Hi, my name is

Sofia Pelica

I am a Behavioral
Researcher

Summary
Sofia Pelica studies thinking and feeling processes in social situations. As a Doctoral Researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, she investigates the psychological mechanisms underlying behaviours that impact the transmission of communicable diseases. Her previous research focused on adaptive memory and pathogen disgust during her MSc at Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon. Her passion for psychological methods, open science practices, and cross-cultural research led her to become a member of the Junior Researcher Programme — a hub for international collaborative research projects in psychology and health policy partnered with Columbia University and the University of Cambridge.
Education
PhD (Promovenda) in Social Psychology: Human Behaviour and Infectious Diseases
2023 - Present | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Supervisor: Professor Joshua .M. Tybur
Co-Supervisor: Professor Catherine Molho

MSc in Social and Organizational Psychology
2020 – 2022 | Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal
Awarded Best Student by the Portuguese Government (DGES). Ranked in the top 0.01% (Grade 19.7) of 14,000 students at Iscte for the 2021/2022 academic year.
Grade: 19 out of 20. Highest-ranked student in the graduating class of 2022. Ranked in first place at the entrance of this program in 2020.
Research-based Dissertation: Graded 20 out of 20, Adaptive Memory in Contamination Contexts: Emotionality as a Proximate Mechanism. This research required Electrocardiogram (ECG) and Electrodermal activity (EDA) measures. The analysis was conducted autonomously using R and Python.
Supervisor: Professor Margarida Garrido
Co-Supervisor: Professor Magda Saraiva

BSc in Psychology
2017 – 2020 | Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal
Awarded Best Student by ISCTE-IUL. Awarded for achieving the highest Bachelor’s degree grade among students applying to the Master's program.
Grade: 17 out of 20, First-Class Honours.
Iscte is Portugal's leading university in Psychology. This program focuses on applied statistics, quantitative and qualitative research methods, and psychometrics. Most of the courses had curricular components that required teamwork.

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands

Publications

Ruggeri, K., Ashcroft-Jones, S., …, Pelica, S., ... & Stock, F. (2023). The persistence of cognitive biases in financial decisions across economic groups. Scientific Reports, 13, 10329. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-36339-2

Ruggeri, K., Symone Tutuska, O., …, Pelica, S., ... & Ashcroft-Jones, S. (2023). The psychology and policy of overcoming economic inequality. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46, e174. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X23001103

Priolo, G., Stablum, F., …, Pelica, S., ... & Rubaltelli, E. (2023). The robustness of mental accounting: a global perspective. OSF Preprint. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/apc26

Pelica, S., Aguiar, T., Frade, S., Guerra, R. & Prada, M. (2024). Are you what you emoji? How skin tone emojis and profile pictures shape attention and social inference processing.Telematics and Informatics, 95, 102207. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2024.102207

Stock, F., Pelica, S., Ashcroft-Jones, S., Stablum, F., … Ruggeri, K., Hertwig, R., Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2024). People in 26 countries prefer individual control to commercial or governmental control over online choice architectures. OSF Preprint https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/haqu9

Research Experience

Visiting Researcher
Policy Research Group, University of Cambridge
August 2024, United Kingdom.
Project: People in 25 countries prefer to control their own online environments rather than companies or governments
› Primarily responsible for data preprocessing and codification in Qualtrics. Assisted with analysis and project administration.
› Oriented Bachelor and Master’s students during the project, specifically in writing R code for analysis and preprocessing.
› Recruited more than 500 individuals from the Portuguese population.

jSchool Organizing Team Member
Junior Researcher Programme (JRP), partnered with Columbia University and the University of Cambridge
December 2022 - Present, United Kingdom.

Junior Researcher & Project Manager
Junior Researcher Programme (JRP), partnered with Columbia University and the University of Cambridge
July 2021 - December 2022, United Kingdom.
Project: Does Tax Choice Increase Tax Compliance? A Cross-Cultural Study
Advisor: Silvia Filippi
Executive Director: Professor Kai Ruggeri
› Recruited more than 460 individuals from the Portuguese population.
› Conducted data cleaning and wrangling with R.
› Applied Open Science practices.
› Contributed to the writing of the research paper.
› Managed a multinational team.

Graduate Research Assistant
Center for Psychological Research and Social Intervention (CIS), affiliated with Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon
May 2022 - October 2022, Portugal.
Project: Ginja, the Guru of Emotions: Emotional Skills of Pre-School Age Children
Advisor: Professor Patrícia Arriaga
› Conducted more than 90 semi-structured interviews with children between 3 and 5 years old in an intervention project related to emotion regulation.

