deal with negative affect. Two studies tracked temporal changes in positive and negative affect (NA) assessed by self-report and the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT; Quirin, Kazen, & Kuhl, 2009). Study 1 observed the predicted increases in implicit PA after e...

A considerable body of evidence derived from terror management theory indicates that the awareness of mortality represents a potent psychological threat engendering various forms of psychological defense. However, extant research has yet to examine the neurological correlates of cognitions about one’s inevitable death. The present study thus invest...

Psychological approaches often conceptualize "free will" as self-determined decision-making. However, the functional mechanisms potentially underlying volitional freedom or its limitations have barely been elaborated. Starting from a functional definition of volition, we illustrate how personality systems interactions (PSI) theory may contribute to...

What are the cognitive and affective prerequisites of adaptive behaviour and what can be learnt from human adaptive behaviour for modelling artificial systems? To answer these questions, this talk will present an information-processing architecture that we consider the minimum requirement for a functional analysis of personality. The architecture c...

Past work indicates that persistent stress leads people to misremember assigned tasks as self-selected, a phenomenon known as self-infiltration [Baumann, N., & Kuhl, J. (2003). Self-infiltration: Confusing assigned tasks as self-selected in memory. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29, 487–497; Kazén, M., Baumann, N., & Kuhl, J. (2003). S...

Recent findings associate attachment insecurity (assessed as levels of attachment anxiety and avoidance) with poor emotion regulation. In turn, emotion regulation has been shown to be associated with hippocampus (HC) functioning and structure. Clinical disorders such as depression and PTSD, which have been previously associated with attachment inse...

This article introduces an instrument for the indirect assessment of positive and negative affect, the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT). This test draws on participant ratings of the extent to which artificial words subjectively convey various emotions. Factor analyses of these ratings yielded two independent factors that can be...

Self-report measures assess mental processes or representations that are consciously accessible. In contrast, implicit measures assess automatic processes that often operate outside awareness. Whereas self-report measures have often failed to show expected relationships with endocrine stress responses, little effort has been made to relate implicit...

This paper presents a recently developed method for the indirect assessment of emotional traits and states, the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT). In the IPANAT individuals make judgments about the degree to which artificial words sound like mood adjectives (e.g., happy or helpless). It is proposed that cognitive representations o...

1 Introducción La teoría PSI (Kuhl, 2001) resultó del empeño en integrar teorías diferentes de la motivación (p.ej. la teoría del control de la acción, la teoría de la autodeterminación y la evaluación cognitiva; la teoría de la autorregulación; la teoría del estímulo-y-reacción, la teoría de la defensa de los instintos; y los enfoques históricos d...

Based on the framework of Personality Systems Interactions theory, this article addresses the functional mechanisms by which positive affect influences motivational and self-regulatory determinants of health-relevant behavior on all elementary level of processing. Research encompassing experimental procedures such as the Stroop task will be present...

Early life experiences can influence hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis regulation in adulthood, in both animals and humans. In humans, they have also been shown to influence adult attachment styles. However, the relationship between adult attachment styles and HPA axis regulation is largely unexplored. The present study investigated the rel...

Socio-economic decisions are commonly explained by rational cost vs. benefit considerations, whereas person variables have not usually been considered. The present study aims at investigating the degree to which dispositional power motivation and affective states predict socio-economic decisions. The power motive was assessed both indirectly and di...

Several studies have revealed that women report stronger feelings of disgust than men (Gross & Levenson, 1995; Schienle, Schäfer, Stark, Walter, & Vaitl, 2005). However, the extent to which this gender difference also influences physiological disgust responses remains an open question. In Experiment 1, 54 female and 41 male participants were expose...

Zusammenfassung. Die Befriedigung grundlegender psychischer Bedurfnisse ist eine wichtige Voraussetzung fur subjektives Wohlbefinden und psychische Gesundheit. In der Theorie der Personlichkeits-System-Interaktionen (PSI) wird angenommen, dass negativer Affekt den Zugriff auf integrierte Reprasentationen von eigenen Bedurfnissen und Handlungsoption...