Thomas Singer
Biographic Data
| ID | 1057007 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Singer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Singer |
| SIGNATURE | SINGER T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Society |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4438-5374 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Cultural Complexes in the Cultural Unconscious
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the basic concept of the cultural complex. I will present the theory and give an example of how the theory can be applied. At the core of this notion is the belief that the Jungian tradition has an important contribution to make about the collective psyche and its role in shaping social, cultural, and political life—and that this collective psyche is both connected to and separate from the individual ps…
Reducing Loneliness through the Power of Practicing Together
Loneliness has become a pressing topic, especially among young adults and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a randomized controlled trial with 253 healthy adults, we evaluated the differential efficacy of two 10-week app-delivered mental training programs: one based on classic mindfulness and one on an innovative partner-based socio-emotional practice (Affect Dyad). We show that the partner-based training resulted in greater reductions in loneline…
Cultural Complexes in Australia
Tend‐and‐befriend and rally around the flag effects during the Covid‐19 pandemic
The COVID‐19 pandemic and its lockdowns have uniquely challenged our social lives. The current study seeks to explore changes in social cohesion on various psychological dimensions (trust, belonging, social interaction, social engagement) and social system levels (family, friends, neighbours, institutions, nations), assessed in 3522 Berlin residents before, during, and after the first lockdown, and four times during the second lockdown. The first…
A Portal to the Imaginal
Thomas Singer takes readers on a tour through the imaginal worlds created by Steve Coleman and a team of volunteers dedicated to keeping the spirit of the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, California, alive during COVID-19 pandemic. In the windows filled with puppets and in the exhibit of rooms created on the mezzanine of the theatre, visitors were invited to create their own stories. The author, struck by the connections to Ingmar Bergman’s f…
Exploring the Structure and Interrelations of Time-Stable Psychological Resilience, Psychological Vulnerability, and Social Cohesion
The current study explores the relationship between three constructs of high relevance in the context of adversities which have, however, not yet been systematically linked on the level of psychological dispositions: psychological vulnerability, psychological resilience, and social cohesion. Based on previous theoretical and empirical frameworks, a collection of trait questionnaires was assessed in a Berlin sample of 3,522 subjects between 18 and…
Coping with the Covid-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns have posed unique and severe challenges to our global society. To gain an integrative understanding of pervasive social and mental health impacts in 3522 Berlin residents aged 18 to 65, we systematically investigated the structural and temporal relationship between a variety of psychological indicators of vulnerability, resilience and social cohesion before, during and after the first lockdown in Ger…
Contemplative Mental Training Reduces Hair Glucocorticoid Levels in a Randomized Clinical Trial
OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate the effect of regular contemplative mental training on endocrine and psychological indices of long-term stress. METHODS: An open-label efficacy trial that comprised three distinct 3-month long modules targeting attention and interoception, socioaffective, or sociocognitive abilities through dyadic exercises and secularized meditation practices was conducted with healthy adults. Participants underwent the…
Differential benefits of mental training types for attention, compassion, and theory of mind
Mindfulness- and, more generally, meditation-based interventions increasingly gain popularity, effectively promoting cognitive, affective, and social capacities. It is unclear, however, if different types of practice have the same or specific effects on mental functioning. Here we tested three consecutive three-month training modules aimed at cultivating either attention, socio-affective qualities (such as compassion), or socio-cognitive skills (…
Cultural Complexes in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan
"Thomas Singer presents a unique collection which examines cultural complexes in four parts of East Asia: China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. From ancestor worship in China to the 'kimchi bitch' meme of South Korea, the wounded feminine in Taiwan and hikikomori in Japan, the contributors take a Jungian lens to aspects of culture and shine a light on themes including gender, archetypes, consciousness, social roles, and political relations"
The analyst as a citizen in the world
Beginning with a 'big dream' from almost fifty years ago, this paper tracks movement back and forth from an inner/individual adaptation to life to outer/collective adaptations through various stages of a life's journey. The rhythm between more inner orientation at one stage gives way to more outer adaptation at another stage and vice versa. This same movement can be paralleled by an exclusive emphasis on analysis at one stage and more of a mixtur…
On the interaction of social affect and cognition
Empathy, compassion and Theory of Mind (ToM) are central topics in social psychology and neuroscience. While empathy enables the sharing of others’ emotions and may result in empathic distress, a maladaptive form of empathic resonance, or compassion, a feeling of warmth and concern for others, ToM provides cognitive understanding of someone else's thoughts or intentions. These socio-affective and socio-cognitive routes to understanding others are…
The Structure of Human Prosociality Revisited
