About Me
Sophie T. Koerner, PhD candidate & early career researcher
I work mostly with Large Language Models & Visual Language Models in the
context of personality and differential psychology. Please reach out via
koerners@uni-mainz.de for collaborations or
research inquiries. I am open to discussing potential new collaborations.
Publications
- Schödel, R., Altgassen, E., Back, M. D., Buss, M., Bühner, M., Etzel, J. M., Goecke, B., Grinschgl, S., Grunenberg, E., Hätscher, O., Hommel, B. E., Kordsmeyer, T. L., Körner, S., Kuper, N., Mata, R., Mussel, P., Petrasch, A., Rammstedt, B., Rau, R., Short, C. A., Sindermann, C., Stachl, C., Stasielowicz, L., Sust, L., Thelen, J., Weiss, S., Wilhelm, O., Wulff, D., Wrzus, C., Ziegler, M. (2026). Künstliche Intelligenz und Individuelle Unterschiede: Eine Perspektive der Fachgruppe Differentielle Psychologie, Persönlichkeitspsychologie und Psychologische Diagnostik. Psychologische Rundschau, 77(3), 149–155. https://doi.org/10.1026/0033-3042/a000766 click to view
- Poster presentation: DGPs Conference in Differential psychology, personality psychology & psychological diagnostics, September 2025, Kassel.
- Poster presentation: 1st International Human-AI Interaction Workshop, March 2025, Freiburg im Breisgau, hosted by Prof. Markus Langer. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.34415067
Current Position
PhD candidate (supervisor Prof. Boris Egloff) and Research Fellow at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz - Institute of Psychology, Department of Personality and Differential Psychology
Research Interests
-
LLMs and Psychology:
- LLM/VLM performance in reading and interpreting social and behavioral cues - compared to human performance
- Neuropsychological Tasks for AI systems: exploring how artificial intelligence systems process and represent knowledge
- How human are LLMs? What can semantic networks and psycholinguistic clusters tell us about the human cognition and experience?
- How much 'humanity' and human-like behavior do people attribute to AI systems? Do contemporary AI companions make the Turing Test irrelevant?
- Human-AI Interaction - how to ensure responsible and reasonable use of AI in psychological research and practice
- Human-AI Communication - how does AI application usage impact decision-making, language production, interpersonal relationships?
- User Privacy and Security in AI Applications - how can we protect sensitive personal information when relying on commercial AI systems?
- Artificial Suffering and Consciousness - problems of Synthetic Phenomenology and Embodied Cognition
- Embodied Cognition & phenomenology in Humans (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) vs. embodied cognition & Extended Mind in AI Systems (Clark&Chalmers)
- Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC, Pennebaker) in personality psychology
- Narrative Construction Theory
- Memory and knowledge representation: how can somatic, semantic, symbolic, dissociative and affective memory inform present neurobiological and socio-psychological frameworks on human memory?
- How can survivor epistemology inform Critical Theory and Empirical Research?
- Social Motivated Blindness
- Sexism in personality perception concerning the Dark Triad/Tetrad (Narcissism, Machiavellianism, Psychopathy, Sadism)
- Mechanisms of Institutional Abuse, The perfect victim narrative, and the role of sexism in abuse disclosure
- Legal proceedings involving testimony; triage of social, familial and economic motifs
- Advantages and pitfalls of social media in survivor advocacy
- The curious case of Anna Freud
- Shere Hite, Sexism and Scarlet Woman archetype/Mary Magdalene ambiguity
- Norma Jean Baker
- The madonna whore complex
- Camille Claudel and defiance
- Absorption and spiritual transcendence (Luhrmann)
- Magical Thinking, Hallucinations and NLP