Events

Explaining Health Behavior Disparities: A Proposed Mechanistic Model

Martin S. Hagger, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of California, Merced, US

A principal reason cited for inequity in health outcomes is the observed disparities in health behavior participation in underserved communities. We propose a model based in social cognition theories that offers a psychological explanation for these disparities. We contend that effects of socio-structural variables indicating disparity (e.g., income, socio-economic status, education level) on health behavior are attributable to variation in theory constructs (e.g., attitudes, risk perceptions) such that the constructs mediate socio-structural variable effects on health intentions and behavior. As an illustration, a mediated effect of education level on health behavior by attitude and risk perceptions suggests that inaction among individuals with lower education may be due to their insufficient knowledge of the health-behavior link. We report data from multiple primary and meta-analytic studies in multiple populations, behaviors, and socio-structural variables in support of our model. Potential avenues for future research and intervention based on the model are proposed.

Date: 27/03/2024

COVID-19 Vaccination: Prediction, Measurement, and Moving Forward

Kyra Hamilton, School of Applied Psychology, Griffith University, Australia

Strategies for long-term management of COVID-19 infections suggests achieving broad immunity through vaccination, and evidence that vaccine-induced immunity wanes over time points to the need for COVID-19 booster vaccines. It is therefore important to identify the beliefs and concerns associated with booster vaccines and using comprehensive measures to examine the issues. Further, persuasive messaging promoting COVID-19 vaccination has been a central strategy of health agencies to ensure control of infection rates and to curtail outbreaks. Thus, it is important to reflect on messaging to examine the cultural appropriateness of messages used to promote COVID-19 vaccination and the adoption of culturally relevant salient beliefs embedded within. This presentation will showcase studies with data collected across Australia and USA providing evidence for the proposed mechanisms by which socio cognition variables relate to booster vaccination intentions and proposes ways to move the field forward to ensure the subsequent development of culturally appropriate and tailored messaging.

Date: 27/03/2024

Cultural shaping of emotions: In the head and in the world

Talk by Yulia Chentsova, Department of Psychology, Georgetown University (Washington DC)

Cultural psychology conceptualizes emotions as emergent properties of biological, psychological and cultural factors, with mechanisms that boost emotional heterogeneity at each of these levels as well as those that constrain it. In our work, my colleagues and I examine different ways in which cultures shape emotions. Some of our work concerns aspects of culture that are "in the head" (including beliefs about emotions and emotional norms) and some that are "in the world" (including cultural products, such as children's books and newspaper articles and culturally-shaped daily life events that trigger affective responses). In this talk, I will describe this work and its overarching concerns with cultural shaping of salience of emotion to the local theories of mind and selfhood and discuss implications for assessing emotions in healthy and clinical samples in culturally-embedded ways.

Date: 29/11/2023

Cancelled New Insights into Social Alignment and Neural Synchronization 

Talk by Hila Z. Gvirts, Ph.D., Dept. of Behavioral Sciences & Psychology, Ariel University, Ariel, Israel

During this presentation, we will delve into the intricate neurocognitive mechanisms that govern social affiliation and coordination. We interpret synchrony as a manifestation of motor alignment, where individuals naturally synchronize their movements, reflecting a shared behavioral rhythm. Notably, our research has unveiled that other forms of social alignment, such as cognitive alignment (e.g., conformity), are governed by the same neural mechanism and adhere to the fundamental principles of predictive coding. 

Our insights are drawn from recent studies utilizing fNIRS hyperscanning and in-depth investigations into motor alignment. We will elaborate on the role of inter-brain synchronization in nurturing social closeness and behavioral alignment, along with its implications in scenarios involving inter-group conflict—all solidly grounded in empirical evidence. Additionally, we will probe into studies scrutinizing motor alignment challenges faced by individuals with autism and ADHD, providing illuminating perspectives on their struggles in social cognition during group activities. 

Furthermore, we will scrutinize the influence of alexithymia on the cognitive alignment process within groups. Additionally, a novel hypothesis positing the involvement of dopamine in both motor function and cognitive alignment will be presented, underscoring the intrinsic interplay between these processes. By focusing on social alignment and neural synchronization, this talk aims to offer unique insights into the complex processes that underlie human sociality. Ultimately, the research presented will propel our comprehension of social cognition, its neural underpinnings, and their relevance to deficits observed in psychiatric conditions. 