In a recent publication, we employed factor analyses to integrate 14 measures of prosocial behavior, proposing four subcomponents of human prosociality: altruistically motivated, norm motivated, strategically motivated, and self-reported prosocial behavior. However, the reported confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) yielded standardized regression weights above 1, resulting from an improper solution (Heywood cases), which precludes straightforward i…
Experiencing meditation – Evidence for differential effects of three contemplative mental practices in micro-phenomenological interviews
Socioaffective versus sociocognitive mental trainings differentially affect emotion regulation strategies
A variety of contemplative practices putatively improves the ability to deal with difficult emotions. However, it is unclear how these different types of mental training differentially affect the use of different emotion regulation strategies. We addressed this question in a 9-month longitudinal study in which participants ( N = 332) took part in three distinct 3-month mental training modules cultivating attentional (the Presence module), socioco…
Author Correction
Who am I? Differential effects of three contemplative mental trainings on emotional word use in self-descriptions
In a large-scale longitudinal mental training study, we examined whether learning different contemplative practices can change the emotional content of people’s self-concept as assessed through emotional word use in the Twenty Statement Test. During three 3-month training modules, participants learned distinct practices targeting attentional, socio-affective, or socio-cognitive capacities, or were re-tested. Emotional word use specifically increa…
Preschool children and chimpanzees incur costs to watch punishment of antisocial others
The Structure of Human Prosociality
Prosocial behavior is crucial for functioning societies. However, its reliable scientific assessment and the understanding of its underlying structure are still a challenge. We integrated 14 paradigms from diverse disciplines to identify reliable and method-independent subcomponents of human prosociality; 329 participants performed game theoretical paradigms and hypothetical distribution tasks commonly used in behavioral economics and completed i…
Physiophenomenology in retrospect
Empathy and compassion
Functional Neural Plasticity and Associated Changes in Positive Affect After Compassion Training
The development of social emotions such as compassion is crucial for successful social interactions as well as for the maintenance of mental and physical health, especially when confronted with distressing life events. Yet, the neural mechanisms supporting the training of these emotions are poorly understood. To study affective plasticity in healthy adults, we measured functional neural and subjective responses to witnessing the distress of other…
Letting go of the present
Response to Kevin Lu’s “Can individual psychology explain social phenomena? An appraisal of the theory of cultural complexes
The Neural Basis of Empathy
Empathy—the ability to share the feelings of others—is fundamental to our emotional and social lives. Previous human imaging studies focusing on empathy for others' pain have consistently shown activations in regions also involved in the direct pain experience, particularly anterior insula and anterior and midcingulate cortex. These findings suggest that empathy is, in part, based on shared representations for firsthand and vicarious experiences …
Preschool children and chimpanzees incur costs to watch punishment of antisocial others
The transcendent function and cultural complexes
Longitudinal Selectivity in Aging Populations
The authors examined 3.7-year selectivity in the Berlin Aging Study by comparing the T1 parent sample (N = 516) with the T3 sample (N = 206). Selectivity was partitioned into a mortality-associated component, reflecting the degree to which individuals still alive at T3 (T3 survivors, N = 313) differ from the T1 parent sample (N = 516) from which they originated, and an experimental component, reflecting the degree to which the T3 sample (N = 206)…
A Jungian approach to understanding ‘us vs them’ dynamics
Plasticity and the ageing mind
Genetic interventions will improve the genome, but they will never make a human being out of the human animal Using research on the ageing mind, support is offered for the concept of bio-cultural sciences. The bio-cultural sciences highlight the notion that human behaviour is the joint and co-constructive expression of biological–genetic and cultural–societal processes and conditions. The genome determines the ontogeny of the brain; however, so d…
The Cultural Complex and Archetypal Defenses of the Collective Spirit
Tend‐and‐befriend and rally around the flag effects during the Covid‐19 pandemic
The COVID‐19 pandemic and its lockdowns have uniquely challenged our social lives. The current study seeks to explore changes in social cohesion on various psychological dimensions (trust, belonging, social interaction, social engagement) and social system levels (family, friends, neighbours, institutions, nations), assessed in 3522 Berlin residents before, during, and after the first lockdown, and four times during the second lockdown. The first…
Response to Kevin Lu’s “Can individual psychology explain social phenomena? An appraisal of the theory of cultural complexes
Plasticity and the ageing mind
Genetic interventions will improve the genome, but they will never make a human being out of the human animal Using research on the ageing mind, support is offered for the concept of bio-cultural sciences. The bio-cultural sciences highlight the notion that human behaviour is the joint and co-constructive expression of biological–genetic and cultural–societal processes and conditions. The genome determines the ontogeny of the brain; however, so d…
Longitudinal Selectivity in Aging Populations
The authors examined 3.7-year selectivity in the Berlin Aging Study by comparing the T1 parent sample (N = 516) with the T3 sample (N = 206). Selectivity was partitioned into a mortality-associated component, reflecting the degree to which individuals still alive at T3 (T3 survivors, N = 313) differ from the T1 parent sample (N = 516) from which they originated, and an experimental component, reflecting the degree to which the T3 sample (N = 206)…
The Cultural Complex and Archetypal Defenses of the Collective Spirit
Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but not Sensory Components of Pain
