Research & Expertise

Vaccination is generally considered an essential tool for curbing the COVID-19 pandemic. Although Russia was one of the first countries to develop a vaccine against COVID-19 and launched an immunisation campaign in 2021, its vaccination rates remained low for a long time. By October 2021, only 36% of Russian adults were vaccinated, many of whom were compelled by their employers to do so. Having examined the factors contributing to low trust in vaccination among Russians, HSE economists suggest measures to improve vaccination uptake. The paper is published in Vaccine.

HSE University researchers have found that complex phonological tests involving several cognitive processes predict dyslexia better than simple ones. This may happen due to the fact that Russian-speaking children with dyslexia generally do not have difficulties distinguishing speech sounds. However, it’s not enough to use only phonological tests to reliably diagnose the causes of reading disorders. The results of the study were published in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.

Scholars from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience have translated the Emotional Contagion Scale into Russian and validated it on Russian-speaking participants. It was the first study of how people unconsciously ‘catch’ other people’s emotions using a Russian sample. The results of the survey, which involved more than 500 respondents, demonstrate that women are more inclined to imitate emotions of others than men. The study was published inFrontiers in Psychology. 

HSE researchers have proposed a new neural network method for recognising emotions and people's engagement. The algorithms are based on the analysis of video images of faces and significantly outperform existing single models. The developed models are suitable for low-performance equipment, including mobile devices. The results can be implemented into video conferencing tools and online learning systems to analyse the engagement and emotions of participants. The results of the study were published in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

Researchers from HSE University and the Pushkin Institute have demonstrated that pairwise comparisons work better than rating scales for measuring motivation. The reason is that many people cannot rank their motives in a hierarchical fashion. The study findings are published in Frontiers in Psychology.

An international team of scientists from the UK, Spain, Denmark and Russia (including researchers from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience) conducted an experiment demonstrating that people automatically integrate extralinguistic information into grammatical processing during verbal communication. The study findings were published in the Scientific Reports Journal.

Researchers of the HSE University and the Southern Federal University (SFedU) have tested a new method for studying the perception of facial emotional expressions. They suggest that asking subjects to recognise emotional expressions from dynamic video clips rather than static photographs can improve the accuracy of findings, eg in psychiatric and neurological studies. The paper is published in Applied Sciences.

An international team of astrophysicists has been studying the formation of strong electrostatic waves, ion holes, in the Earth's magnetotail and assessing their impact on space weather. They found that ion holes propagate oblique to the local magnetic field. The study's findings can contribute to a better understanding of processes in the Earth's magnetotail which affect space weather in the near-Earth plasma environment and the polar region. The paper is published in Geophysical Research Letters.