News

📌 June, 2024

Rosa and Daniela attended the ESCAN 2024 conference, which took place in Ghent between the 22nd and 25th of May.

Rosa had the pleasure of taking part in the symposium “Representing Outgroup Minds”, presenting the work “When the Political Becomes Personal: The Neural Effects of Intergroup Exclusion,” and Daniela had the opportunity to discuss her research on the “Neurocognitive basis of misinformation sharing across the political spectrum” through a poster presentation.

The conference was a great experience for the PhD students, who had the opportunity to engage with fellow researchers in the neuroscientific community!

📌 July, 2023

Official launch of our lab 🚀 🚀

Clara has been awarded a Serra Húnter Assistant Professor position in Methods in Behavioral Sciences at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

The Serra Húnter Program (SHP) is a competitive tenure-track program that aims to hire highly qualified faculty staff whose academic records meet international standards in Catalan public universities.

To encourage transparency and the selection of the best-qualified candidate, the SHP selection committee is composed of internationally renowned academics without conflicts of interest.

We are celebrating this occasion by officially launching the Social Brain Lab Barcelona 🎉 🎉

Visit us at www.socialbrainlab.com and stay tuned for the latest news and open positions ⚡⚡

We are hiring!

📌 March, 2023

Exciting news! ⚡⚡

This Spring Clara will be participating in the Behavioral Insights Academy at the United Nations Office for Counter-Terrorism.

As part of the UN International Hub on Behavioral Insights to Counter Terrorism, Clara will provide training and mentoring to practitioners, UN program managers, civil society organizations, and member state government officials in charge of Counter Terrorism programs.

The goal of the BI Academy is to help practitioners apply and evaluate behavioral insights into their programs. A behavioural insights approach enables the identification of risk and resilience factors and the development of empirically validated interventions for policymakers and practitioners to effectively prevent and counter violent extremism.

The Behavioral Insights Hub is a global platform for creating knowledge around behavioural insights to prevent and counter terrorism, disseminating lessons learned and good practices, and creating a professional network of experts, academics, practitioners, and policymakers.

Very excited to take part in this!

📌 December, 2022

Big announcement! 🎉🎉

We have been awarded the internationally competitive BIAL Foundation grant to research cognitive flexibility effects on vulnerability to misinformation!

This is a project we conceived together with the Center for Brain at Cognition at the UPF. The aim is to evaluate whether cognitive flexibility correlates (estimated using EEG) predict vulnerability to partisan misinformation in participants with right-leaning and left-leaning political attitudes.

We are also very interested in distinguishing political orientation from political extremity effects in vulnerability to misinformation. This is because political extremity is usually associated with cognitive rigidity and could be impacting how people respond to misinformation more so than political orientation.

We are excited to start this project and to provide responses to all of these questions!

👉🏼 We will be announcing a research assistant position opening for this project soon. Follow me on Twitter if you don’t want to miss it!

📌 October, 2022

We officially started the VALAWAI project!

It was great to meet our project partners at the Kick-off meeting, which took place in Castelldefels (Barcelona) on October 11th and 12th.

We are collaborating with an exciting team of computer scientists at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (Barcelona, Spain), social media researchers at Sony Computer Science Labs (Paris, France), roboticists at Ghent University (Ghent, Belgium), and human-robot interaction researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (Genoa, Italy).

We forgot to take pictures of the event, but here is us having dinner to celebrate.

Exciting times ahead!

Read more about the VALAWAI project in valawai.eu.