Selection procedure 1 Post Doctoral Fellow in Terms of Aesthetic Engagement
Type of contract
1 posizione Post Doctoral Fellow
Research areas
- MOMILAB
Unità di Ricerca
- MOMILAB
Profile:
Highly motivated and rigorous early-career researcher - ideally someone with a Master's degree and a PhD in psychology, cognitive science, or cognitive neuroscience. The ideal candidate should meet the following criteria:
- Strong background in affective science. They must be well-versed in theories of emotion, especially those that consider the interplay between emotion, visual imagery and language or context (e.g., constructionism).
- Experience in empirical research on how linguistic context shapes emotion elicitation. For example, having designed or conducted experiments using paradigms such as picture-word cues (or similar), to study how context, framing, or language influences emotional response.
- Expertise in mental imagery. The candidate should be familiar with - and ideally have used in prior research - tasks or paradigms involving mental imagery, whether triggered by language, images, or combinations.
- Proven ability to run experiments both in the laboratory and online. This includes designing, administering, and analyzing experiments using online platforms (e.g., surveys, behavioral tasks).
- Technical skills in online data-collection tools and survey/experiment platforms. Specifically, proficiency with platforms such as Qualtrics and Prolific (or equivalents) to recruit participants, program and deploy experimental surveys/tasks, and manage data collection.
- Strong quantitative skills and ability to analyze psychometric data. They should be comfortable with statistical analysis, psychometric assessments, and appropriate data-processing pipelines.
- Good writing and communication skills, including the ability to contribute to academic publications, grant reports, and interdisciplinary work bridging psychology, philosophy, and the humanities.
- An open, interdisciplinary mindset. The candidate should be intellectually curious and comfortable working in cross-disciplinary teams and international collaborations.
Activity:
The post-doctoral fellow will carry out a range of activities in the context of the project. These include, but are not limited to:
- Design and execution of empirical studies: conceive, pre-register, and run experiments that investigate how linguistic context (language, framing, wording) shapes emotional experiences. This may involve: (1) picture-word cue paradigms, image + caption manipulations, context-priming tasks; (2) mental imagery tasks: prompting participants to generate mental images on the basis of words or descriptions, then measuring emotional and possibly physiological or behavioral responses; (3) both lab-based (in-person) studies (e.g., controlled experiments with psychophysiological or behavioral measures) and online studies (surveys or tasks via platforms such as Qualtrics and Prolific) to ensure broader, diverse sampling and greater scalability.
- Data analysis and psychometrics: process, analyze, and interpret data from experiments; compute psychometric indices (e.g., reliability, validity of emotion measures), conduct inferential statistics (ANOVA / mixed models / regression / multilevel modelling), possibly latent-variable modelling or other advanced techniques, depending on study design.
- Methodological development and validation: develop or refine stimuli (e.g., picture-word cues, imagery prompts), possibly also adapting or creating new paradigms tailored to studying context-linguistic effects on emotion; pilot testing; validation of instruments (e.g., measuring whether context manipulations reliably elicit distinct emotional or imagery patterns).
- Collaboration and interdisciplinary integration: work closely with other team members (e.g., philosophers, art scholars, theologians, or other humanities scholars) to integrate empirical findings with broader theoretical, aesthetic, or philosophical questions.
- Dissemination, communication, and network-building: contribute to writing academic papers, grant reports, and possibly public-facing pieces; present results at conferences or symposia; help build or sustain a network of researchers engaged with the topic (psychology, cognition, language, meaning, and art/spirituality).
- Project management and grant reporting: coordinate timelines, pre-register experimental design and analysis of studies, manage participant recruitment (both online and lab), ensure ethical compliance (e.g., informed consent, data protection), maintain datasets, and prepare periodic reports for the grant’s lead investigators or funding body.
- Exploratory and pilot work for future projects: depending on results, help design follow-up studies (e.g., cross-cultural work, longitudinal studies, integration with neuroimaging or physiological methods), and help prepare new proposals or extensions.