Projects

Epistemic emotions

At present, the core focus of our lab group is on the study of emotions. We look at  emotions in the awe family (awe, admiration, elevation) as well as epistemic emotions (awe, curiosity, interest, surprise, boredom and confusion) and study them using traditional methods and using Virtual Reality environments. We look at the commonalities and differences between those emotions, their elicitors and subjective experiences, different emotion "flavours" and downstream consequences to values, attitudes, beliefs and behaviour.

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Comfort with novelty and unexpectedness

Comfort with and/or preference for novelty and unexpectedness is one aspect of open-mindedness. Our past research has shown that open-minded individuals (e.g., those high in openness to experience or low in the need for structure) enjoy and are interested in expectancy violations (Gocłowska, Baas, Elliot & De Dreu, 2017) and experience greater creativity when seeing something unexpected (Gocłowska, Baas, Crisp, De Dreu, 2014). Some open-minded personality traits (e.g., high novelty seeking) are also directly linked to greater creativity (Gocłowska, Ritter, Elliot, Baas, 2019) and to the enjoyment of open-ended, creative tasks.   

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Social/environmental factors that foster open-mineded behaviour

Even though open-minded personality traits (e.g., the Big 5 Openness to Experience) are hard to change, open-minded behaviour (e.g., creativity) can be influenced by a range of social and environmental factors. For instance unusual social experiences such as identifying with multiple groups (Gocłowska & Crisp, 2014; Steffens, Gocłowska, Cruwys & Galinsky, 2016) or being exposed to social diversity (Vezzali, Gocłowska, Crisp, Statchi, Capozza, 2016) have been linked to greater creativity. It's important to know that rather than accross the board, this tends to happen in some people and under some specific circumstances (Gocłowska, Damian, Mor, 2018; Gocłowska, M. A.,Crisp, 2014).

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Women who challenge expectations

We're also interested in individuals who display unexpected and non-normative behaviour, and who challenge our stereotypic knowledge about "proper" behaviour. 

According to psychological research many people consider men to be better leaders and better creators than women. I'm interested in women who challenge those assumptions and I'd like to understand what social and individual factors motivate these women. For instance past research conducted with my colleagues shows that women who identify with feminists have higher leadership aspirations (Leicht, Gocłowska, van Breen, De Lemus & Randsley De Moura, 2018) and are more creative (van Breen, Gocłowska, De Lemus, Baas, Kelleci, Spears, 2020) compared to those women who are less identified with feminists.

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