European Bulletin of Social Psychology 33,2 (December 2021)

Editorial

Dear friends and colleagues,

We hope you enjoy reading this second edition of the Bulletin for 2021. You will find comments from our president Kai Jonas with updates on activities and information about new initiatives that EASP will be introducing shortly. We also warmly welcome our new Media Manager Hannah Schäfer. There is information about a recent writing workshop organised by EASP and we also introduce the new editor of Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology (CRSP), Neil Lewis.
You will also find our usual announcements of future activities, recently awarded grants, and the new members who we warmly welcome to the EASP. Reports on previous grants and meetings will follow as soon as possible.

We wish you all a happy and relaxing end-of-year break and all the best for 2022.
Karen, Hannah, and the EASP Executive Committee

President's Corner

Dear colleagues and friends,

Most of us had hoped that with increasing levels of vaccinations, by the end of the year, we would get the opportunity to return to a somewhat old normal. Unfortunately, this is not the case for most of us. We all have to realize that the Corona virus is meant to stay and will become endemic. This will have fundamental consequences for all of us and requires us to rethink how we rearrange our private and our professional lives. It also does not spare EASP. Not surprisingly, we have witnessed a reduction of EASP activities, both in terms of applications and events to be held later. Feedback has shown that researchers turning to the analysis of existing data and are writing up the review that they always wanting to do, rather than putting themselves through the challenge of gathering new data (not even thinking about trying to preregister the unknown circumstances) and making contingency plans. This is all less of an issue for established researchers, they can endure a period of fewer conferences, lower output and may even enjoy the possibility to finally write this review. For younger researchers, PhD students or those that need to make relevant career steps currently, this is all much more challenging. EASP has tried to support its members as much as we could, with additional grant funding, a grant scheme to buffer personal hardships, and by trying to link PhD students to their dream labs for feedback. Evaluating all of these measures, we come to several conclusions. The Corona crisis hits everybody, but differently. It exacerbates existing differences. And we feel that many of our members do not dare yet to voice their needs. The discrepancy between the experienced negative consequences and the demand for solutions is visible. We can only encourage our members to reach out to the Executive Committee and to let us know how we can best support our members.

The introduction of the Diversity Officer, Nurit Shnabel, to the EC has lead to a number of novel and necessary initiatives about which you can read about in this Bulletin. More is to follow: We are working on a workshop to train members to ensure diversity measures in hiring decisions, and academic career management in general. Next year, we will roll out this workshop, COVID-19 proof of course, and hopefully reaching as many interested members as possible. For 2022-2023, leading to the General Meeting, we are introducing a novel measure to further EASP and its diversity. We are seeking to appoint three Social Psychology Ambassadors! These ambassadors are meant to be active in regions in which social psychology is underrepresented in academia and/or suffers a lack of recognition in society in general. We seek to furnish these ambassadors with a budget for innovative research, networking and outreach, and invite them present their work during the GM in 2023. We hope to facilitate novel sustainable networks and also bring new members to EASP. Look out for the announcement coming out later this month! By the same token, the website and announcement for the Summer School 2022 in Wroclaw is going live soon. I am happy that two of the main events of EASP, the Summer School 2022 and the General Meeting 2023, will be hosted by colleagues in Eastern Europe. To conclude, while informing you about these developments, we must also ask for understanding that not each diversity cause, deemed most important by a specific member, can be immediately honored. EASP is a dynamic group of scholars and as the EC, we are committed to balance all interests as much as possible.

To ensure that EASP is sailing smoothly, the EC is working hard to manage the association. The complexity of these tasks is continuously increasing. EASP is facing a number of challenges that this Executive Committee has to master to make the association future-proof:

1. The format of the General Meeting needs to be adjusted to the new possibilities and limitations brought about by COVID-19. We want to see this as an opportunity to improve the GM to a meeting that fits the needs of our members and is as inclusive as possible. Related to the format change for the GM, we also need to re-think the EASP meetings, and our collaborations with other (overseas) societies. Formats can potentially change, but also novel collaborations are possible.
2. A number of our statutes and by-laws require a revision, as they relate to different, out-dated contingencies and create more work than benefit. To give you some examples: we need to re-think our membership criteria that can be perceived as exclusive; Management processes get more complex and require more time: next to the introduction of a “president-elect” which we have introduced already, we need to consider if we also need a “past-president” function (like SPSP or many other learned societies have implemented) to finish ongoing administrative processes and to enable continuity for the EC.
3. The legal and tax framework has changed considerably in the last years. Running EASP as we did it even 3 years ago is not possible anymore. We are required to have continuous tax and accounting advice, and we rely heavily on legal support when it comes to revising contracts with publishers, for example. But this is not all: the legal requirements related to our bank account and registration at the Dutch chamber of commerce are at odds with our governance structure. Not changing this has serious repercussions for the upcoming ECs. We need to strive for both administrative continuity and democratic representation of the members in the governance of EASP. Other learned societies have undergone similar processes, either by establishing continuous management (e.g., SPSP) or by changing representation processes.