Project Collaborator, Team Manager
JDMLab - Judgement and Decision-Making Lab, affiliated with the University of Padova
April 2022 - September 2022, Italy.
Project: Multicountry Mental Accounting Replication
› Translated and implemented the Mental Accounting scale into Qualtrics as part of an international project
› Elaborated JavaScript code for Qualtrics.
› Recruited more than 90 individuals from the Portuguese population.
› Managed the team representing Portugal.

Policy Research Intern
Policy Research Group, University of Cambridge
July 2022 - August 2022, United Kingdom.
First Project: The psychology and policy of overcoming economic inequality
Second Project: Poor but not by choice(s): The persistence of cognitive biases across economic groups
Advisor: Professor Kai Ruggeri
Co-Advisor: Sarah Ashcroft-Jones
› Worked with a multinational, multidisciplinary team with the goal of understanding economic inequality through research.
› Applied Open Science practices.
› Contributed to the writing of the research paper.
› Recruited more than 350 individuals from the Portuguese population.
› Conducted R analysis and data wrangling.

Curricular Research Intern
LAPSO - Laboratory of Social and Organizational Psychology, affiliated with Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon
September 2021 - May 2022, Portugal.
Project: What can an Emoji tell me? An eye-tracking study about inferring processes regarding social identity
Advisors: Professor Margarida Garrido and Dr. Sofia Frade
› Worked on a research project as the first author.
› Applied Open Science practices.
› Collected and analysed data from ECG, electrodermal activity (EDA), and Eye tracking.
› Created and delivered a workshop about PsychoPy for online studies.

Graduate Research Assistant
CICANT - Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture, and New Technologies, affiliated with Lusófona University
September 2021 - September 2022, Portugal.
Project: Love-Hate: interactions between social media users and influencers during the social isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Advisors: Professor Ana Jorge and Professor Joana Cabral
› Conducted a literature review about cyberbullying.
› Analysed quantitative and qualitative data with SPSS and MAXQDA.

Undergraduate Research Assistant
Center for Psychological Research and Social Intervention (CIS), affiliated with Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon
April 2019 - December 2019, Portugal.
First Project: Survival Processing Effect in Memory of Bilinguals
Second Project: Collaborative Learning
Advisors: Professor Margarida Garrido and Dr. Magda Saraiva
› Collected behavioural, ECG and EDA data.
› Managed lab sessions and recruited participants.

Teaching Experience

PsychoPy for Online Studies (2022). Workshop for an international audience at LAPSO.

Communication Experience

Pelica, S., & Frade, S. (2023, March 31-1). Once bitten, twice shy: The impact of predictive validity on anticipatory processing during sentence comprehension. [Poster presentation]. Associação Portuguesa de Psicologia Experimental [Portuguese Association of Experimental Psychology], Portugal.

Pelica, S., Garrido, M., Saraiva, M., & Pandeirada, J. (2023, March 9-11). Adaptive memory in contamination context: Emotionality as a proximate mechanism. [Poster presentation]. International Convention of Psychological Science, Belgium.

Mariani*, S., Mitra*, M. L., Pelica*, S., Pyrkowski*, M., Toma*, S., & Silvia, F. (2022, August 19-20). Does tax choice increase tax compliance? A cross-cultural study. [Conference presentation]. JRP Conference, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. * Shared position.

Pelica, S., Aguiar, T., Frade, S., Guerra, R., & Prada, M. (2022, June 20–22). O Papel dos Emojis com Tons de Pele na Formação de Impressões [The Role of Skin-Tone Emojis in Impression Formation]. [Conference presentation]. XI Simpósio Nacional de Investigação em Psicologia [XI National Symposium on Research in Psychology], Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal.

Skills

Computational Skills
Programming Languages: R, Python, Markdown, minimal JavaScript (jsPsych, online PsychoPy).
Computational Tools & Software: Posit/RStudio, Jupyter Lab, PsychoPy, Git, Qualtrics, jsPsych, PsyToolkit, SPSS, JASP, Jamovi.

Statistical Skills
Analysis of variance (e.g., general linear models for fixed factors, repeated measures, multivariate analysis of variance), cluster analysis (K-Means clustering, DBSCAN), correlation, distribution fitting, multivariate analysis (e.g., principal component analysis, factor analysis), multilevel models and regression (e.g., multiple regression, mediation analysis, mixed-effects models, meta-regression), equivalence tests, bootstrapped t-tests, and power and sample size analysis.

