Team | Staff | Chair of Sport Psychology

Hard Facts

Work
Since 2021: Senior researcher in the Sport Psychology Lab, University of Konstanz, Germany

2019 - 2021: Senior researcher at the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria

2018 – 2019: Researcher at the Department of Empirical Educational Research, University of Konstanz, Germany

2015 – 2018: Researcher in the DFG Research Unit “Psychoeconomics”, University of Konstanz, Germany

Education
2015: Dr. rer. nat. at the University of Konstanz Germany

2011: B. Sc. Economics at the University of Konstanz Germany

2010: B. Sc. Psychology at the University of Konstanz Germany

My Research & Me
In my research, I focus on motivation, effort, and performance in both laboratory and real-life settings. I’m particularly interested in understanding why we often fall short of our goals, and what we might do about that. As an endurance runner, I’m quite convinced that studying self-control and boredom can provide key insights into these questions. Consequently, understanding how these two sensations complement each other in guiding our experiences and behaviors is currently my main research interest.

Bachelor & Masterthesis
If you're a student looking to explore my research topics, please get in touch so that we can discuss available topics. Depending on your study program and background, your thesis can be in German or English.

Boredom: We are interested in characterizing boredom in sports and exercise contexts. How does boredom arise, how does it develop over time, and how does it affect effort and performance? We address these questions in lab experiments and survey studies.
Emotions: Sports and exercise elicit numerous emotions, such as enjoyment, anxiety, anger, hope, or pride. However, little is known about differences between these emotions and their consequences for activity and performance. We try to change this in lab and survey studies.
Effort: Many everyday behaviors require mental and physical effort to varying degrees. While effort is often seen as costly and aversive, recent research suggests that (some) people might (sometimes) actually like effort. We conduct lab and survey studies to learn more about this.
Self-control: When it comes to attaining difficult goals, people use a variety of self-control strategies. We want to better understand the differences between these strategies and how people decide which strategy to use under which circumstances. This involves survey studies.

Publications
Three major publications

Bieleke, M., Wolff, W., & Bertrams, A. (in press). On the virtues of fragile self-control: Boredom as a catalyst for adaptive behavior regulation. In Bieleke, M., Wolff, W., & Martarelli, C. (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of boredom. Routledge.
Bieleke, M., Keller, L., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (2021). If-then planning. European Review of Social Psychology, 32(1), 88-122. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2020.1808936
Bieleke, M., Gogol, K., Goetz, T., Daniels, L., & Pekrun, R. (2021). The AEQ-S: A short version of the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 65, 101940. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101940

Full publication list: click here.