In sum, we will work with an extended group of members to help us to come up with suggestions for the necessary changes and best solutions. As mentioned before, this will also entail the change of our statutes and by-laws. We need to vote on this during the next GM.

We will also invite all members to join an online “Meet the EC” event in January during which we would like to inform you in more detail about these ongoing issues and to hear your opinion on these matters. We will share the date and sign-up information in due course.

For now, I want to wish you that you get through these months healthy, that you find some rest and have time to celebrate with your friends and loved ones.

Kai J. Jonas
President of EASP

Welcome to our new Media Manager  

We are very pleased to welcome Hannah Schäfer as the new EASP Media Manager. Hannah is currently studying in the Masters programme in work and organisational psychology at Mainz after completing her Bachelor's degree in psychology at Frankfurt. She has a wealth of experience using social media for her work. For example, she worked in a language school in Exmouth (UK) where she took care of their appearance on social media. We are delighted to have Hannah working with us. She can be reached at the email address: media@easp.eu.

Hannah Schäfer

Writing Training Workshop  

One of the barriers to regional diversity as identified by Nyúl et al.’s report (EJSP, 2021) and by the diversity task force is training in scientific writing in English. As a first step toward addressing this issue, we offered early career researchers—especially if coming from underrepresented regions or not having access to an academic writing workshop in their current program—an opportunity to participate in workshop on scientific writing and publishing. The workshop was delivered by Marco Brambilla and Kai Epstude. It was a hands-on workshop, in which participants (advanced PhD or post-doc students) received feedback about manuscripts they are about to submit.
Excerpts from the feedback about the workshop suggest that it was highly beneficial for participants, both in terms of practical advice and confidence building:

“I think the workshop is highly fruitful for all research students but especially for me who belong to a rural background and is a first-generation woman researcher from my whole community.”

“The workshop provided a clear and complete overview of the steps to take when preparing and submitting a manuscript for publication. This is very important, because, at least in my case, there is nobody that teaches PhD students about these things, which are often just taken for granted. The way scientific writing and especially the way publishing works is to a young academic what sex education is to a teenager: fundamental, but missing in public education. The learning environment benefitted from the experience of two established researchers, professors and editors, who could enrich the discussion with past experiences and who created a safe space where students could ask all their questions.”

“In the big group, I feel shame to speak or express my opinion but […] today I gave them my feedback feeling confident I proud of my work.”

“I appreciated the sincerity of the moderators. They made me aware that writing is not easy, and everyone (even renowned professors) can have difficulties and must therefore find strategies.”

“In my research team we speak in Spanish about our research. So, I never use the English for speaking about my job […] Speaking about our research with other partners it essential.”

“I really enjoyed the tips, useful information and kindness you gave us!”

We sincerely thank Kai and Marco!

Also, because the number of applicants was much higher than the number of available spots in the workshop, we intend to run another workshop in 2022.

Member Contributions to the History Website

We would like to remind you about the website on the history of European social psychology: https://history.easp.eu. Thank you very much to colleagues who have contributed so far. The website is still very incomplete, however, and we write again to request more contributions.
We would like to expand the website to cover the history of social psychology in Europe as broadly as we possibly can. Specifically, we invite everyone to consider writing contributions about ideas, theories, schools, or people in European social psychology. We are also interested in thoughts and streams that had a national or regional impact, but that have never or not yet been extensively discussed internationally.
We are not looking for people to send their papers to put on the website. Instead, we are asking for written contributions. Please take a look at the website to get an idea of what we're looking for, and get in touch if you would be willing to make a contribution. You can send these to media@easp.eu.

An online compendium of ideas, schools and people in the field of Social Psychology

New Editor of CRSP 

One of the current editors in chief at CRSP, Joe Cesario, will have to step down from his editorial position and take on new challenges. EASP would like to express its sincere gratitude towards Joe, one of the founding editors of CRSP, for his tremendous service to the community in having supported this journal and pre-registered research in social psychology for eight years. Joe's position as co-editor in chief will be taken on by Neil Lewis, starting from September 2022. Neil is already an associate editor at CRSP and ideally suited to help develop CRSP further.

