Four projects carried out in the field of Psychology at the Universitat Jaume I of Castelló obtained more than 400,000 euros in the last call for proposals of the Spanish Plan for Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation 2021-2023 to better understand decision-making based on social or emotional information, the relationship between structural and functional organisation through statistics, the influence of episodic memory processes on social behaviour and the adaptive functions of cognitive immaturity in preschool children.
The project "The brain network underlying social and emotional concepts", endowed with 186,061 euros in funding and led by Maya Visser, a researcher in the NFN - Neuropsychology and Functional Neuroimaging research group, aims to investigate how the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) interacts with the frontal and limbic regions during decision-making based on social or emotional information and how subclinical anxiety affects this interaction.
The research team will address key issues such as the role of the ATL in social hierarchy processing and during decision-making based on facial emotional stimuli. The results will be relevant to both basic and clinical research because they will lead to the development of a more complete theoretical model of the regions involved in the processing of social and emotional concepts. Likewise, they will also be used to explore the impact of subclinical anxiety on this network, which could have implications for clinical models of mood disorder and its treatment.
The study entitled “Reinforcement sensitivity theory as a higher order model for the study of structure-function organisation in the human brain”, funded with 126,808 euros and led by the researcher Alfonso Barrós Loscertales of the NFN - Neuropsychology and Functional Neuroimaging research group, explores the relationship between the structural and functional organisation of the brain by means of statistics, through the application of advanced factorial models.
The aim is to advance, above all, our understanding of the neurobiological basis underlying Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST) and the application of variable models in neuroimaging research. Gender peculiarities will also be taken into account, because RST-related traits associated with a higher risk or vulnerability to psychopathological disorders show differences between women and men.
The project entitled “Episodic memory in the prosocial world”, with a budget of 151,008 euros and led by Raphael Kaplan, a researcher from the NFN - Neuropsychology and Functional Neuroimaging research group, will advance our understanding of the influence of episodic memory processes on social behaviour. Episodic memory is that which informs our beliefs about ourselves and our interactions with other people. The findings may lead to future avenues for clinical research into the pathophysiology that causes both social cognitive and episodic memory deficits.
The study will explore whether episodic memory is preferentially adapted to social elements within events and what these elements are. It will also investigate how episodic hippocampal computation help people learn and evaluate relationships between individuals in their social networks, and use functional magnetic resonance imaging to understand the neural computation that influences episodic versus non-episodic social decision-making.
The study entitled “Adaptive function of cognitive immaturity in preschool children: Multimodal contrasts in adults and adolescents”, funded with more than 30,000 euros and led by Carlos Hernández Blasi, coordinator of the research group Cognitive Development, Children's Memory and Evolutionism, explores the adaptive functions of cognitive immaturity in preschool children (2-7 years old). It also asks whether there are adaptive mechanisms during this stage that have evolved to attract the attention of adults and adolescents and promote their care.
This study completes the first phase of the research programme that began in 2005, which is set within the theoretical framework of evolutionary developmental psychology and analyses the effects of cognitive, physical and vocal immaturity in adults and adolescents, as well as the effects of vocal immaturity, compared to physical and cognitive immaturity, in adolescence.
SPANISH NATIONAL RESEARCH PLAN
The research staff at the Universitat Jaume I of Castelló have obtained 4.17 million euros from the Spanish Research Agency, almost twice as much as in the previous call, for the development of 38 new research projects of the Spanish Plan for Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation 2021-2023, which focuses on the most strategic sectors for recovery, such as health, ecological transition and digitalisation.
The success rate (number of projects approved out of the total number submitted) is 70% (the national average being 50%). Moreover, the average amount of funding per project is around 110,000 euros and there are 14 projects more than in the previous edition. With the 2021 call, the Universitat Jaume I has obtained 23.7 million euros of funding for R&D and innovation since the launch of the Spanish Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation a decade ago.
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