NeuroWelfare in Cash Transfers Measures (CTs): Do Welfare Cash Transfers Show Different Brain Activity and Improve Equality? (NW) aims to pave the way for the interdisciplinary study of the brain functioning and the socio-cognitive impact on self and social perception in the experience of the two main paradigmatic cash transfer schemes: conditioned CTs (CCTs) and unconditioned CTs (UCTs). NW’s idea is born from my PhD effort, in which I studied a Basic Income pilot project, observing a mindset shift in the re-distributive beliefs and attitudes of community’ financiers, showing me the need for a neurophysiological understanding of CTs phenomena. NW’s achievability has been improved from the previous project’s application in its methodological operationalization, better defining the outcomes’ measurability and scalability to isolate effects of CTs’ on the brain. The assessment of social protection measures is usually done by looking at the behaviors of the welfare recipients. In addition, social neuroscience efforts are frequently focused on mental manifestations observed in the laboratory environments. What if the modern techniques to investigate brain activity would be applied to healthy individuals perceiving income support in their social environment? By utilizing an interdisciplinary and multidimensional approach, I pursue to combine the knowledge and the methodology of human sciences with those of social neurosciences, to detect and measure the effect of CTs’ on brain from three empirical intertwined perspectives: (1) neurophysiological, (2) cognitive and (3) interactional.I’ll train my interdisciplinary skills thanks to experienced supervisors in Iscte-CVTT and the University of Turin. NW tackles the complexity of redistribution social phenomena, advancing my career progress in the brand-new field of “Neurosociology”.

The project aims to design and test a new, feasible strategy to combat misinformation based on naturally occurring cognitive biases, namely the similarity between misinformation and its contradiction.

Explore the bidirectional link between aging and prosocial/environmental behavior, examine behavior determinants and how acting impacts individuals' life satisfaction, mental and physical well-being.

This study examines the sociopsychological aspects of aging and their role in cognitive preservation as routes to promote an active and healthy life and prevent dementia.

LessSugar4Kids aims to address the problem of excessive sugar intake in Portuguese children by examining the underlying individual (e.g., child's food preferences and perceptions) and contextual (e.g., parents'/teachers' attitudes towards sugar intake) determinants. It is critical to combine the parents, teachers', and children's perspectives to attain this goal.

Main purpose of the project: Rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and condomless sex have been increasing. Although many health problems are preventable, people often fail to regulate their actions and, engage in threatening behaviors. We will assess how people’s regulatory motives for security versus pleasure shape how they approach sexual behavior and sexual-health decisions.   Potential results: People with stronger motives for security (vs. pleasure) should know more about STIs and their implications for sexual health (Study 1), perceive more health risks, and have stronger intentions toward condom use and STI testing (Study 2), and actually engage in more safe sex behaviors six months later (Study 3).

Every day a vast amount of misinformation and Fake News are repeated and infinitely shared, reaching millions of people in a short time. The large-scale dissemination of misinformation is one of the major challenges that current societies face, with long-lasting costs to individuals and governments. European Commission’s recent efforts in seeking advice from experts regarding measures to counteract disinformation attest to the urgency of addressing this issue. The fact that people tend to believe in information they repeatedly encounter and to reject claims that contradict what they heard before makes misinformation-correction very difficult. Since most correction strategies entail both a repetition of the false claims and their contradiction, they ironically end up strengthening the validity of the misinformation they attempt to correct. It is thus of the utmost importance to examine the mechanisms that may contribute to the development of effective misinformation-correction actions.

  According to the WHO, the excessive intake of free sugars - sugar added to foods and beverages by the manufacturer, cook or consumer - is associated to unhealthy dietary habits, weight gain, increased risk of noncommunicable diseases and oral health problems. Portugal has a high prevalence of adult overweight and obesity and over 95% of the population exceeds the WHO's free sugars intake limit (below 10% of the daily total energy intake). This projects takes on a multimethod approach to examine the eating habits and objective knowledge about the sugar content of processed foods, how such information is processed, and experimentally examines contextual (e.g., sugar-content labeling) and individual (e.g., attitudes, regulatory focus) factors underlying the perception and consumption of different types of high-sugar processed foods. These findings will be highly informative to understand the current problem of high free sugars intake and to design future interventions to address it.  

The research project investigates the social nature of memory and the distinctive mechanisms underlying collaborative memory process. It focuses on two forms of social memory phenomena that have been robustly demonstrated: (a) effects of socially shared encoding on individual memory, and (b) effects of group collaboration in memory tasks. The process underlying effects of socially shared encoding and interpersonal collaboration on memory is examined through five tasks. Task1 examines the previously proposed cognitive process: the stimuli that are experienced together with relevant others receive more attention and elaboration, thus increasing their accessibility. Task 2 explores affiliative-relational motivation by which cognitive processes are harnessed to fulfill our goals in a given social context. Task 3 and 4 use a new paradigm examining the effects of manipulating representations formed at encoding on a cued recall task. Task 5 explores distributed memory (i.e. whether elaborative efforts made by one group member can enhance the memory of other group members). 

The proposed research program is designed to investigate the embodied mechanisms that ground cognition, in first (L1) and second (L2) language. We suggest that different languages shape our thinking, perceiving and feeling of the world. More importantly, they are grounded differently. We argue that whereas L1 is embodied, this is not the case for L2, or at least not to the same degree. The proposed experiments are designed to systematically compare L1/L2 related differences in performance as well as psychophysiological indicators in a number of paradigms presented to early (EB) and late (LB) bilinguals. To our knowledge these are among the first studies on embodiment with bilingual samples. The suggestion that L1 and L2 are unlikely to be equally embodied will be investigated in a study designed to furnish a direct examination of how L1 and L2 are somatically grounded (a neglected feature of both the embodied literature as well as bilingualism research). Studies 2 to 4 investigate how embodied simulation may drive specific phenomena such language congruence effects, modality switching costs and false memories in L1 and L2. Studies 5 & 6 will provide a more ecologically valid indication of how affective and interpersonal states are manifested in spontaneous linguistic representations when using L1 and L2. Our findings are likely to advance our understanding of a number of central issues pertinent to the emerging field of embodiment and may lend additional support to the assumptions that cognition and language are grounded on bodily states. Second, this research will identify the constraints of such assumptions in an increasingly multilingual and multicultural world where the daily use of a second language for professional, recreational and interpersonal purposes is often required. This is likely to inform research and policies designed to address the current challenges posed by participating in two or more linguistic communities.