Date: 09/10/2023

Inter-generational transmission of collective memory of the 1948 War events among Palestiniancitizens of Israel
Talk by: Eman Abu-Hanna Nahhas, Oranim Academic College and Teaching, Israël

The Arab-Israeli conflict has been the subject of interest in numerous scholarly research. However, one area that has been understudied is how Palestinian citizens of Israel maintain their collective memory of the 1948 War events. The main purpose of the lecture is to share the results of a study that investigatedthe role of the Palestinian family as a mnemonic socializing agent in preserving and transmitting the collective memory of the 1948 War events from the so-called Nakba generation to other generations of internally displaced and non-displaced Palestinians. The study sought to answer two major questions:
1. What is the nature of the narrative of each of the investigated generations (those who experienced the traumatic events of 1948, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren) concerning the 1948 War events?
2. What are the differences in the narratives between internally displaced and non-displacedPalestinians?
The study was guided by a phenomenological perspective in which the mode of inquiry used was qualitative and interpretive, which included in-depth interviews with open-ended questions.
The sample of the interviewees included twenty-one Palestinian families, ten of whom were internallydisplaced.
In general, the analysis of the interviews revealed that despite the Israeli monitoring of the Palestiniancounter-narrative regarding the 1948 War events, it continues to be represented and communicated at a grassroots level across the different generations of Palestinians. The findings revealed that besideshaving one unifying trans-generational popular collective memory narrated by all generations, eachgeneration selected certain contents to remember, forming a “unique portrait” for it.

Invited by: Olivier Luminet &  ARC Re-Member

Date: 25/09/2023

"Nature of the Representations in Working Memory: The case of Aphantasia"

Talk by Gaën Plancher (Maître de Conférence HDR en Psychologie Cognitive Laboratoire d'Etude des Mécanismes Cognitifs (EMC), Université Lumière Lyon 2. Membre junior de l'Institut Universitaire de France (IUF))

The inescapable forgetting of even small amounts of information in the short term is a striking limitation of human memory that has for a long time attracted the interest of psychologists. Some theories assume that memory traces suffer from a temporal decay in the short term, and that to avoid forgetting, participants run maintenance mechanisms to keep memory traces activated. We know for decades that verbal information can be maintained by articulatory rehearsal. More recently, it has been claimed that all types of information can be maintained through a general, domain-free rehearsal process relying on attention, termed attentional refreshing. Attentional refreshing can be described as a process by which the level of activation of memory traces is restored by focusing attention. In the first part of my talk, using behavioral and neuronal measures, I will provide evidence that verbal rehearsal and attentional refreshing are independent. Second, I will talk about aphantasia which has been recently discovered and described as the inability to create mental images in working memory. I will present a study suggesting that aphantasia relies on a genuine inability to generate mental images in working memory, rather than on a deficit in accessing these images. Since aphantasics manage to perform cognitive tasks involving working memory processes, their condition raises the question of amodal representations in working memory.

Date: 02/05/2023

"Se souvenir des catastrophes : travailler entre histoire et psychologie cognitive sur la mémoire individuelle et collective d’un événement bouleversant"

Exposé de Lucrèce Heux (Docteure en Histoire et Psychologie cognitive, LPNC – CNRS UMR 5105 - Université Grenoble Alpes)

Au sein des memory studies, les disciplines intéressées par la nature et usages de la mémoire adoptent des approches conceptuelles et méthodologiques différentes, compliquant le dialogue interdisciplinaire. Cette présentation montre comment l'histoire et la psychologie cognitive peuvent être croisées pour étudier le lien entre mémoire individuelle et collective, en observant la mémoire et l’oubli des catastrophes. Deux études de cas ont été retenues : l’effondrement d’un terril à Aberfan, au Pays de Galles en 1966, et le glissement de terrain du Roc des Fiz, en Haute-Savoie en 1970. Suivant une approche d’abord principalement historique, les effets à court et long terme des prises de paroles médiatiques et publiques au sujet des deux catastrophes ont été étudiés à l’aide d’un corpus de sources historiques. La permanence de la mémoire de la catastrophe d’Aberfan au sein de la société galloise contraste avec celle du Roc des Fiz, qu’un groupe de proche des victimes tente difficilement de réhabiliter depuis 50 ans. Le rôle des médias dans le demi-siècle qui a suivi chaque catastrophe et la construction de l’événement au sein des populations et territoires concernés sont apparus comme deux facteurs centraux. L’influence de ces facteurs sur la mémoire a ensuite été testée au sein de deux études mobilisant des questionnaires, conçus suivant des méthodes issues de la psychologie cognitive. Un tel croisement interdisciplinaire a permis d’aborder de manière plus nuancée la mise en mémoire des catastrophes dans le temps, en fonction des intérêts individuels et des « cadres sociaux » dans lesquels ils évoluent.

Date: 26/04/2023

Celia Harris from Western Sydney University. How to share a memory: Costs and benefits of remembering with others: In cognitive psychology, three decades of research on collaborative recall has demonstrated that people recalling together remember less than the same number of people recalling alone, known as “collaborative inhibition”. More recently, a handful of studies have suggested that particular groups can remember together more effectively and facilitate rather than inhibit each others’ recall. These special groups include domain experts and long-married older couples. In this talk, I present a series of experiments aimed at understanding the individual and group factors that enable groups to remember together in ways that facilitate retrieval. Findings across studies suggest that real-world groups benefit from remembering together, with implications for supporting memory retrieval including within aged care settings.

