EFPSA

Supervisors & research teams topics

 
ESS team are sincerely sorry to inform you that due to health reason, Susanne Schweizer is not able to be the ESS supervisor for this year. We send our regards to Susanne and cross our fingers for her. This also indicates for students who have applied ESS, and would like to amend your application due to this news, please do so till 25th May. After this date, we will take your initial choice as your final decision. If you have any queries, please email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it   We apologise the inconvenience this has caused you.
 

1. Stanislava Yordanova Stoyanova - "Attitudes towards and social representation of young people"
 

Abstract: This research group will study the attitudes towards young people in the participants’ countries using Fishbein’s and Ajzen model that requires the generation of a questionnaire measuring the beliefs about the young people (stereotypes) and their estimations as positive or negative. Such a questionnaire will be created during the summer school, but the research will be carried out after the end of the summer school for a period of at least three months. The respondents will be young people on the one hand and other age groups on the other hand in order to be made a comparison between their attitudes. Later, the data will be processed and compared between the participating countries and age groups.

Another method that will be used in the study is content analysis of the articles in the print and/or on-line media concerning the young people’s image, civic position and activities in the society reflected by the chosen media. The coding matrix for this analysis will be worked during the summer school and the participants will be instructed how to code the relevant information in it. A preliminary check of the reliability of the coding will be done. The coding process of the real information from the articles in printed and on-line media will be realized after the end of the summer school for a period of at least one month. The qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the coded information will be carried out for a next period of at least half a year.

The results from the study of the attitudes towards young people will be compared to the results from the content analysis about the social representations of young people’s civic position and activities. At least one paper presenting the results will be prepared during the last three months of the year after the end of EFPSA Summer School. The authors will be the participants in the research group.

 

2. Kai Ruggeri - "Learning in divided schools and societies"
 

Abstract: Conflict, economic hardship, and social division have led to many issues in providing quality education for young people.  One commonly seen effect of this is post-conflict division of ethnic groups, such as in Northern Ireland, the West Bank, and former Yugoslavian states.  However, an ongoing dilemma found in these regions are divided school systems where entirely different curricula are taught and often in incongruous dialects or suggestive rhetoric.  These differences have the potential of further separating young generations and as a consequence, exacerbating already tense social problems.  In order to find out what impact this method of schooling may have, it is necessary to find out how students are learning about their environment, history, and opportunities.  Are groups taught entirely unique topics about recent conflict?  Is innaccurate information presented in specific situations so as to keep ethnicities separated?  Who is responsible for creating these standards?  Most importantly, what is the potential influence these differences have on how young people learn?  To test this, an extensive literature review on the impact of divided education will be necessary.  From that, it will be determined exactly what type of research will benefit these issues, or if there is even a problem to address.  Considerable focus will be placed on European instances of division, as they are most heavily covered in recent literature.  The key focus of any work will be to see if there is significant difference in how students in divided schools learn about the world in respect to their ethnic counterparts.  If so, an appropriate measure to demonstrate this empirically must be developed.   

 

3. Muazzez Merve Yuksel - "Emotion processing in schizophrenia and attitudes towards schizophrenics: theoretical reflections from social cognition perspective"
 

Abstract: Social cognition includes a multidimensional mental process underlying social interactions such as perceiving and interpreting social information, generating responses to the intentions, dispositions, and behaviours of others.  That’s to say, it is “people thinking about other people and themselves” (Pennetal, 2008). The research areas of the social cognition field are emotion processes, social perception, social knowledge, theory of mind, and attribution bias. Despite the fact that those variables cannot be considered apart from each other and the boundaries between them are not always absolute, the definition of the components may help to comprise the big picture. The first component is emotion processing which refers the ability to infer emotional information from facial expressions, vocal inflections or some combination of these. According to Salovey’s model (1997), there are four emotion processes which are identifying emotions, facilitating emotions, understanding emotions and managing emotions. The second component of the social cognition is the theory of mind typically that involves the ability to infer intentions, dispositions, and beliefs of others (Baron 2001, Frith 1992). Social perception is another component which indicates one’s ability to identify social roles, societal rules, and social context (Toomey, 2002; Penn, 2002). Social knowledge, also called social schema, refers to awareness of the roles, rules, and goals that characterize social situations and guide social interactions (Corrigan, 1992; 1993). Attribution bias or style reflects how people typically infer the causes of particular positive and negative events (Zullow, 1988).

