Geneva Motivation Lab

The Geneva Motivation Lab is led by Prof. Guido H.E. Gendolla.

Research fields

Established in 2003, the Geneva Motivation Lab (GML) is directed by Prof. Guido Gendolla and comprises currently three postdoctoral researchers, four PhD students, and several research assistants. The lab's research addresses basic processes of motivation and emotion as well as applied aspects of motivation and self-regulation. The lab’s core competence is the psychology of effort mobilization. Most of its research uses psychophysiological and behavioral-experimental methods.

Based on Gendolla’s recent implicit-affect-primes-effort model, Guido Gendolla, Athina Zafeiriou, and Mathieu Chatelain conduct research financed by a Swiss National Science Funds (SNF) grant on the impact of implicitly processed affective stimuli, like facial expressions of emotions and implicit age stereotypes on effort mobilization in cognitive tasks. Moreover, Guido Gendolla and Nicolas Silvestrini work on boundary conditions of automatic effort mobilization. Kerstin Brinkmann examines together with her PhD student Jessica Franzen in another SNF project reward and punishment sensibility in depression and its impact on effort-related cardiovascular activity. Financed by an Ambizione grant of the SNF, Nicolas Silvestrini conducts research on the link between cognitive control and pain using experimental, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging methods. In a fourth SNF grant awarded to Michael Richter, he and his PhD student Joséphine Stanek examine the determinants of energy investment using handgrip tasks.

In addition to their own research activities, Guido Gendolla, Kerstin Brinkmann, Nicolas Silvestrini, and Michael Richter contribute to the field of motivation and emotion psychology by serving as associate editors of the international peer-review journals International Journal of Psychophysiology, Motivation and Emotion, and the Journal of European Psychology Students, as well as members of other journals’ editorial boards. Moreover, they are actively contributing to the work of the Society for the Study of Motivation (SSM) and bring together researchers from different universities and different countries in various conference symposia.

The lab currently contributes with nine courses to the Bachelor of Science in Psychology and the Master of Science in Psychology of the University of Geneva. The courses cover a wide range of topics including motivation, learning, the relationship between motivation and emotion, pain, effort, and personality, and psychological methods. Furthermore, the lab members currently supervise several internships and thesis projects of Bachelor and Master students.