The Scientific Area of Psychology at FCH-UCP announces the soon to open New Psychology Laboratory, comprising an Experimental Psychology Lab and a Multi-purpose Psychology Lab. When construction work is completed our students and their supervisors will be able to use our state of the art resources for their research:

• Experimental studies computer room, an eye-tracking room, a Physiological Unit (enabling the study of electrodermal activity, cardiac activity, facial electromyography, and EEG), an observation room video with a recording soundproof facility, training facility and focus groups facility.

This widens opportunities for research toward Master’s and Doctoral Thesis and is also great news for the faculty projects.

Some projects that are either ongoing or about to be launched within the Lab are:

• Emotions4Wellbeing – an Interdisciplinary – Multi-university project, adapts interventions to foster positive emotions and emotion regulation to applications for portable devices. As part of this project, we are investigating the effects of app use in various populations.

This is an ongoing project; at its current stage, the team is testing some of the features and resources of our App, but there is still much to do and incorporate into this app, including creating and validating new interventions. (Coordinated by Professor Augusta Gaspar and Professor Ana Paula Cláudio). And, new stages are ahead for the inclusion of gamification and new partners.

• The Empathy trajectory – an ongoing project addressing the development of empathy across pre-adolescence, adolescence, and adulthood. (Coordinated by Professor Augusta Gaspar and Professor Francisco Esteves)

• Food and body project – this is an ongoing project studying cognitive processing (attention, memory, learning) of affective stimuli related to food and eating habits. For example, by means of eye-tracking, studying attention, and decision making in food choices (Coordinated by Professor Francisco Esteves).

• Empathy, Media & Ethical Consumerism – this is a partly ongoing project that explores the roles of Emotions, Empathic reactions, Beliefs, Information, Media, and various individual traits in consumer habits and in changes in consumer behaviour. Several variables are still to be explored and a new stage of the project is to be launched (Coordinated by Professor Augusta Gaspar).

• Attention and attitudes towards affective stimuli – Ongoing project studying experimentally how our attention is related to the prejudices and preconceived ideas associated with the affective relevance of different categories of stimuli (Coordinated by Professor Francisco Esteves).

• Colour-and Emotion – this is a Multi-university project, based at the University of Lausanne – with which we have a long-standing collaboration. It is an opportunity to explore emotion & color associations and conduct cross-cultural research. Examples of research questions within this project are  How colour affects mood or How clothing colour affects impression formation.