In December 2023, Dr Laura Moradbakhti defended her dissertation with the title "Towards the human desire for autonomy, competence, and relatedness: Can AI assistants meet basic psychological needs?". In her research, she developed a scale to measure the degree of fulfilment of the three basic psychological needs in human-machine interaction and analysed their significance for the acceptance of new technologies, also taking gender aspects into account.

As "wearable robots", exoskeletons are increasingly being used to ensure that employees remain fit for work in industrial environments. In a series of empirical field and laboratory studies, Dr Sandra Maria Siedl investigated how exoskeletons affect the self-concept of their users, and under what conditions workers are willing to use exoskeletons on a permanent basis. The final defence of her dissertation "Wearable Robots at Work: A psychological perspective on occupational exoskeletons" took place in January 2024 at the Open Innovation Center on the JKU campus.

Dr Simon Schreibelmayr was the third person to successfully complete his doctorate at the LIT Robopsychology Lab at the end of January. In his dissertation entitled "Talking machines: Empirical investigations into user perceptions of AI voice assistants", he investigated synthetic, human-like sounding voices of robots and AI systems and analysed their effects on people's willingness to use and trust the technology.

The three doctoral theses were primarily supervised by Univ.-Prof. Martina Mara and co-supervised by JKU colleagues Assoc. Prof. Barbara Stiglbauer, Assoc. Prof. Nicole Kronberger and Assoc. Prof. Bernad Batinic.

The LIT Robopsychology Lab congratulates its successful graduates Laura, Sandra and Simon on their doctorates!