Personal Experiences and Interviews
From interviews with professionals to sharing your personal experience on an academic topic of your choosing! Be brave! We’re all people that love to talk about the things we’re passionate about!
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I’m in. Now What? – A JEPS Editor Testimony
It was October 2024 when I came across an open call for EFPSA, a federation I had heard plenty about and longed to be a part of for quite some time. Submitting my application for the JEPS Editor position felt like a small leap into the unknown (because it was). What I didn’t consider was what happens after the acceptance email arrives. I’ve never gotten this far and, just like Carrie Bradshaw, I couldn’t help but wonder: now what? In hopes of easing your worries and, hopefully, exciting you into joining this wonderful team, I will summarily dive into JEPS, as a project, as a process, and as an experience.…
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Why Undergraduate Research Matters – Even if you do not Want a PhD
When students hear “undergraduate research,” many immediately picture PhD applications, or careers in academia. It’s true, research experience is a golden ticket for those paths. But here is the thing: undergraduate research is not just for aspiring academics. Even if you are planning a career in business, healthcare, policy, or something completely outside the ivory tower, research can still be one of the most valuable experiences of your degree. Why? Because research does not just teach you about your discipline. It teaches you how to think, solve problems, and work in ways that are highly transferable to nearly any career. Think of research as a professional boot camp: it challenges…
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EFPSA Research Programme 2022/2023 experience
Research project – Dance Therapy for migration-affected women with psychological trauma: Socio-demographic Barriers and Facilitators Our team is part of the EFPSA Research Programme 2022-2023 and consists of six members and our supervisor. The title of our Research Project is ‘Dance Therapy for migration-affected women with psychological trauma: Socio-demographic Barriers and Facilitators’. The objective of our study is to identify the variables contributing to the development of stress, PTSD, anxiety and/or depression for migration-affected women participating in dance therapy workshops. Our journey during this past year has been truly rewarding and we already had the chance to enjoy some positive outcomes of our work. So far, we have written the…
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Psychedelics as a Scientific Tool for Mental Health
An Interview with Marvin Däumichen, MA, co-founder of the MIND Foundation Psychedelic drugs might become the next big therapeutic tool to fight depression and other psychiatric disorders as “changes in self-experience, emotional processing and social cognition may contribute to the potential therapeutic effects” (Vollenweider & Preller, 2020). Classical psychedelics like lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or psilocybin (magic mushrooms) that are administered with appropriate guidance and in a controlled therapeutic setting that includes preparation and reflexion upon the experience were shown to enhance mental health (Walton & Liknaitzky, 2020). We talked to Marvin Däumichen who is a co-founder of the MIND Foundation about the history and potential of psychedelics as a…
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Open Science Bottom Up – An interview with SIOS (Student Initiative for Open Science)
The field of psychology has been profoundly impacted by the replication and reproducibility crises – which unearthed many issues in the way psychological science is conducted (if you are unfamiliar or want to refresh your knowledge, Galetzka, 2019, offers a short summary). As a reaction to these issues, many initiatives across the world are now trying to implement changes in our research culture – changes that are usually referred to under the umbrella term “Open Science”. One of the fundamental characteristics is that many of these initiatives are lead by young researchers eager to do the best research they can. These are mostly PhD students or PostDocs, but under-/graduate students…
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Doing Open Science in a Developing Country – An Interview with Dr. Chuan-Peng Hu
Open Science practices are becoming increasingly common and we at the Journal of European Psychology Students, are committed to Open Science practices and to promote researchers engaging in them. Today, we have the privilege of interviewing one of these researchers. Dr. Chuan-Peng Hu is a postdoctoral researcher at the German Resilience Center (Deutsches Resilienz Zentrum, DRZ) in Mainz and an Assistant Director at the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA). After studying Law and Psychology at University, he completed a Master’s programme in Social Psychology in Wuhan, China. In 2007, he completed his PhD in Beijing before moving to Germany. His research investigates the consolidation of positive memories, which may play a…
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Open Science Bottom-Up: An Interview with OSIP (PsyFaKo’s Open Science Initiative)
For the Editors of JEPS, one of the most important topics in current psychological science and beyond are the issues of replicability and reproducibility [for an introduction, see Galetzka, 2019], as well as possible paths to solutions. The keyword here is Open Science, an umbrella term for activities which strive to make science more transparent, openly accessible, and reproducible, in an effort to increase our confidence in the results we read in the body of scientific literature. While many Open Science initiatives are led by more senior researchers, the movement is fundamentally driven by bottom-up initiatives of early-career researchers, but students as well. For this interview, we sat down and…