Micah Allen, from Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, and the Centre for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, at Aarhus University in Denmark; Cambridge Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Towards better interoceptive biomarkers: how I learned to stop worrying and love beliefs. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Michaël Witthöft, Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany (2019). In Search of Explanations for the Medically Unexplained: Models and Mechanisms of Chronic Somatic Symptom Distress. IGIA (interest group on interoception and alexithymia), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Daryl O'Connor from University of Leeds, UK (2019). Effects of childhood trauma and the role of HPA axis responses to stress in vulnerability to suicide. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Delespaul, Ph. & Verhagen, S. from MSc Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology, Faculty of Health Medicine and Lifesciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands (April 2019). Exploring the Experience sampling method and its use in research and clinical practice from a positive psychology point of view. Horizon 2020 - IPSY. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

William Hirst from New School for Social Research, New York (March 2019). The attack of September 11, 2001: Flashbulb memories, collective memory and bearing witness. Horizon 2020 - IPSY. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Michiko Kano from Tohoku University Hospital Psychosomatic Medicine (February 2019). "Physiological link between alexithymia and psychosomatic diseases". Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique.

Gideon Nave from Wharton College, University of Pennsylvania, USA (October, 2018). Single dose testosterone administration impairs cognitive reflection in men. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Borja García-Lorenzo from Université de Bordeaux (June 2017). Maybe not spending more, but spending better on healthcare: some perspectives from health economics.

Christin Köber from New York University at Abu Dhabi (April 2017). Developmental and social aspects of autobiographical narratives.

Prof. Charles Stone from City University of New York, John Jay college of criminal justice, USA (March 2017). Social aspects of memory and decision making.

Irena Domachowska from University of Amsterdam (October 2016). Deliciously healthy: Healthy food cues elicit approach motivation and reduce the breadth of attention.

Olivier Luminet, UCLouvain (December 2022). Covid 19: Prise de recul. Prévention de la santé physique et mentale. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Olivier Desmedt "The conceptualization and measurememnt of interoception". October 2022. UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique.

Djouaria Ghiliani "Social psychological dynamics of historical representations in the enlarged European Union". February 2019. ULB, Brussels, Belgium.

Valérie Broers “A taste for the unfamiliar: Investigating the individual and environmental determinants of prebiotic vegetable consumption”. January 2019, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique.

Marlène Mélon “The Effects of holidays on multidimensional health in seniors”. January 2019, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique.

Giorgia Zamariola “The role of interoception and alexithymia in emotion regulation and obesity prevention”. February 2019, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique.

Luminet, O. "Alexithymia: advances in research, theory, and clinical practice". BPSP, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Nollaig Frost from London (March 2017). Le modèle mixte en méthode d'intervention en Psychologie de la santé. Louvain-la-Neuve.

Maria Del Rio from Université de Lausanne (November 2016). L'approche qualitative en méthode d'intervention en Psychologie de la santé.

Gisela Böhm, Sussanne Brückmuller, Peter Hegarty and Karl Harvor Teigen (October 2016). Preference for beginnings over ends in the perception of historical events.

Projection du film: Tout va s'arranger (ou pas), en présence du réalisateur Pierre Schonbrodt. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (December 2022).

Professor William "Bill" Hirst (New School for Social Research, New-York) was honored in the 2015 class of IPSY's Doctor Honoris Causa.

It is a great pleasure for Illuminetti to announce this Doctor Honoris Causa award granted to Bill Hirst. In the lab, Olivier Luminet and more recently Aurélie Van der Haegen have been collaborating with him on different topics of research related to flashbulb memories and collective memory. More recently, we published together a paper on the intergenerational transmission of memory related to WWII. His talks and the award will be new occasions to reinforce the links with him. 

Intergenerational Transmission of Memory: Case Studies Across the World. As the refrain “never forget” insists, the intergenerational transmission of memories is a moral imperative, the basis for communal legacy, and a daunting challenge. The way transmission, reception, and consequences of intergenerational memories unfolds depends on a host of factors, including (1) the nature of the memory, (2) the psychological dynamics of members of each generation, (3) societal factors, such as the presence or absence of cultural artifacts, and (4) the cultural factors. The present talk explores each of these issues in a wide variety of cultural contexts. It will particularly focus on the intersection of personal memories and historical memories of WWII, the Argentine Military Junta of 1967, and the attack of September 11, 2001.

Social aspects of forgetting. One can characterize the content of an act of remembering not only in terms of what is mentioned but also of what goes unmentioned, whether unmentioned by choice or because the information is no longer readily accessible.  That is, in many cases, remembering can also conversely be considered an act of forgetting.  In this talk, I will explore the social aspects of forgetting.  Remembering often involves acts of communicating, be it one person talking to another in a conversation, a television reporter updating viewers about unfolding news events, or a professor lecturing students.  Usually selective, communicative remembering will reinforce the mentioned memories, but the “silences” in the remembering can also induce forgetting.  Such remembering-induced forgetting holds both for the communicator and the recipient of the communication.  When do communicative acts of remembering to induce forgetting?  How do the social relationships between communicator and recipient and the goals of the communication affect when remembering-induced forgetting occurs?  And, because the effect holds for all parties of the communication, when do these memory effects lead to the formation of a collective memory?  The possibility that seeming flaws of memory, as forgetting often is believed to be, can promote the formation of collective memories suggests that forgetting may have adaptive value, in that it may facilitate human sociality.