Upcoming Events and Announcements

EASP Hybrid Meeting: "20 years of dehumanisation: Rethinking dehumanisation to confront social discourses that treat people like non-human beings"
28-30 April, 2022, Tenerife, Spain and online

https://www.easp.eu/news/itm/20_years_of_dehumanisation__conf-1302.html

Twenty years since the first empirical papers on dehumanisation were published, we return to the spiritual home of dehumanisation research for a meeting Thursday, 28 April, 2022 through Saturday, 30 April, 2022, in Tenerife, Spain. This meeting will address dehumanisation and objectification research since the MeToo movement, dehumanising social media rhetoric associated with increased nationalism, and the rise of populist opinions against immigration. The meeting is open to EASP members and non-members. Registration instructions for the meeting can be found through the meeting webpage. Everyone interested in research related to dehumanisation or objectification is welcome and encouraged to register!

Joint IARR-EASP Symposium: “What's love got to do with it? Diversity in couples and close/intimate relationships”
May 12 2022, 16-19h GMT+1

In our endeavour to collaborate more with sister learned societies, IARR (International Association for Relationship Research; https://www.iarr.org/) and EASP have agreed to start a joint symposium series. The first symposium will be held May 12 2022, 16-19h GMT+1 on the topic “What's love got to do with it? Diversity in couples and close/intimate relationships”. The aim of this symposium series is to bring research on couples and close/intimate relationships together from both a social psychological and an interdisciplinary relationship research perspective. We seek to jointly explore novel research avenues related to couples and close/intimate relationships, for example related, but not limited to topics such as queer lives, patchwork families, polyamory, relations at old age, interfaith and interethnic, age and power differences; to also discuss adequate research methodologies; to investigate the social perception of such couples and relationships. A Call for Papers will follow soon.

SPSSI-EASP Small Group Meeting: "Society in the classroom: Integrating perspectives on how socioeconomic disparities unfold in educational settings"
30th June-2nd July 2022, London School of Economics

https://www.spssi.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewPage&pageID=2734&nodeID=1

Although education is often seen as the great equalizer, socioeconomic status (SES) continues to be one of the strongest predictors of academic outcomes. Psychology research into educational inequalities has shifted from individual-level traits to focus on institutional, cultural, and societal factors, such as class-based stereotypes, independent norms, and the psychological impact of conditions of poverty. Such an orientation is starting to reveal how potential cognitive, emotional and behavioral strengths afforded by situations of adversity or working-class environments may be devalued by institutions designed for middle class people. This Small Group Meeting aims to contribute to this shift toward higher levels of analysis in the study of the link between SES and educational outcomes, by bringing together different subfields of research (e.g., behavioral economics of scarcity, sociocultural psychology of social class, behavioral ecological study of responses to adversity), and connecting them with insights from sociology and social policy. Based at the London School of Economics our program will enable participants to share cutting-edge psychological research on how socioeconomic disparities unfold in educational settings across life stages, while also hearing from leading researchers on the topic from neighboring social science fields.

The Role of Emotions in Interethnic Relations

7 September 2022 until 9 September 2022

Organizers: Magdalena Bobowik, Janis Zickfeld, Borja Martinović, and Anouk Smeekes

Despite growing globalization and increased opportunities for interethnic encounters, the segregation and discrimination of ethnic minority communities persists. Emotions, which are inevitably involved in social relationships, might be one important reason for the persisting lack of but also the emergence of social acceptance and empowerment of ethnic minorities.

The proposed meeting aims to connect scholars examining emotion expression and perception in the context of interethnic relations. We therefore invite work from diverse domains of social psychology, including intergroup emotions, emotion expression, acculturation, social identity, collective action, or communication research, among others. The meeting aims to contribute to understanding a) emotions felt toward an ethnic outgroup and their implications; and b) reactions to emotions expressed by an ethnic outgroup. Both may provide valuable insight on how to promote equal treatment of ethnic minority groups and improve interethnic relations.

The conference program will include several social events as well as two invited talks on the role of emotions in the context of interethnic relations by Dr. Jozefien De Leersnyder and Dr. Gijs Bijlstra.

The meeting will take place in the beautiful city of Utrecht (at the University Hall), with easy public transport connections to Amsterdam’s international airport.

A fee of 150 EUR per participant will apply for EASP members (non-member 200 EUR). Participation will be free for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers who are EASP members (non-members 70 EUR). We cover the costs of meals and accommodation for all participants.

If you are interested in participating, submit your abstract via https://forms.gle/sPKdgWoMxHuYULU18 by March 15. We invite papers to be presented in regular paper sessions (15min), flash talk sessions (5min), or poster sessions.

The meeting will be located at the University Hall in the city center of Utrecht.

