Category Archives: Non classé

One of the things we will miss possibly the most this pandemic winter in the Northern Hemisphere is gezelligheid [ɣəˈzɛləxɛit]. No real English equivalent of gezelligheid exists; the closest word in the English vernacular – coziness – still doesn’t capture the same feeling of intimacy and belonging. What does communicate a similar sentiment and is more familiar to US ears is the Danish concept hygge [hʊɡə] and the Swedish concept of lagom. Wikipedia describes gezelligheid as “’conviviality’, ‘coziness’, ‘fun’” or “just the general togetherness that gives people a warm feeling”.

During this pandemic winter, many of us will be away from the people we love most. The absence of the physical presence of loved ones deprives us of hugs, physical touch, and feelings of physical and psychological warmth that no amount of Skype or Zoom ever seems to fully replace.

This quote is often attributed to the person hailed as the “father of social psychology”, Kurt Lewin. In social psychology textbooks, the quote is used to justify a mode of social psychology whereby theories that are developed and tested in the lab “naturally” and “inherently” lead to useful social applications

In our previous post, we argued that the PSA has a grand vision and a budget that cannot easily support it. If the PSA is to fulfill its aspirations, the PSA must increase its funding so that it can support an administrative staff.
In this post, we will assume that the PSA wants to fulfill its grand vision. We will therefore explore ways that the PSA could create the funding streams that are necessary to achieve that vision.

In one of my projects of my PhD, I – Olivier – am working on developing and validating a scale (the Social Thermoregulation, Risk Avoidance, and Eating Questionnaire – 2, or the STRAEQ-2). In the first phase of this project, we involved people from different countries and asked them to generate items. We did soContinue reading “Creating a psychological tool applicable to individuals around the world (STRAEQ-2 item generation and selection phase).”

In 2017, Chris Chartier shared a blog post that revealed a grand vision for psychology research: psychologists could build a “CERN for psychology” that does for psychology what particle accelerators have done for physics. This “CERN for psychology” would be an organization that harnessed, organized, and coordinated the joint efforts of psychology labs throughout the world to take on large, nationally diverse big team science projects.

How many resources does the PSA possess? This is a question that affects many activities within the PSA — prime among them the annual decision of how many studies the PSA is able to accept.