Tag «IQ»

Fashion Theory journal Editor-in-Chief Liudmila Alyabieva explains how the pandemic has changed our wardrobe as well as expectations of the fashion industry — and ourselves.

This September, work was in full swing at HSE University’s Laboratory for Psychology of Social Inequality. The laboratory, which was established in spring 2021, is the first research centre in Russia devoted to researching perceptions of inequality in various fields. IQ.HSE spoke to Elena Agadullina, head of the laboratory, about the research projects underway at the lab, the psychological mechanisms that support and maintain inequality, and Russia-specific trends in the field.

Women typically earn 18%-20% less than men do with the same education, profession and personal characteristics, researchers from the Higher School of Economics found using data from an employment survey of young personnel. What’s more, this income gap has a cumulative effect, growing wider the longer a woman works. Education, however, significantly compensates for this ‘penalty’. IQ.HSE examined this issue with the help of a study by Margarita Kiryushina and Victor Rudakova.

Teaching is a stressful job, and with schools and universities operating remotely over the last eighteen months, teachers’ worries have increased dramatically. In the latest in a series of articles on distance learning, IQ.HSE reports on research conducted by the HSE University Institute of Education on how teachers have been coping with stress.

HSE University researchers Evgeny Osin and Irina Turilina conducted an intervention study looking into the effectiveness of a short-term online mindfulness meditation course. They discovered that even after a three-week course of daily 10 to 15-minute meditation sessions, novice participants benefitted from improved emotional wellbeing, concentration, motivation and self-reflection. The practitioners were also less likely to fixate on negative thoughts. However, these effects only applied to people who already had sufficiently high levels of self-control and motivation to meditate and were thus less likely to give up on the practice. The research is presented in an article published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being

Master’s programmes are gaining popularity in Russia. The number of master’s graduates now stands at 185,000 — more than three times the 2013 figure. In 2020, one fifth of admissions to Russian universities were for master’s programmes.

Russia has 3.5 million people in creative occupations and 2.7 million employed by creative industries. IQ.HSE used data by the HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge (ISSEK) to see how much these two figures overlap and how creative employment is different from creativity. Having assessed Moscow's creative economy, the experts have broadened their scope to Russia at large. The findings are published in the inaugural digest of the Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Centre.

Creators are also part of the job sector. Their work is increasingly oriented around commercial activities and in the pursuit of economic goals. As such, the organization of artists’ professional work and the motivations behind it are by no means unique. Rather, they straddle the line between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘market’ concerns.