Her research uses a range of methods including functional magnetic resonance imaging, virtual reality environments, biological markers such as cortisol, and behavioral studies.

Singer founded and is principal investigator of the ReSource Project, a large-scale one-year longitudinal mental training study co-funded by the European Research Council since 2008.

[11] This is a longitudinal investigation of the long-term effects of different types of mental training (ranging from practices based on mindfulness and compassion to perspective-taking) on well-being, brain plasticity, prosocial behavior, stress reduction, and health in more than 300 participants using 90 different measurements.

[1] In a paper published in the journal Science in 2004, Singer showed that some pain-sensitive regions of the brain are also activated when volunteers experience their partners feeling pain.

[14] In follow-up studies, published in the journals Nature and Neuron, she showed that empathy-related brain responses are influenced by the perceived fairness of others and by whether a target belonged to an ingroup or outgroup.

Whereas empathy is associated with negative emotions and can lead to burn-out if it turns into empathic distress, compassion comes with positive feelings of care and warmth and can boost resilience in the face of suffering.

[19] Difficulties were brought up by team members during a meeting with the scientific advisory board in February 2017 as a part of the institute’s official evaluation.

The press release of the Max Planck Society acknowledged that partial anonymity of the accusations was not lifted which “made it more difficult for the director to respond to the allegations".

In order to avoid a further escalation of the situation, Singer resigned from her director position in agreement with the Max Planck Society .