Psychological Intervention Reduced Stress during COVID Lockdown
Resilience and well-being in difficult times can be developed via online interventions in the workplace. An international team of researchers from France, the UK, and Russia (with the participation of researchers from the HSE International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation) studied the effectiveness of SPARK Resilience, a programme for developing resilience, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of the study were published in the PLOS One journal.
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HSE Psychologists Propose New Approach to Building Soft Skills
Researchers at HSE's School of Psychology have used the findings of studies into creativity and multilingualism to develop 'Plurilingual Intercultural Creative Keys’ (PICK), a new programme which integrates both aspects into the teaching and learning process. The study results have been published in Psychology. Journal of the Higher School of Economics.
Card File: Plurilingual Creativity
Fluency in foreign languages has multiple advantages in terms of cognitive abilities, communication skills, cultural awareness, and career advancement. But can bilingualism and plurilingualism (knowledge of multiple languages and related cultural contexts) contribute to creative thinking and one's ability to generate new ideas? Studies have shown that linguistic, intercultural and creative competencies are interrelated, and their synergy can give rise to plurilingual creativity. The following overview is based on several papers by Anatoly Kharkhurin, Director of the HSE Laboratory for Linguistic, Intercultural and Creative Competencies.
Readers Found to Rely on Word Spelling Rather Than Sound in Reading
Skilled readers are known to extract information not only from the word they are looking at but from the one directly following it. This phenomenon is called pre-processing. Researchers from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain analysed the eye movements of primary school children and adults during silent reading and found both groups to rely on orthographic, rather than phonological, information in pre-processing an upcoming word. The study has been published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
Light Breezes Improve Moods of Social Media Users
Sergey Smetanin, Research Fellow of the HSE Graduate School of Business, conducted a large-scale analysis to examine the impact of weather conditions on the sentiments expressed by users of the Odnoklassniki (OK) social network. The findings have been published in PeerJ Computer Science. This is the first study of its kind in Russia.
HSE Psychologists Examine Baby Duck Syndrome in Digital Interface Users
Researchers of the HSE Laboratory for Cognitive Psychology of Digital Interfaces Nadezhda Glebko and Elena Gorbunova have examined the so-called ‘Baby Duck Syndrome’—the tendency among digital product users to prefer the the old version of an interface over a new one. The authors compare this phenomenon to similar cognitive biases such as the mere-exposure effect, the endowment effect, and the status quo bias. Their findings are published in Psikhologicheskie Issledovaniya [Psychological Studies].
Meta-analysis Links Benevolent Sexism to Violence against Women
HSE researchers Elena Agadullina, Andrey Lovakov, Maryana Balezina and Olga Gulevich examined the potential links between different types of sexism – hostile and benevolent – and the likelihood of supporting or practicing violence against women. The authors conducted a meta-analysis of academic literature to find out how sexist attitudes can contribute to violence.
Study Explains Blood Donation Motivations
An international team of researchers from the HSE International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation, the Russian National Research Centre for Hematology, and a number of American universities examined the motivations of regular blood donors.
Senior Scholars’ High Achievements Rely on Strong Personality and Favourable Environment
According to researchers of the Moscow City Pedagogical University (MSPU) and HSE University Vladimir Postavnev, Irina Postavneva, Vadim Peskov and Alexey Dvoinin, certain personality traits can help older scholars stay productive and creative for a long time. The study findings are published in Acta Biomedica Scientifica.
HSE University Researchers Adapt Emotional Contagion Scale to Russian Language
Scholars from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience have translated the Emotional Contagion Scale into Russian and validated it on Russian-speaking participants. It was the first study of how people unconsciously ‘catch’ other people’s emotions using a Russian sample. The results of the survey, which involved more than 500 respondents, demonstrate that women are more inclined to imitate emotions of others than men. The study was published inFrontiers in Psychology.
‘Our Experience Shows That Motivation and Patience Can Achieve the Impossible’
Psychologists Sergey Andreev and Egor Surdeykin are both graduates of HSE University. Together with other graduates of the university, they created a project to provide supplementary education for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The programme for middle- and high-school students covers such subjects as computer science, programming, and mathematics.