Tag "research projects"

Researcher Anastasia Dubnovitskaya of HSE University has studied the impact of social comparison on the level of Russians' pay satisfaction. The study used data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey — HSE University (RLMS-HSE) from 2002 to 2018. It turned out that the main contribution to Russians' pay satisfaction is the difference between their actual pay and the average wages of the reference group — people with similar characteristics. The size of one's own wages was of secondary importance.

The concept of Satanism originating from Roman Catholic sources continues to lack a rigorous social science interpretation. Satanism is sometimes believed to be a reflection of real-life problems faced by society and is sometimes considered a phenomenon in its own right that merits serious study. HSE doctoral student Oxana Mikhailova provides an overview of how the concept of Satanism is treated by different sociological theories and offers her commentary.

World Brain Day is observed on July 22 every year. The HSE News Service asked researchers of the HSE Centre for Cognition and Decision Making about the impact of neurological conditions on mental health, using cervical dystonia (CD) as an example. Ainur Ragimova, Research Fellow of the Centre, discusses current studies into cervical dystonia at HSE University and worldwide and explains how patients' quality of life can be improved by proper treatment.

Researchers from the HSE Center for Language and Brain have identified previously unknown age-related changes in brain activity during the perception of auditory information in a group of children aged 7–12 years. The researchers used magnetoencephalography (MEG), an ultra-precise method of brain activity recording. The results obtained can be used to explore the impairments in language comprehension in children with autism. The study was published in the Human Brain Mapping.

Researchers of the HSE International Laboratory of Statistical and Computational Genomics together with their international colleagues have proposed a new statistical method for analysing population admixture that makes it possible to determine the time and number of migration waves more accurately. The history of Colombians and Mexicans (descendants of Native Americans, Spaniards and Africans) features two episodes of admixture that occurred about 350 and 200 years ago for Mexicans and 400 and 100 years ago for Colombians. The results were published in the Plos Genetics journal.

Evgeniia Shmeleva and Egor Sagitov of the HSE Institute of Education examined the relationship between how study sessions are designed and the likelihood of students’ cheating. They found students more inclined to cheat when expected to learn by rewriting and retelling the study material and more likely to be honest when engaged in interactive learning activities such as debates. 

A team of Russian researchers affiliated with the HSE University, RANEPA, and NES found professional athletes to perform better against their former clubs. At least in some circumstances, emotions seem to have a greater effect on their performance than knowledge of the opponent's tactics. The study's findings are published in the Journal of Behavioural and Experimental Economics and may be useful for coaches, sports managers, and bookmakers.

Two of the winners, Konstantin Sorokin, doctoral student and visiting lecturer of the HSE Faculty of Computer Science and research assistant at the HSE International Laboratory of Algebraic Topology and its Applications, and Daria Kleeva, doctoral student of the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences and research assistant at the HSE Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience Centre for Bioelectric Interfaces, spoke to the HSE News Service about why attending the School matters so much for them.

The Mirror Labs research project competition is aimed at HSE University departments that are planning to conduct joint studies with other Russian universities and research centres. The competition is now in its third year. A total of 19 academic organisations from 14 regions of Russia submitted applications as partners of HSE University, including 9 organisations participating for the first time.

An international team of researchers led by scientists from the HSE University have examined the interplay of languages in the brains of bilinguals. Using EEG data of Russian-English bilinguals, the authors were the first to demonstrate nearly instant and automatic detection of semantic similarity between words belonging to their two languages, suggesting the existence of an integrated bilingual lexicon in which words are activated in parallel in both languages. The study findings are published in Cortex.