Language Skills
Portuguese: Native.
English: Advanced.
Spanish: Beginner.
German: Beginner.

Other Skills
Media Processing: audio editing (Audacity), image manipulation (Adobe Photoshop, GIMP), video editing (DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro).
Web design: HTML, CSS, WordPress.
Painting: 4 years of training in Fine arts.
Film: 2 years of work experience as an assistant director.
Customer service: +1 year of work experience as a waitress.

Additional Training

Quantitative Analysis
› Multilevel Analysis in R, FLAMES Summer School at Hasselt University
› Power and Sample Size for Multilevel and Longitudinal Study Designs, University of Florida
› Data Science: R Basics, HarvardX
› Introduction to Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, Johns Hopkins University
› Introduction to EEG: acquisition, processing, and analysis of the EEG signal, LAPSO

Acoustic Analysis
› Course I & II: Advanced Praat and acoustic analysis, Labfon

Qualitative Analysis
› Qualitative Data Analysis with MAXQDA Software, Emory University

Programming Studies
› Introduction to jsPsych for Online Studies, University College London
› Introduction to PsyToolkit: Web-based experiment developing, LAPSO
› Optimize your Qualtrics Survey, LAPSO
› Introduction to E-Prime, LAPSO

Community Engagement

Volunteer at International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS)
2023 | Association for Psychological Science (APS)

Volunteer at XVII Ph.D. Meeting in Psychology
2022 | Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon

Member of the Pedagogical Commission
2017 - 2020 | Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon

Class Representative
2017 - 2019 | Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon

Hi, my name is

Sofia Pelica

I am a Behavioral
Researcher

Summary
Sofia Pelica studies thinking and feeling processes in social situations. As a Doctoral Researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, she investigates the psychological mechanisms underlying behaviours that impact the transmission of communicable diseases. Her previous research focused on adaptive memory and pathogen disgust during her MSc at Iscte – University Institute of Lisbon. Her passion for psychological methods, open science practices, and cross-cultural research led her to become a member of the Junior Researcher Programme — a hub for international collaborative research projects in psychology and health policy partnered with Columbia University and the University of Cambridge.
Education
PhD (Promovenda) in Social Psychology: Human Behaviour and Infectious Diseases
2023 - Present | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Supervisor: Professor Joshua M. Tybur
Co-Supervisor: Professor Catherine Molho

MSc in Social and Organizational Psychology
2020 – 2022 | Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal
Awarded Best Student by the Portuguese Government (DGES). Ranked in the top 0.01% (Grade 19.7) of 14,000 students at Iscte for the 2021/2022 academic year.
Grade: 19 out of 20. Highest-ranked student in the graduating class of 2022. Ranked in first place at the entrance of this program in 2020.
Research-based Dissertation: Graded 20 out of 20, Adaptive Memory in Contamination Contexts: Emotionality as a Proximate Mechanism. This research required Electrocardiogram (ECG) and Electrodermal activity (EDA) measures. The analysis was conducted autonomously using R and Python.
Supervisor: Professor Margarida Garrido
Co-Supervisor: Professor Magda Saraiva

BSc in Psychology
2017 – 2020 | Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal
Awarded Best Student by ISCTE-IUL. Awarded for achieving the highest Bachelor’s degree grade among students applying to the Master's program.
Grade: 17 out of 20, First-Class Honours.
Iscte is Portugal's leading university in Psychology. This program focuses on applied statistics, quantitative and qualitative research methods, and psychometrics. Most of the courses had curricular components that required teamwork.

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands

Publications

Ruggeri, K., Ashcroft-Jones, S., …, Pelica, S., ... & Stock, F. (2023). The persistence of cognitive biases in financial decisions across economic groups. Scientific Reports, 13, 10329. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-36339-2

Ruggeri, K., Symone Tutuska, O., …, Pelica, S., ... & Ashcroft-Jones, S. (2023). The psychology and policy of overcoming economic inequality. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46, e174. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X23001103

Priolo, G., Stablum, F., …, Pelica, S., ... & Rubaltelli, E. (2023). The robustness of mental accounting: a global perspective. OSF Preprint. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/apc26

Pelica, S.,, Aguiar, T., Frade, S., Guerra, R. & Prada, M. (2024). Are you what you emoji? How skin tone emojis and profile pictures shape attention and social inference processing.Telematics and Informatics, 95, 102207. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2024.102207

