Prof. Dr. Christine Michel has been Professor of Early Childhood Development in the Inclusive Childhood Education program since December 2022.
After her diploma studies in psychology at the University of Heidelberg, she received her doctorate at the Chair of Developmental and Biological Psychology at the University of Heidelberg in 2016. In her doctoral thesis, she explored (neural) attentional processes in early childhood and how infants learn from others. As a postdoctoral researcher, she moved to the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig in 2016 and investigated neural correlates of social interactions and learning processes, including interactions between mothers and their babies, in the working unit "Early Social Cognitions". In 2017, she completed the theoretical module for advanced training in behavior-oriented parent-child psychotherapy at the Center for Psychological Psychotherapy in Heidelberg.
In 2020, she moved to the University of Leipzig to teach and conduct research as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Early Childhood Development and Culture. Here, she ventured from thinking to feeling in the DFG-funded research project she acquired, exploring emotional reactions and mechanisms at work in infants and children in social interactions and helping situations.
Prof. Dr. Michel is a member of the German Psychological Society (DGPs) and the International Congress of Infant Studies and an ad-hoc reviewer for Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Infancy and Child Development, among others.
Research Interests
Social cognition in early childhood
Affective mechanisms of social interaction & information processing
Method development for the study of early childhood cognition
