Teaching

Main disciplines (License degree):

• Cognitive Psychology

• Social Psychology

• Research Methodology

Main disciplines (Master degree):

• Embodied Cognition

• Social Cognition

• Neuro-Mythology

• Conflict Management

Supervision (e.g. Master’s thesis topic @ Univ. Paris Nanterre) :

COSIMO – Cross-Cultural Validation of an Online Social Cognition Screening Tool [COSIMO – Validation normative d’un outil en ligne de dépistage de la cognition sociale]

Social cognition screening tools that are brief, ecologically valid, and easily deployable are increasingly important for both research and clinical contexts. COSIMO is a five-minute, online, and freely accessible screening instrument designed to assess core aspects of social cognition across diverse populations, with demonstrated ecological validity and demographic diversity. Developed at the Swiss Epilepsy Center in collaboration with the Institute of Psychology of the University of Zurich, COSIMO provides a promising framework for scalable assessment of social cognitive functioning. Following a recent collaboration with the project’s lead developer, Rebecca Johannessen, this project aims to produce a French adaptation of COSIMO and to establish its psychometric validation within French-speaking populations. The study will involve data collection, psychometric analyses, and the development of normative benchmarks. When possible, the project will also extend to francophone regions beyond mainland France (e.g., Réunion, French Guiana, and other French-speaking countries), in order to explore cultural variability and construct parallel normative datasets adapted to different sociocultural contexts.

Developing Bottom-Up Strategies to Counter Conspiracy Thinking [Développement de Stratégies « bottom-up » de Lutte contre le Complotisme]

Although relatively absent in the 20th century, conspiracy theories have become a central theme over the last two decades, both in everyday decision-making and in psychological research. They challenge public understandings of events, attribute agency to individuals or groups rather than systemic forces, and pose significant epistemic risks. While rational minds might expect that debating beliefs would convince people, such approaches have proven to be largely ineffective. This project therefore aims to explore bottom-up strategies to counter conspiracy thinking by targeting cognitive functioning rather than individual beliefs.

Put Yourself in My Shoes! An Embodied Approach to Visuo-Spatial Perspective-Taking [Mets-toi à ma place ! Approche incarnée de la prise de perspective visuo-spatiale]

As a social species, humans are particularly skilled at perceiving and representing the mental states of others—from the interpretation of simple actions and bodily postures to more complex inferences about intentions, emotions, and beliefs. This research focuses specifically on how humans mentally adopt another person’s visuo-spatial perspective, i.e., representing the world from someone else’s point of view. This cognitive mechanism, considered to operate at a relatively basic level, may be a prerequisite for effective interpersonal interaction. Yet, although humans can adopt perspectives that differ from their own, it is generally accepted that the egocentric perspective is the default and holds primacy. The aim of this study is to identify the embodied (sensorimotor) processes that enable visuo-spatial perspective-taking. 

Kinematic Markers of Empathic Response in Social Interaction [Etude des marqueurs cinématiques de l’empathie dans les interactions sociales]

This research builds on the framework proposed by Becchio (2024), which describes how affective and cognitive states are embodied in the body and highlights the communicative function of such embodiment, allowing others to perceive internal states. Two fundamental processes structure this dynamic: encoding, the probabilistic mapping of mental states onto movement parameters, and decoding, the recognition of bodily cues to infer others’ internal states. While much of the literature has examined the passive perception of emotions, less is known about how postural responses unfold in dynamic interaction. Yet social exchanges are inherently fluid and contextualized. This project therefore aims to investigate postural adjustments and kinematic parameters in response to others’ emotions in quasi-natural social situations.