Tag "research projects"

Happiness and harmony are the two mantras of most commercials. "Buy this stuff, and it'll make you happier," they promise. Yet they do not always succeed in increasing sales. One of the reasons may be that advertisers and their audiences have different views on happiness. While the former tend to reduce happiness to hedonism, pleasure-seeking and satisfying one’s desires here and now, the latter often refuse to limit happiness to simple enjoyment. 

From November 30  to December 1, 2017, the international conference 'Urban youth cultures: solidarity, creativity, activism' will take place as part of the project 'Creative Fields of Interethnic Cooperation and Youth Cultural Scenes of Russian Cities' (Russian Science Foundation, 2015-2017), implemented by the Center for Youth Studies (CYS) at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg. The research of the CYS always produces interesting results, so we turned to the director of the Center Professor Elena Omelchenko to find out more about the upcoming event.

A new study by HSE researchers has uncovered a new brain mechanism that generates cognitive dissonance – a mental discomfort experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs or values, or experiences difficulties in making decisions. The results of the study have been published in the paper ‘Open Access Neural Mechanisms of Cognitive Dissonance (Revised): an EEG Study’in The Journal of Neuroscience. 

A comparative cross-cultural study conducted by the HSE International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation has found that Russians tend to be as open with their friends as Americans, but unlike Americans, Russians prefer to hide their happiness when talking to strangers or government officials. These findings were published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology in the paper Russians Inhibit the Expression of Happiness to Strangers: Testing a Display Rule Model.

Traditionally, postgraduate studies have been considered a school of teaching and research and a step towards an academic career. Today, however, many postgraduate students see their future outside academia and plan a corporate career instead. According to Ivan Gruzdev and Evgeniy Terentev, only 56% of postgraduate students plan a career within the academic environment.

According to HSE researchers, men with a high 2D:4D ratio (i.e. those whose index finger is longer than their ring finger) tend to be better educated. These findings are presented in the paper «2D: 4D and lifetime educational outcomes: Evidence from the Russian RLMS survey» in Personality and Individual Differences.

According to Glasgow and HSE/Northumbria researchers, repetition of non-verbs as well as verbs can boost the effect of syntactic priming, i.e. the likelihood of people reproducing the structure of the utterance they have just heard.

Why did Trump win the election? Who votes for right-wing xenophobic populist parties? How do we account for Brexit? Ronald Inglehart, Academic Supervisor of HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, traces the change in public opinion to rising inequality and the resulting cultural xenophobic backlash and prevailing feeling of insecurity.

The International Symposium on Economics and Sociology of Education is being held on April 11-14 as part of the XVIII April Conference on Economic and Social Development. On April 11, experts discussed the dynamics of educational outcomes in Russia and beyond (based on data culled from international projects to monitor the quality of education) at a roundtable session organized by the World Bank.

Immigrants accounted for 6.8% of the European population in 1990 and had reached 10.3% by 2015. The growing number of 'outsiders' has caused a change of attitudes in the host country. While most Europeans are fairly tolerant, not everyone is prepared to 'share their turf' with ethnic minorities, according to Galina Monusova's study Public Attitudes towards Migrants in Europe.