Units

Center for Social and Cultural Psychology

Person in charge of the Unit : Oui

The department is responsible for research activities in social and intercultural psychology

Projetcs

Emotional norms

The emotional norms prescribe which/what kinds of emotions are expected to be felt and/or to be expressed in a given context. As any social norms, they are culturally specific and often implicit. Both the adoption of emotional norms and the assessment of an emotional behavior as congruent with these norms may be difficult, particularly for immigrants. Besides possible misunderstandings, previous studies have shown that a non normative emotional behavior may lead to difficulties and discrimination at school and for job inquiries. This project aims to confirm if a cultural variation in emotional norms exists; to distinguish the part of explicit vs implicit knowledge in the adoption of these norms as a second culture; and to see if, beyond the cultural variations, the stereotypes influence expectations related to the immigrants' emotional behavior.

Collective Memory

Initiated by Halbwachs (1925, 1950) and Bartlett (1932), the interest for collective memory have recently been revived (Middleton and Edwards, 1997; Penebaker, Paez, and Rimé, 1997; Haas and Jodelet, 1999). Collective memory contributes to fashioning group identity. It is therefore of crucial social and political importance. Memory is likely to be distorted in order to serve identity-related needs (Baumeister, 1997). The history of Belgian colonial action is a highgly relevant in this regard in view of the public controversies that have surrounded Belgian colonial action in Congo. We study how this history is reconstructed in the discourse of former colonials and colonised by focusing on the identity-related dynamics governing those accounts.

Gullibility and epistemic Vigilance

This project, at the crossroads between social psychology and pragmatics, is concerned with the way people validate information. How do we come to view an information as true or false? Do we first need to validate it in order to subsequently reject it? Or can we, like a proper ''cartesian'', be skeptical before validating an information? This question is considered i.a. in relation to belief in conspiracy theories.

Persistence and dropout in the pursuit of a Ph.D.

This projects aims at identifying the factors that predict the successful pursuit of a Ph.D. (as well as dropout).