Research & Expertise

World Brain Day is observed on July 22 every year. The HSE News Service asked researchers of the HSE Centre for Cognition and Decision Making about the impact of neurological conditions on mental health, using cervical dystonia (CD) as an example. Ainur Ragimova, Research Fellow of the Centre, discusses current studies into cervical dystonia at HSE University and worldwide and explains how patients' quality of life can be improved by proper treatment.

The SNAD team, an international network of researchers including Matvey Kornilov, Associate Professor of the HSE University Faculty of Physics, has discovered 11 previously undetected space anomalies, seven of which are supernova candidates. The researchers analysed digital images of the Northern sky taken in 2018 using a k-D tree to detect anomalies through the ‘nearest neighbour’ method. Machine learning algorithms helped automate the search. The paper is published in New Astronomy.

According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 5% of the world's adults are affected by depression. Since treatment options are now available for all stages of depression, better awareness of its nature and causes could help in dealing with this disorder promptly and effectively. The following fact sheet from IQ.HSE summarizes several recent research findings on depression, including its contributing factors and manifestations in today's digital society.

The Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) quality assessment and journal selection working group has updated its list of journals based on the results of expert review and monitoring of the quality of publications. The expert review examined such criteria as the scientific level of the journal, its relevance, its consistency, the level of the scientists on its editorial board, the journal’s adherence to publishing and scientific ethics, and the quality of its formatting.

Tatiana Sysoeva and Svetlana Yaroshevskaya, researchers from the Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education, have found out that mistakes in texts play only a minor role in people’s perceptions of the intelligence of the texts’ writers. The content, form of presentation, and other aspects are much more important. The results of the study are published in the latest issue of Psychology, an HSE journal.

HSE is presenting A Society of Unequal Opportunities: The Social Structure of Modern Russia, a new book whose authors use an original model to paint a collective portrait of Russians in the last decade. IQ.HSE asked Svetlana Mareeva, co-author of the monograph and Director of the HSE Institute of Social Policy’s Centre for Stratification Studies, about the highlights and trends discussed in the book and whether they tend to change in particularly challenging times.

Researchers from the HSE Center for Language and Brain have identified previously unknown age-related changes in brain activity during the perception of auditory information in a group of children aged 7–12 years. The researchers used magnetoencephalography (MEG), an ultra-precise method of brain activity recording. The results obtained can be used to explore the impairments in language comprehension in children with autism. The study was published in the Human Brain Mapping.

South Korean TV series feature a whole typology of ghosts. Alexandra Tarasova, visiting lecturer at the HSE School of Media, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Cultural Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, spoke about all main types, their origin, features and behaviour of ghosts at the first open seminar to be held as part of the ‘Media Culture of East Asia: Discourses, Industries, Fandoms’ project.

As a rule, people look immediately and automatically in the same direction when their companion or someone nearby suddenly turns their attention. And it seems rather obvious. In fact, joint attention is an ability that helps people in many areas, such as communication, collaborative activities, etc. But sometimes a person can be deprived of it. We analyse this phenomenon — what is joint visual attention, cases in which this mental function can be disrupted, and what remains a mystery for scientists — in IQ Card Index with the help of HSE researchers Tatiana Shevel and Maria Falikman.

Researchers of the HSE International Laboratory of Statistical and Computational Genomics together with their international colleagues have proposed a new statistical method for analysing population admixture that makes it possible to determine the time and number of migration waves more accurately. The history of Colombians and Mexicans (descendants of Native Americans, Spaniards and Africans) features two episodes of admixture that occurred about 350 and 200 years ago for Mexicans and 400 and 100 years ago for Colombians. The results were published in the Plos Genetics journal.