PsyChange: Psychology of Societal Change

PSYCHANGE:
PSYCHOLOGY OF SOCIETAL CHANGE

PsyChange's mission is to to examine societal change – how it affects individuals, groups, and social relations as well as how it is created, accepted, or resisted.

Research topics

COORDINATION TEAM

Melanie Vauclair

Full Member

João Manuel de Oliveira

Full Member

Elena Piccinelli

PhD Student

RESEARCH TOPICS

PsyChange's areas of research encompass the notion of not only social change, but also political, legal, cultural, environmental, and economic changes in contemporary societies. Grounded in social psychology, the members from PsyChange recur to diverse qualitative and quantitative methods to study emerging topics on identity, collective mobilization and meaning-making as well as social interactions and relations as situated in a particular social and/or cultural context. Considering the complexity of social change, this research group often draws on other disciplines, and applies a social psychological perspective to subareas of psychology. The main areas of expertise of PsyChange are a) intergroup relations and identities; b) environment, climate change, and citizenship; and c) diversity and inclusion.

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

MISTRAL - Multi-sectoral approaches to Innovative Skills Training for Renewable energy and sociAL acceptance

Funded by the EU, this project trained early stage researchers to effectively evaluate the complexity of social acceptance issues facing the deployment of renewable energy infrastructure and propose innovative solutions in a variety of research, government and business contexts. + info

kNOwHATE - kNOwing online HATE speech: knowledge + awareness = TacklingHate

This consortium, funded by the CERV programme, aims to offer an innovative, comprehensive, participatory, and culturally sensitive approach to analyze, detect, and counter, direct and indirect online hate speech in Portuguese language. + info

TURN_ON HELP - Intergroup factors and bystanders’ helping behaviors on bias-based cyberbullying incidents

This 'la Caixa' funded project aimed at understanding cyberbullying towards different minority groups through an online survey . + info

GLOBAL-MINDS - European Master in the Psychology of Global Mobility, Inclusion and Diversity in Society

Funded by the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree funding programme, this is a comprehensive 2- year study programme focusing on insights into contemporary social and societal issues from Social and Cultural Psychology. + info

All projects

Batel, S. (2020). Research on the social acceptance of renewable energy technologies: Past, present and future. Energy Research & Social Science, 68, 101544, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101544

António, R., Guerra, R., & Moleiro, C. (2020). Stay away or stay together? Social contagion, common identity, and bystanders’ interventions in homophobic bullying episodes. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 23(1), 127-139. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430218782741

Rijo, A., & Waldzus, S. (2023). That's interesting! The role of epistemic emotions and perceived credibility in the relation between prior beliefs and susceptibility to fake-news. Computers in Human Behavior, 141, 107619. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107619

Vauclair, C.-M. & Rudnev, M. (2019). Modernization Theory. In D. Gu & M. Dupre (Eds.), Encylopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging. Springer: Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_750-2

Carmona, M., Sindic, D., Guerra, R., & Hofhuis, J. (2020). Human and global identities: Different prototypical meanings of all‐inclusive identities. Political Psychology, 41(5), 961-978. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12659

Oliveira, J.M. (2022). Uprisings: A meditation on feminist strategies for enacting the common. In Ana Cristina Santos (Ed.), LGBTQ+ intimacies in Southern Europe: Citizenship, care and choice. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13508-8_2

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Alice Fonseca

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