News

Researchers from the HSE Laboratory for the Neurobiological Foundations of Cognitive Development, Alexey Kotov, Ivan Aslanov and Yulia Sudorgina, have experimentally proved that categorical labels, including nonexistent medical terms, significantly affect people's judgments, activating semantic knowledge in memory. The study has been published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal.

Natalia Soboleva has examined the impact of various factors on the link between job satisfaction and life satisfaction. Using data from the European Values Study, she found the association between job satisfaction and life satisfaction to vary across sociodemographic characteristics. In particular, job satisfaction contributes more significantly to life satisfaction for men compared to women, while being married weakens the association between job satisfaction and life satisfaction. The paper is published in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy.

The creation of the Customs Union and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) contributed to the development of mutual trade between their member countries. That process picked up pace significantly starting in 2019. Still, it is too early to say that the efforts by EAEU member states to achieve economic integration have been an unqualified success. This problem is the focus of a joint report that a group of experts from Russia (HSE), Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan presented at the XXIII Yasin International Academic Conference organised by HSE University in April.

Kirill Bryanov and Victoria Vzyatysheva, researchers at the HSE Laboratory for Social and Cognitive Informatics in St. Petersburg, studied factors that influence people’s perceptions of fakes, as well as their ability to distinguish false information from reliable. 

The Russian Arctic should be better connected – economically and logistically – to the country's other regions, according to researchers of the HSE Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs. If Arctic projects are to develop further, they must be supported by stronger horizontal connections involving regional authorities, civil society organisations, the expert community, and the indigenous peoples of the North. The study is published in Regional Research of Russia.

A research team from the HSE University Artificial Intelligence Centre led by Ivan Yamshchikov has developed a model to predict the success of efforts to rehabilitate homeless people. The model can predict the effectiveness of the work of organisations for the homeless with about 80% accuracy. The project was presented at a conference dedicated to the activities of social centres.

Russia’s relations with Ibero-America go back more than five centuries and include more than 200 years of permanent diplomatic relations. The need to build a multipolar world and expand cooperation between Russia and the countries of Latin America—including in the field of science and education—was discussed at the Third International Ibero-America and Russia: Diplomacy and Diplomats Conference held at HSE University.

China and the Chinese world, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Arab countries, Iran, Turkey, Central Asia and Africa are gaining new significance in Russia’s foreign policy. However, we do not know enough about the Eastern countries. It is necessary to change the priorities in education, starting from grammar school. Prospects for the development of domestic Oriental studies in the context of the new stage in the development of the system of international relations were discussed at a round table at HSE University.

Russia has recently launched an organic farming initiative; a new Law on Organic Products came into effect in the early 2020. An important first step in assessing the potential for this subsector has been to identify the most suitable locations for its development. According to researchers of the HSE Institute for Agrarian Studies and the RAS Institute of Agrarian Economics and Rural Development, provinces located in the country’s northern non-black earth areas – in the Northwest and in the Northeast of Russia’s European region – have the best potential. The study is published in Agriculture Digitalization and Organic Production.

Abdul-Raheem Mohammed from Ghana has recently defended a PhD dissertation in cognitive psychology at HSE University via remote procedure. Abdul-Raheem and his academic supervisor, Dmitry Lyusin, talked to the HSE News Service about their cooperation, the advantages and complications of remote PhD defence at HSE University, and the prospects of cognitive science in African countries.