New Members of the Association

The following applications for membership were approved by the Executive Committee in November 2021. Each of the applicants will become a member of the EASP in the category indicated below. Names of members providing letters of support are in the third line of the entry:

Full Membership 

Postgraduate Membership 

Grant Awards

The following members have received a grant from the EASP:

Stefanie Hechler (Seedcorn Research Grant): "Third-Party Punishment – a communicative act with victims"

Caterina Suitner (Collaborative Research Grant): "Towards more sustainable organizations: the role of self-management for workers' well-being and a more equal organizational environment"

Mirjana Rupar (Travel Grant): "Establishing collaboration with researchers from Chile to enhance research on national identification and intergroup conflict and reconciliation"

Julia Schnepf (Travel Grant): "Investigating the role of literacy and sexism on readers’ evaluation of
gender-fair language"

Felix Grundman (Travel Grant): "Exploring the relationship between negative feedback, emotion (regulation), and goal (disengagement)"

RKTS (Research Knowledge Transfer Scheme) Grants

RKTS are intended to fund initiatives whose ultimate purpose is establishing networks of researchers from underrepresented regions, backgrounds, or focusing on innovative or underrepresented topics or methodologies.

Funded in the May submission cycle was the proposal to establish a Latino-European Social Psychological Research Network focused on Migration, Displacement and Inclusion (La-EU-MiDI), submitted by Dr. Anca Minescu from the University of Limerick, Ireland.

Funded in the June submission cycle was the proposal to establish a European Community of Environmental Social Psychologists, submitted by Lise Jans from the University of Groningen, Netherlands and Gerhard Reese, from the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.

Double Burden Corona Relief Grants

The EASP established this initiative due to the growing evidence that researchers with double burdens (e.g., homeschooling children or caring for family members while also working) are suffering proportionally more in terms of scientific productivity during the Corona pandemic. This situation is particularly detrimental to women, as it exacerbates existing inequalities, and junior scientists without a permanent position (see also these articles on the impact of COVID-19 on science). The funded projects were as follows:

Maria Chayinska: “Nobody is safe until everyone is safe: Towards understanding the determinants of public support for the global COVID-19 vaccine aid in high-income countries"

Joanne Smith: "Understanding Descriptive and Injunctive Norm Conflict (DINOCO)"

Claudia Sassenrath: "Exploring victim blaming in everyday life: Applying ambulatory assessment to examine the relation of everyday sadism and positive affect in victim blaming"

Societal Relevance of Social Psychology Grants

Currently, a large number of societally relevant issues warrant further investigation and social psychology is well equipped to contribute to these matters. The EASP called for proposals on any topics. Examples given were, but were not limited to, (post-)Corona related issues, refugees and migration, political populism and extremism, global warming and sustainability, or health behavior change. The funded projects were as follows:

Tijana Karic: "Exploring the space of reconciliation: the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina"

Andrew Moynihan: "Existential escape in times of Covid-19: The tole of hedonic behaviours in managing existential threats"

Executive Committee

Małgorzata Kossowska (Meetings Officer), malgorzata.kossowska@uj.edu.pl
Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Ingardena 6, PL 30 060 Krakow, Poland

Roland Imhoff (Journals Officer), roland.imhoff@uni-mainz.de
Social and Legal Psychology, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Binger Str. 14-16, D-55122 Mainz, Germany

Nina Hansen (Treasurer), n.hansen@rug.nl
Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, University of Groningen, Grote Kruisstraat 2/1, NL 9712 TS Groningen, Netherlands

Nurit Shnabel (Diversity Officer), shnabeln@tauex.tau.ac.il
The School of Psychological Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel-Aviv, Israel

Karen Douglas (Secretary and Membership Officer), k.douglas@kent.ac.uk
School of Psychology, University of Kent, Cantebury, Kent CT2 7NP, United Kingdom

Monica Rubini (Grants and Membership Officer), monica.rubini@unibo.it
Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, I 40126 Bologna, Italy

Kai Jonas (President), kai.jonas@maastrichtuniversity.nl
Work and Social Psychology, Maastricht University, Universiteitssingel 40, NL 6229 ER Maastricht, Netherlands

Oladipupo Shobowale (Executive Officer), office@easp.eu
Universiteitssingel 40, PO Box 616, NL-6200 MD Maastricht, Netherlands

Executive Officer
Oladipupo Shobowale
Universiteitssingel 40
PO Box 616
6200 MD Maastricht
The Netherlands
Email: office@easp.eu

Secretary
Karen Douglas
University of Kent
United Kingdom
Email: k.douglas@kent.ac.uk

Media Manager
Email: media@easp.eu