ONGOING PROJECTS

​The effects of social chemical signals (body odors) on multisensory perception

FCT PhD scholarship awarded to Marta Rocha

• Several studies have demonstrated the social component of body odors and how this information affects the recipient's behavior. In this project, in addition to studying the effect of anxiety odors on the categorization of dynamic emotional faces, we also intend to understand the importance of smelling the emotional information contained in our own body odor. Using different paradigms, we exposed women to their own body odor, collected in emotionally salient contexts, in order to understand its influence on behavior and psychophysiological responses (e.g., cardiac activity).
  

Emotional processing on the psychotic spectrum

FCT PhD scholarship awarded to Joana Grave

• In this project, we are investigating phenomena related to emotional processing on the psychotic spectrum, from automatic attention, conscious detection and extrapolation of movement of emotional faces, to the perception of social and non-social emotional odors. To achieve this, we conducted experimental studies with different paradigms, both in the general population and in people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other disorders with associated characteristics.

Illness perception and approach-avoidance tendencies: How the behavioral-immune system shapes our social behavior

FCT PhD scholarship awarded to Ana C. Magalhães

• In this project, we investigated how the behavioral-immune system – a system that aims to prevent the development of infectious diseases – influences the way we perceive signs of illness in others (whether visual or not!) and behave socially. To do this, we used different experimental paradigms in which we combined stimuli associated with the disease and “neutral” stimuli.

Assessing the effects of action video games on cognition: How video games shape emotional and social aspects.

FCT PhD scholarship awarded to Joana Dias

• In recent years, several studies have shown that those who play action video games have improved attention in various computerized tasks. However, there are also studies that report a desensitization of these same players to aggression, due to the violent content of many action video games. In this project, we intend to evaluate action video gamers and non-video gamers in attentional tasks that involve emotional stimuli or require regulation emotional in order to maximize performance. Furthermore, we evaluate the differences with regard to competitive personality.

FINISHED PROJECTS

Smell on the autism spectrum: Relationships between olfactory processing, autism characteristics and emotional variables (year of completion: 2023)

FCT PhD scholarship awarded to Filipa Barros

• In this project, we conducted a series of studies to evaluate olfactory perception on the autism spectrum. We also assessed the suitability of two instruments for measuring anxiety and autism traits in the Portuguese population and explored the relationship between autism traits and other variables associated with the spectrum.

Project to support confident non-verbal communication in education

FCT PhD scholarship awarded to Ângelo Conde

• The area of public speaking is dominated by experts who make countless inferences about the performance of a speaker or even a teacher. However, these assessments have a certain degree of personal subjectivity. In the scientific literature there are very few evaluations of speakers made by lay audiences, which contrasts with the perceptions of experts. Using the lens of social cognition, the social inferences that shape our first impressions of an unknown person, together with the psychology of emotions, the effects of emotional responses, considering that these automatic cognitive processes are based on the observers' perceptions of non-verbal language of speakers while they speak, a multimodal experience can be developed to evaluate the performance of speakers by an entire non-knowledgeable audience. In this way, it becomes viable to establish which are the best social predictors of communicative success or failure of a speaker or even a teacher in front of their students, such as the emotions triggered in the audience, as well as verifying the influences that non-verbal expressions have on these social attributions and emotional responses of observers.

How anxiety shapes our predictive nature: Perceiving our social environment under threat

FCT PhD scholarship awarded to Fábio Silva

• Expectations about expected visual events shape the way we see the world. These predictions are critical for deciphering less clear social communication, allowing you to anticipate and interpret the behavior of others. In this project, we investigated how anxiety affects this perceptual mechanism, revealing how this state can potentially impair social communication.

• "Effects of body odors on behavioral and neural processing of visual fear stimuli" (2013-2015), FCT Research Project (Principal Investigator), 71.812 €
• "Learning to fear animals and human" (2005-2010), Research project. US National Institute of Mental Healthy (team member), 240.000 €
• "Visual search with phobic stimuli: Treatment effects and hemispheric asymmetry" (2006-2010), FCT Research Project (team member), 45.000 €
• "Attentional biases to emotional and motivational stimuli" (2005-2009), FCT PhD Scholarship (Sandra S. Soares)