Prof. Dr. Petra Schmid
Prof. Dr. Petra Schmid
Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics
Additional information
Research area
Petra Schmid’s research focuses on the effects of social power on effective and efficient goal pursuit. She also has a longstanding interest in studying the factors that influence person perception. Her methods include laboratory experiments with behavioral and psychophysiological assessments, as well as survey studies with working professionals.
Petra Schmid is Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics (D-MTEC). She earned her PhD in Work Psychology from the University of Neuchatel in 2009, where she stayed for two more years as a postdoctoral fellow to work on a project funded by the NCCR Affective Sciences. She then went on to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Psychology (Social Neuroscience Lab) at New York University from 2012 to 2015 (two of those years were funded by the SNSF Fellowship for Prospective Researchers). She joined the faculty of ETH Zurich in 2015 as a tenure-track assistant professor.
Publications
Willardt R., & Schmid, P. C. (accepted). The threat of powerlessness: The consequences for affect and (social) cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Straub, L. M., Lin, E., Tremonte-Freydefont, L., & Schmid, P. C. (2023). Individuals' power determines how they respond to positive versus negative performance feedback. European Journal Social Psychology, 53, 1402-1420.
Gloor, J., Van Quaquebeke, N., Seong, M., Schmid, P. C., & Hildebrand, C. (2023). Friend or Fiend? Disentangling Upward Humor’s (De)Stabilizing Effects on Hierarchies. Current Opinion in Psychology, 101667.
Azevedo, F., Pavlovic, T., Rego, G. G. d., Ay, F. C., Gjoneska, B., Etienne, T., ... Sampaio, W. M. (2022). Social and moral psychology of COVID-19 across 69 countries. Scientific Data.
Crouzevialle, M., Schmid, P. C., & Trope, Y. (2022). Beliefs about abstraction: Low-level and high-level construal signal different lay theories. Journal of Exeprimental Psychology:General, 152, 1351-1367.
Pavlovic, T., Azevedo, F., De, K., Maglic, M., Donnelly Kehoe, P. A., Payan-Gomez, C., ... van Bavel, J. J. (2022). Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning. PNAS Nexus, 1.
Lin, E., & Schmid, P. C. (2022). Does power increase attention to rewards? Examining the brain and behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 101, 104332.
Mammassis, C. S., & Schmid, P. C. (2022). Individuals' power persistence in teams: A study examining the effects of individuals' competence, uncooperative behavior and team performance in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Frontiers in Psychology.
Van Bavel, J. J., Cichocka, A., Capraro, V., Sjastad, H., Nezlek, J. B., Alfano, M., ... Hudecek, M. F. C. (2022). National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic. Nature Communications, 13, 517.
Willardt, R., Jutzi, C. A., Schmid, P. C., & Jonas, E. (2022). From threats to defenses: Theoretical and statistical suggestions to investigate and explain the psychological phenomena of COVID-19. In M. K. Miller (Ed.), The Social Science of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Call to Action for Researchers (pp. #-#). Oxford University Press.
Schmid, P. C. (2021). The effort investment theory of power. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 52, 145-157. (Special Issue: Towards a Second Generation of Power Theories: Considering the Complexities and Dynamics of Social Power)
Schmid, P. C., & Amodio, D. M. (2021). The effects of high and low power on the visual encoding of faces. Social Neuroscience, 16, 293-306.
Lin, E., Freydefont, L., & Schmid, P. C. (2021). Psychological power alters cognitive efficiency. Psychophysiology, 58, e13773.
Willardt, R.*, Jutzi, C. A.*, Schmid, P. C., & Jonas, E. (2020). Between conspiracy beliefs, ingroup bias, and system justification: How people use defense strategies to cope with the threat of COVID-19. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. *shared first authorship
Schmid, P. C. (2020). Power reduces the goal gradient effect. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 90, e104003.
Lin, E., & Schmid, P. C. (2020). The experience of power could facilitate healthy food consumption. Social Cognition, 38, 197-233.
Mammassis, C. S., & Schmid, P. C. (2018). The role of power asymmetry and paradoxical leadership in software development team agility. In K. Sund, R. Galavan, & S. Brusoni (Eds.), Cognition and Innovation (pp.125-139). Emerald.
Schmid, P. C., Hackel, L. M., & Amodio, D. M. (2018). Power effects on instrumental learning: Evidence from the brain and behavior. Motivation Science, 4, 206-226.
Schmid, P. C. (2018). Less power, greater conflict: Low power increases the experience of conflict in multiple goal settings. Social Psychology, 49, 47-62.
Schmid, P. C., Hackel, L. M., Jasperse, L., & Amodio, D. M. (2018). Frontal cortical effects on feedback processing and reinforcement learning: Relation of EEG asymmetry with the feedback-related negativity and behavior. Psychophysiology, 55.
Schmid, P. C., & Amodio, D. M. (2017). Power effects on implicit prejudice and stereotyping: The role of ingroup vs. outgroup face processing. Social Neuroscience, 12, 218-231.
Schmid, P. C. (2016). Situational influences on interpersonal accuracy. In J. A. Hall, M. Schmid Mast, & T. V. West (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Perceiving Others Accurately (pp. 230-252). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Schmid, P. C., Kleiman, T., & Amodio, D. M. (2015). Power effects on cognitive control: Turning conflict into action. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144, 655-663.
Schmid, P. C., Kleiman, T., & Amodio, D. M. (2015). Neural mechanisms of proactive and reactive cognitive control in social anxiety. Cortex, 70, 137-145.
Schmid, P. C., Schmid Mast, M., & Mast, F. W. (2015). Prioritizing – the task strategy of the powerful? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68, 2097-2105.
Schmid, P. C., & Schmid Mast, M. (2013). Power increases performance in a social evaluation situation as a result of decreased stress responses. European Journal of Social Psychology, 43, 201-211.
Bombari, D., Schmid, P. C., Schmid Mast, M., Birri, S., Mast, F. W., & Lobmaier, J. S. (2013). Emotion recognition: The role of featural and configural face information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66, 2426-2442.
Grubert, A. K., Schmid, P. C., & Krummenacher, J. (2013). Happy with a difference, unhappy with an identity: Observers’ affective state determines processing depth in visual search. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 75, 41-52.
Schmid, P. C., Schmid Mast, M., Bombari, D., Mast, F. W., & Lobmaier, J. S. (2011). How mood states affect information processing during facial emotion recognition: An eye tracking study. Swiss Journal of Psychology, Special Issue: Social Cues in Faces, 70, 223-231.
Schmid, P. C., Schmid Mast, M., Bombari, D., & Mast, F. W. (2011). Gender effects in information processing on a nonverbal decoding task. Sex Roles, 65, 102-107.
Schmid, P. C., & Schmid Mast, M. (2010). Mood effects on emotion recognition. Motivation and Emotion, 34, 288-292.
Sauer, J., Darioly, A., Schmid Mast, M., Schmid, P. C., & Bischof, N. (2010). A multi-level approach of evaluating crew resource management training: A lab-based study examining communication skills as a function of team congruence. Ergonomics, 35, 1311-1324.
Schmid Mast, M., Hall, J. A., & Schmid, P. C. (2010). Wanting to be boss and wanting to be subordinate: Effects on interaction performance. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 40, 458–472.