The Team
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Tschacher
University of Bern
Bolligenstrasse 111
3060 Bern, CH
Bio
Born in Stuttgart, Germany, studied psychology at Tübingen University where he received his Ph.D. in 1990. Psychotherapy training in systemic therapy at the Institute of Family Therapy, Munich. Habilitation in psychology and Venia legendi 1996 at University of Bern, Switzerland, professorship in 2002. He currently works at the University Hospital of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, where he founded the department of psychotherapy research, and currently is head of the Experimental Psychology group. His main interests are in quantitative psychotherapy research, time-series methods and experimental psychopathology, with an emphasis on dynamical systems, complexity science, embodied cognition, and phenomena of cognitive self-organization. He previously acted as president of the European chapter of the Society for Psychotherapy Research (SPR). He is member of the board of directors of the Society for Mind-Matter Research and organizer of the series of ‘Herbstakademie’ conferences on systems theory in psychology.
Research Statement
My research interests concerning music and the concert setting focus on processes of synchronization, resonance and entrainment with the presented music on the side of its recipients. I am also interested in the function of the affordances of the entire context of the concert, and in music appreciation and immersion experiences of listeners. Such processes can be viewed as examples of embodied and situated cognition. Methodologically, it is a promising approach to analyze fine-grained process data monitored in the context of the concert hall, and then determine the synchonies between recipients in the audience and between recipients and the music / musicians. Several methods have become available for this approach, such as synchrony computation controlled by surrogate data as well as conventional multivariate time series analyses (vector autoregression). The expected patterns in the time series further need to be associated with self-reports of listeners. As yet, it is not known which kind of nonverbal data – physiological, body movement, facial expression – are linked in which way with musical stimuli.
