PhD Programme in Psychology - Academic Year 2021/2022 - Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna

The PhD programme aims at training candidates in innovative basic, field, applied, clinical and rehabilitative research in Psychology.

This goal is achieved by training candidates in basic skills concerning comprehension of scientific texts, scientific writing, presentation skills, oral communication of scientific results in national and international conferences, and quantitative and qualitative data analysis. When basic research skills have been acquired, PhD candidates will be able to pursue their research goals in one of the fields of Psychological Sciences or Cognitive Neuroscience. They will then review the relevant scientific literature pertaining to their topic, formulate a clear research hypothesis, adopt a method fitting their research design, run the appropriate data analyses and provide discussion and interpretation of findings in the light of the relevant, available literature.

Main Research Fields

 

Curriculum 1: Psychological Sciences

General Psychology

- Emotions attention and learning

- Perception and decision making

- Body action and cognition

- Spatial cognition memory and individual differences

 

Psychometric

- Psychometric methods in cognitive and clinical assessment

- Advanced inferential statistics

- Qualitative methods for psychological research

- Bayesian inference in inferential statistics

 

Developmental and Education Psychology

- Typical and atypical development from early infancy to adulthood

- Risk and protective factors in development

- Lifespan development and information and communication technologies

- Teaching learning and social processes in educational contexts

 

Social Psychology

- Gender inequalities and prejudice reduction

- Personal and social identity

- Psychosocial factors in risk and safety

- Equal opportunities and community participation

 

Work and Organizational psychology

- Diversity management in organizations

- Organizational change and development

- Employability and new careers Psychosocial factors at work

 

Psychodinamics

- Perinatal psychopathology

- Developmental psychopathology in childhood

- Child and parents psychotherapy research

- Emotional intelligence in clinical and educational settings

 

Clinical psychology

- The use of new technologies in clinical psychology

- Clinical assessment of psychological distress/well-being/adjustment/attachment

- Psychosomatics

- Psychological interventions.

  

Curriculum 2: Joint PhD Program in Cognitive Neuroscience

 

Social neuroscience and error monitoring

- Action control and error monitoring

- Recognition of erroneous and painful actions

- Empathy and moral cognition

- Interoception and autonomic response

- TMS-EEG, brain connectivity and plasticity

 

Neuroscience of visual awareness

- Conscious and unconscious visual perception

- Visual disorders in brain-damaged patients

- Brain oscillations

- Eye movements

 

Memory and future anticipation

-  Episodic memory

-Time perception

- Mental time travel

- Delay discounting and future-based choice

- Fear conditioning and extinction

- Memory-impaired patient population