News

On 17th October the HSE School of Psychology is holding Welcome Lab Day as a continuation of the Nauka O+ festival. Head of School Vasily Klucharev talks to us about what will be on display, which areas of psychology are most popular today and whether it is possible to use brain stimulation to make people conform.

The lower a person's resilience, the greater their alienation from themself, other people, and society. In turn, self-alienation and a lack of personal relationships can cause one to approve of military action as a solution to international conflicts, according to Olga Gulevich, Associate Professor of the HSE School of Psychology, and Andrey Nevruyev, postgraduate student of the same department.

On October 5th, 2015 Yulia Kovas will give an open lecture at the HSE Centre for Cognition & Decision Making — 'An Introduction to Behavioral Genetics'. Professor of Genetics and Psychology at Goldsmiths College, London University and Co-director of the Russian British Laboratory of Psychogenetics and author of many academic articles, Yulia Kovas will talk about the problems facing contemporary behavioral genetics, how DNA influences the individual variations of a person’s psychological features, what role the interaction between genes and the environment plays in the formation of behaviour and other questions of contemporary behavioral genetics.

Can the brain be linked directly to the computer? What areas of the brain are involved in speech recognition? What impacts on decision-making and how to other people influence this process? Can you calculate people's inclination to take risks? Participants in the 'Cognitive Control, Communication and Perception: Psychological and Neurobiological Aspects' conference, which took place September 29-30, 2015 at the  Centre for Cognition & Decision Making  at HSE.

The First International Summer Workshop on Alternative Methods in Social Research, which took place from July 13^th to 19^th 2015, in Barcelona, was dedicated to hybrid methods of evaluation in the arts and life sciences. Anna Paukova, lecturer at the HSE School of Psychology (Department of Psychology of Personality) participated in the event.

HSE’s social and cognitive psychologists will help the British Higher School of Art and Design (BHSAD) in their project ‘Design Against Crime’.

New theoretical paper by Igor Utochkin on ensembles is now published in Journal of Vision. He tried to explain how our visual system uses summary statistics to transform the continuous variation of visible features into discrete categories. This aids our ability to see multiple items as representing same or different types of objects (say, leaves on a tree or apples among these leaves) at a moment.

There are numerous ways of impacting people’s decisions, you can convince, intimidate, hypnotise, or use particular tools on certain parts of the brain. Why do scientists do this and what do these experiments show? Vasily Klucharev, Head of HSE’s School of Psychology answers questions posed by Olga Orlova, who hosts the  Hamburg Score  programme on Russia’s Public Television Channel.

Vasily Klucharev, School of Psychology Head, and Anna Shestakova, Director of the Centre, have become co-authors of a chapter in ‘Brain Mapping’, a three-volume encyclopaedic collection.

On March 25, Samuel McClure, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, gave a lecture called ‘Neuroeconomics: Cognitive and Neural Processes in Delay Discounting’ at HSE. Organized by the Centre for Cognition & Decision Making, the event covered delay discounting, as well as the work that had been done to understand the cognitive and neural processes that give rise to delay discounting and hence the dimensions along which delay discount rates vary. Samuel McClure recently agreed to speak with the HSE news service about his research and what he aims to accomplish in terms of collaboration with specialists at HSE.