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.

This project, developed in Portugal, Turkey, and Croatia, aims to identify the compliance of food service menus with the Mediterranean Diet in public high education institutes canteens, pinpointing opportunities to intervene, namely: 1) promoting changes in the food offer addressing proximity to the Mediterranean Food Pattern, creating, and offering plant-based meals, with seasonable and local food products and 2) developing tailored social marketing strategies to engaging stakeholders to encourage healthier and sustainable food habits. It gathers a team comprised of nutrition experts on public health and food service, food technologists, gastronomy experts, psychologists, and marketers, with a vast experience and professional skills.

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).

Despite Portugal’s peaceful environment and generous reception policies, it’s not immune to borderless invisible threat that is violent extremism, radicalization and terrorism. Destructive forces from extremist groups – within our country and abroad – currently poses a threat to the security and social cohesion of the Portuguese society. This proposal aims to prevent and counter extremism and radicalization in PT, by combining communication technology with a more coordinated and knowledge-based prevention effort. Project activities will include: 1. Innovative multi-level communication campaign designed to reach vulnerable individuals at risk of radicalisation and recruitment by extremists, by providing alternative or counter narratives and sharing moderate voices 2. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of multi-level communication campaign, reach and impact 3. Establishment of a multi-stakeholder network that will offer both strategic advice & skills enhancement of professionals working in close contact with members of the public 4. Dissemination Action Plan preventing & countering extremism and radicalisation in Portugal, sharing good practices and lessons learned These activities will result in outputs: 1 x multi-level communication campaign with: o 3 x Micro-documentary o 4 x Small awareness films mobile/web o 3 x Social media Monitoring and Tracking Report o Social media contents o Offline activities with Press PR Actions and an Ambassadors Program o 1 x Web Portal “RESILIENT and UNITED” 1 x Quantitative and qualitative evaluation Report 5 x training sessions for professionals, teachers and volunteers 1 Final publication and Action Plan dissemination compiling best practises and lessons learned Direct benef: members of PT Islamic community, incl refugees (estim 15.000), 50 prof, 50 teachers, 25 volunteers. Indirect beneficiary’s governmental and non-governmental actors; At EU level, policy-makers, from RAN, CSEP; Other MS and Orgs.

One of the earliest findings in social psychology was that performance is modulated by the social nature of a given context. The mere presence of others has been shown to improve (facilitates) or impair (inhibits) performance. The acknowledgement of this effect had a great impact on society, for instance by conceiving working "open spaces" for some type of tasks. Our current societal demands require more knowledge of social presence effects, especially the knowledge of how it impacts our brain and cognitive activity.Our research has offered new insights to this question. Based on those and in the light of the information from other cognitive and neuroscience approaches, we now suggest a new avenue to the field: focusing on how social presence modulates the interplay between the associative and monitoring thinking. With this new focus we proposed the "tuning processing approach" grounded on two assumptions.First, mere social presence tunes earlier attention processes, increasing the scope of individual?s attention to internal and external information. This leads to a spread of our mind, which becomes more sensitive to different context cues. Second, social presence tunes attention to monitoring mechanisms allowing for better control of undesirable interferences. We further suggest that the effect of the mere presence should be found in the interplay between two processes: higher attention to our environment (increasing the likelihood of adaptive responses) and a more active role for the executive control so as to select what is relevant to our current goals and guaranteeing an adaptive reaction. Our aim now is to provide support to this theoretical framework, with several experimental studies. Their design is derived from well-known paradigms of cognitive (e.g. Stroop, Flanker tasks), social (e.g. anchoring) and neuroscience approaches (using ERP measures). In addition, we aim to show the relevance of these cognitive processes for socially relevant phenomena: stereot...

  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 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.