Literature indicate that patients with schizophrenia show significant and stable mentalizing impairments related to social cognition those are not moderated by IQ level, gender, or age. The studies reviewed the following features occur in schizophrenia that display deficits compared with nonclinical control participants. These deficits are more severe relative to individuals with other psychiatric disorders such as depressive disorder (unless psychotic features are present).The greatest deficits are evident in the perception of negative emotion (compared with positive emotions). The deficit in emotion perception is stable over time, although evidence suggests that individuals in remission may outperform individuals in an acute phase of the disorder. Individuals with schizophrenia perform worse trying to ‘‘read between the lines’’ (ie, identifying what a given individual is thinking or feeling) but are less impaired on more concrete social judgments (ie, identifying what a person is wearing or doing). Finally, many individual with schizophrenia display restricted visual scanning and spend less time examining salient facial features during emotion perception tasks. 
 

The first part of this research covers the relationship between social cognition and schizophrenia, in other words how the people with schizophrenia understand the world. The second part of the study is about how the people without schizophrenia understand the people with schizophrenia. What’s the role of mental dynamics such as prejudice which are the basic subjects of social cognition lead to discrimination and misunderstood? Therefore, there are two major components to investigate: Deficits in social cognition in people who experience  schizophrenia (social cognition in people with schizophrenia) and role of components of social cognition in normal population in developing attitudes towards people with schizophrenia related to stigma & discrimination.
 

Data collection process and tolls will be discussed during the group sessions. Members of this work group are expected to have basic knowledge on schizophrenia, basic multivariate statistics and a huge smile. During the first sessions participants will be introduced with different aspects of schizophrenia through some movies and research methods for this topics will be covered by reading list and a cramming course of research techniques.

 

4. Michał Andrzej Golombek - "Evolution of beauty difference between attractiveness estimation of person on photos and in reality"

Abstract:
Beauty, attractiveness, what do we know about it? Already in 43 B.C famous poet Ovid wrote „Let no rude goat find his way beneath your arms…”Also in the British Museum we can find a woman’s cosmetics box, dating about 1400 B.C. Kings’ painters were sent to visit their future matrimonial prospects and brought back portraits of them and Elizabeth I refused to marry anyone she couldn’t see. Nowadays 1,484 tubes of lipstick are sold every minute (Etcoff 2000), The value of the cosmetic market in Poland (2009) was worth 20 billion  PLN (to compare, the value of budget for science in Poland 2009 was 4,6 billion PLN). Conclusion - beauty was, is and will be required. And what does the psychology science know about them? We assign more desirable features to attractive people (Dion 1970). Attractive people are seen as more sociable, dominant, intelligent (Feingold 1992). Attractive students get better grades at school (Singer 1964). And they are also less likely to be convicted for a crime, even if, they get lower sentence. (Efran 1974) Conclusion? The same - beauty is required! We can use several techniques to improve our own beauty, for example: cosmetic make-up, plastic surgery, and also in nonpersonal contact photo retouch. In this study the major question is about the difference between estimation of person on photos and in reality. Why do I assume that difference will appear? Firstly because of the knowledge the conclusion above, and secondly of the availability heuristic (Kahneman, Tversky 1972) The real person that I see will have more influence on my judgment, that a person on the picture. She is available for me, she can talk, even hurt me. I can also see her, she fells more real for me. The study, if possible will include measurement of time reaction. (Time reaction as a measure of the confidence of the response-  Maison 2004). What can this study give to the science? Much studies in psychology are made with use of picture or live people. If there is a difference between this two we should be more careful conducting them. It should be known that this is more a methodology and technical study.

