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Israel Science Foundation Research Grant
Israel Science Foundation -
Personal research grant - social sciences.
Winners in the 2023/24 -
Shamoa-Nir Lipaz, Razpurker-Apfeld Irene.
Attention bias in intergroup relations: The role of religious content, interpersonal threat, and attachment style.
4 years: NIS 160,000
Attentional Bias in Intergroup Relations
In a series of experiments majority group members (Jews) and minority group members (Arabs) will be exposed to threatening or non-threatening visual social stimuli in a variation of an attentional bias task. They will also fill questionnaires to assess their personality traits and attachment styles. The obtained results would demonstrate the plasticity of attention in a newly explored social context. The research would elucidate under which conditions top-down processes are enhanced to minimize fundamental attentional biases. We hope to enrich the research field by showing how majority and minority groups traverse their social world and whether biases triggered by attention may be diminished in the context of conflictual intergroup relations.
Helping Kids! Project
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Helping Kids! is an international research project studying developmental changes related to children’s prosocial behaviours and civic engagement in a post-accord generation and also around the world. We examine factors related to children’s ability to understand and identify with conflict-related groups, how they respond to the emotions of others, and their helping behaviours towards peers they have not met. This research is framed by the Developmental Peacebuilding Model.
Since 2015, we have collaborated with colleagues in Colombia, Republic of Ireland, Israel, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Republic of North Macedonia, South Korea on a number of funded projects.
Visual Attention in Social Cognition
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Did you know that both your social identity and the identity of others could influence where you direct your attention?
Visual attention is considered one of our most basic cognitive mechanisms. It’s like an internal spotlight that helps us navigate the world by directing our focus to what’s important while filtering out distractions. Our lab is exploring how people perceive and prioritize visual information based on both who they are and who they are looking at.
Is our attention directed in the same way toward someone from our own group as it is toward someone from a different group? And, could certain personal traits or attachment styles play a role in these patterns of attention?
Moreover, we are examining these questions using methods that do not require participants to be aware of how their attention is operating. This allows us to observe attention shifts that potentially happen automatically, below the level of conscious awareness.
We’re investigating how people from majority and minority groups navigate their social environments, especially in contexts of conflict. Our research aims to understand how attention operates as individuals from different social backgrounds interact with one another and whether it matches their personality traits.
Stay tuned as we shed light on the interplay between social identity, attention, and personality in shaping our interactions with others.