Our ability to have an experience of another's pain is characteristic of empathy. Using functional imaging, we assessed brain activity while volunteers experienced a painful stimulus and compared it to that elicited when they observed a signal indicating that their loved one—present in the same room—was receiving a similar pain stimulus. Bilateral anterior insula (AI), rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), brainstem, and cerebellum were activa…
Cultural Complex
The Cultural Complex
The neuronal basis and ontogeny of empathy and mind reading
Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others
Humans have the capacity to empathize with the pain of others, but we don't empathize in all circumstances. An experiment on human volunteers playing an economic game looked at the conditional nature of our sympathy, and the results show that fairness of social interactions is key to the empathic neural response. Both men and women empathized with the pain of cooperative people. But if people are selfish, empathic responses were absent, at least …
The empathic brain
Effects of oxytocin and prosocial behavior on brain responses to direct and vicariously experienced pain
In this study, we tested the validity of 2 popular assumptions about empathy: (a) empathy can be enhanced by oxytocin, a neuropeptide known to be crucial in affiliative behavior, and (b) individual differences in prosocial behavior are positively associated with empathic brain responses. To do so, we measured brain activity in a double-blind placebo-controlled study of 20 male participants either receiving painful stimulation to their own hand (s…
The Social Neuroscience of Empathy
The phenomenon of empathy entails the ability to share the affective experiences of others. In recent years social neuroscience made considerable progress in revealing the mechanisms that enable a person to feel what another is feeling. The present review provides an in‐depth and critical discussion of these findings. Consistent evidence shows that sharing the emotions of others is associated with activation in neural structures that are also act…
A Jungian approach to understanding ‘us vs them’ dynamics
Neural Responses to Ingroup and Outgroup Members' Suffering Predict Individual Differences in Costly Helping
Little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms underlying prosocial decisions and how they are modulated by social factors such as perceived group membership. The present study investigates the neural processes preceding the willingness to engage in costly helping toward ingroup and outgroup members. Soccer fans witnessed a fan of their favorite team (ingroup member) or of a rival team (outgroup member) experience pain. They were subsequent…
The transcendent function and cultural complexes
Short-Term Compassion Training Increases Prosocial Behavior in a Newly Developed Prosocial Game
Compassion has been suggested to be a strong motivator for prosocial behavior. While research has demonstrated that compassion training has positive effects on mood and health, we do not know whether it also leads to increases in prosocial behavior. We addressed this question in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we introduce a new prosocial game, the Zurich Prosocial Game (ZPG), which allows for repeated, ecologically valid assessment of prosocia…
Meta-analytic evidence for common and distinct neural networks associated with directly experienced pain and empathy for pain
The role of emotions for moral judgments depends on the type of emotion and moral scenario
Emotions seem to play a critical role in moral judgment. However, the way in which emotions exert their influence on moral judgments is still poorly understood. This study proposes a novel theoretical approach suggesting that emotions influence moral judgments based on their motivational dimension. We tested the effects of two types of induced emotions with equal valence but with different motivational implications (anger and disgust), and four t…
The Neural Basis of Empathy
Empathy—the ability to share the feelings of others—is fundamental to our emotional and social lives. Previous human imaging studies focusing on empathy for others' pain have consistently shown activations in regions also involved in the direct pain experience, particularly anterior insula and anterior and midcingulate cortex. These findings suggest that empathy is, in part, based on shared representations for firsthand and vicarious experiences …
The Meshugana Complex
“The Meshugana Complex” examines some of the “craziness” of being both Jungian and Jewish. It begins with personal biographical anecdotes showing there are as many ways of being Jewish as there are of being Jungian. The paper then explores group identity as being mediated by complexes that are built up over time, both within the group’s view of itself and of how other groups perceive it. Jewish Jungians carry multiple cultural complexes as part o…
Functional Neural Plasticity and Associated Changes in Positive Affect After Compassion Training
The development of social emotions such as compassion is crucial for successful social interactions as well as for the maintenance of mental and physical health, especially when confronted with distressing life events. Yet, the neural mechanisms supporting the training of these emotions are poorly understood. To study affective plasticity in healthy adults, we measured functional neural and subjective responses to witnessing the distress of other…
Letting go of the present
Response to Kevin Lu’s “Can individual psychology explain social phenomena? An appraisal of the theory of cultural complexes
Empathy and compassion
Physiophenomenology in retrospect
The Structure of Human Prosociality
Prosocial behavior is crucial for functioning societies. However, its reliable scientific assessment and the understanding of its underlying structure are still a challenge. We integrated 14 paradigms from diverse disciplines to identify reliable and method-independent subcomponents of human prosociality; 329 participants performed game theoretical paradigms and hypothetical distribution tasks commonly used in behavioral economics and completed i…
Psychology (35 works) · Social Psychology (25 works) · Cognitive psychology (17 works) · Developmental psychology (15 works) · Neuroscience (14 works) · Cognition (13 works) · Empathy (13 works) · Clinical Psychology (9 works) · Medicine (9 works) · Prosocial behavior (9 works)