HSE Scholars Speak at Conference on Applied Psychology in Singapore

On June 29 – 30, 2017, an international Singapore Conference on Applied Psychology (SCAP2017) took place in Singapore. Psychologists from 14 countries took part in the event. A paper by Natalia Antonova, Associate Professor at HSE, and Vladislav Gorbov, HSE graduate, received the Best Paper Award.

The conference discussed various problems in applied psychology. The speakers presented new approaches to research, as well as papers on applied problems in psychology, including organizational, clinical, and extreme psychology.

For example, the following topics were among those covered by papers on organizational psychology: relating entrepreneurial, professional and leader profiles to work-related outcomes; the impact of employee engagement on customer experience and performance; and the role of boundaryless and protean career attitudes on work behaviors. The problems of leadership, entrepreneurship, and employee engagement proved the most popular in this area.

A great deal of attention was paid to extreme psychology, likely in part as a result of particular aspects of recent events in the East-Asian region. For example, a model of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after the earthquake in South Korea was presented. The researchers showed that trauma-related appraisals and internalized stigma have a mediating effect on PTSD. The conference also paid a lot of attention to gender identity, as well as gender stereotypes and prejudices.

Russia was represented by the Higher School of Economics and Omsk State University. On behalf of HSE, Natalia Antonova, Associate Professor at the HSE Department of Organizational Psychology and lecturer on the MA Programme in Business Psychology, and Vladislav Gorbov, a graduate of that programme, spoke at the conference. They presented a joint study ‘Music accompaniment as a factor in the psychological effectiveness of advertising’. The paper received the Best Paper Award at the conference. Natalia Antonova also chaired one of the conference sessions.

Participation in the conference gave HSE scholars an opportunity to meet colleagues from around the world, and, importantly, the chance to note the similarity in the challenges faced by psychologists in different countries and the approaches to them, despite cultural, racial, and religious differences.