 

5. Maria Ioannou - "How do context characteristics influence prejudice towards traditional out-groups?"
 

Abstract:
When studying out-group prejudice, a set of variables which can account for it come into play. The majority of studies in the area of intergroup relations have traditionally tried to pin down a number of individual/social factors that predicted different levels of prejudice. Such variables, are quantity and quality of inter-group contact (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006 for a review), intergroup anxiety (Stephan & Stephan, 1985), social dominance orientation (Whitley, 1999), social idenity (Hogg, 1999) etc. Less is known however on how social/societal factors can influence out-group prejudice in different national contexts. A number of possible discriminating social/societal factors between different societies could be for example in-group norms about the out-group, opportunity for contact, status of out-group compared to in-group, existence/absence of intergroup conflict etc.
 

An international research group will allow for a cross-national research in which the role of social/societal factors on out-group prejudice can be identified and subsequently tested. Although prejudice can be measured in a number of ways (Esses, Haddock, & Zanna, 1993) within the context of this study, prejudice will be measured as stereotypes (see Osgood, Suci, Tannenbaum,. 1957) that in-groupers (ie each country’s nationals) hold for the respective out-group (ie. an out-group which had been/ or is viewed as a competing out-group to the in-group). Measures of percieved out-group variability (see Wolsko, Park, Judd, Bachelor, 2003) and other measures that tap on the cognitive dimension of prejudice can be added. It is expected that some of the contextual factors will be related to higher prejudice (demonstrated by more negative stereotypes and by less percieved out-group variability). More specifically, less opportunity for contact, intractable nature of intergroup conflict, and more negative in-group out-group norms will be factors that will lead to more negative stereotypes and less percieved out-group variability.

 

6. Ajda Erjavec - "Conflict resolution styles and attributes towards dispute resolution methods"
 

Abstract: Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methods are becoming very present in the western public sphere and they represent a fascinating social phenomena, where subjective factors also seem to play an relevant role. We will conduct a qualitative and quantitative research on personal conflict resolution styles and attitudes towards juridication, arbitration, mediation and negotiation. First participants will fill out the attitude questionnaires, then the questionaire about their patterns of conflict behavior. They will then form a focus group where certain aspects such as familiarity of approaches, personal prejudices against individual approaches, first- and second-hand experience with these methods, etc. will be discussed. After the debate is finished, participants will once more fill out the questionnaire on the attitudes in order to check if discussion and/or education on some methods had any influence on change of attitude.
 

Participants of ESS will be the original sample focus group, where higher variance of questionnaire results and greater variety of issues exposed in focus groups due to students’ cultural origin are expected. Students, who will repeat the original research in their own cultural environments with fellow-students, will presumably get different insights from the focus groups. The final number of participants depends on the number of students and countries cooperating in the research.
 

Research results should provide a greater understanding of the role of personal factors when choosing between various dispute resolution methods and, hopefully, some insight into conflict resolution patterns in connection to dialectical relations theory and social cognition. Implications for ADR practice will be discussed.

 

Student participants: Choosing a research team you would like to be a part of will be part of the application process. You will be asked to outline you interest and motivation for this type of research. For this reason, we are presenting the topics to you now so that you can consider each of them fully. 

 

Research Teams

A central element to the summer school is the opportunity to get involved in some research of your own. This involve selecting a research group which you think you would like to be a part of from a choice of 6. This process is part of the application process which is opening soon. You can download the application form from this link. If you are selected, you will be given readings from your research team leaders and the academic speakers to read prior to the summer school. Each day you will meet with your research team for a few hours and begin the process of the research, which aims to a publish in international journals. 

 

Teams are reasonably sized, perhaps 5 or 6 students from different countries in each, and you will be mentored by a PhD student who will fulfill the role of supervisor. Each research team will start off their research during the week in Bulgaria and will carry on under the supervision of the above supervisors in the next 12 months. So the summer school allows you the time to meet your team, do the necessary literature review of your field of research and formulate a plan with which to leave the summerschool and get to work. 

 

You Can Contribute Too!

The summerschool is all about gaining valuable experience and as such we welcome you to present your research to the rest of the school. 

 

As well as established academics presenting their work, the ESS also offer YOU the chance to present your work. Should you wish to do this, we would ask you to notify us before the summerschool (more information will be included in participant application forms). This is a great opportunity for you to demonstrate your skills as a presenter and a researcher and something employers would notice too.