Stock, F., Pelica, S., Ashcroft-Jones, S., Stablum, F., … Ruggeri, K., Hertwig, R., Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2024). People in 26 countries prefer individual control to commercial or governmental control over online choice architectures. OSF Preprint https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/haqu9

Research Experience

Visiting Researcher
Policy Research Group, University of Cambridge
August 2024, United Kingdom.
Project: People in 25 countries prefer to control their own online environments rather than companies or governments
› Acted as second author in the project.
› Oriented Bachelor and Master’s students during the project, specifically in writing R code for analysis and preprocessing.
› Recruited more than 500 individuals from the Portuguese population.

jSchool Organizing Team Member
Junior Researcher Programme (JRP), partnered with Columbia University and the University of Cambridge
December 2022 - Present, United Kingdom.

Junior Researcher & Project Manager
Junior Researcher Programme (JRP), partnered with Columbia University and the University of Cambridge
July 2021 - December 2022, United Kingdom.
Project: Does Tax Choice Increase Tax Compliance? A Cross-Cultural Study
Advisor: Silvia Filippi
Executive Director: Professor Kai Ruggeri
› Recruited more than 460 individuals from the Portuguese population.
› Conducted data cleaning and wrangling with R.
› Applied Open Science practices.
› Contributed to the writing of the research paper.
› Managed a multinational team.

Graduate Research Assistant
Center for Psychological Research and Social Intervention (CIS), affiliated with Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon
May 2022 - October 2022, Portugal.
Project: Ginja, the Guru of Emotions: Emotional Skills of Pre-School Age Children
Advisor: Professor Patrícia Arriaga
› Conducted more than 90 semi-structured interviews with children between 3 and 5 years old in an intervention project related to emotion regulation.

Project Collaborator, Team Manager
JDMLab - Judgement and Decision-Making Lab, affiliated with the University of Padova
April 2022 - September 2022, Italy.
Project: Multicountry Mental Accounting Replication
› Translated and implemented the Mental Accounting scale into Qualtrics as part of an international project
› Elaborated JavaScript code for Qualtrics.
› Recruited more than 90 individuals from the Portuguese population.
› Managed the team representing Portugal.

Policy Research Intern
Policy Research Group, University of Cambridge
July 2022 - August 2022, United Kingdom.
First Project: The psychology and policy of overcoming economic inequality
Second Project: Poor but not by choice(s): The persistence of cognitive biases across economic groups
Advisor: Professor Kai Ruggeri
Co-Advisor: Sarah Ashcroft-Jones
› Worked with a multinational, multidisciplinary team with the goal of understanding economic inequality through research.
› Applied Open Science practices.
› Contributed to the writing of the research paper.
› Recruited more than 350 individuals from the Portuguese population.
› Conducted R analysis and data wrangling.

Curricular Research Intern
LAPSO - Laboratory of Social and Organizational Psychology, affiliated with Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon
September 2021 - May 2022, Portugal.
Project: What can an Emoji tell me? An eye-tracking study about inferring processes regarding social identity
Advisors: Professor Margarida Garrido and Dr. Sofia Frade
› Worked on a research project as the first author.
› Applied Open Science practices.
› Collected and analysed data from ECG, electrodermal activity (EDA), and Eye tracking.
› Created and delivered a workshop about PsychoPy for online studies.

Graduate Research Assistant
CICANT - Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture, and New Technologies, affiliated with Lusófona University
September 2021 - September 2022, Portugal.
Project: Love-Hate: interactions between social media users and influencers during the social isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Advisors: Professor Ana Jorge and Professor Joana Cabral
› Conducted a literature review about cyberbullying.
› Analysed quantitative and qualitative data with SPSS and MAXQDA.

Undergraduate Research Assistant
Center for Psychological Research and Social Intervention (CIS), affiliated with Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon
April 2019 - December 2019, Portugal.
First Project: Survival Processing Effect in Memory of Bilinguals
Second Project: Collaborative Learning
Advisors: Professor Margarida Garrido and Dr. Magda Saraiva
› Collected behavioural, ECG and EDA data.
› Managed lab sessions and recruited participants.

Teaching Experience

PsychoPy for Online Studies (2022). Workshop for an international audience at LAPSO.

Communication Experience

Pelica, S., & Frade, S. (2023, March 31-1). Once bitten, twice shy: The impact of predictive validity on anticipatory processing during sentence comprehension. [Poster presentation]. Associação Portuguesa de Psicologia Experimental [Portuguese Association of Experimental Psychology], Portugal.

Pelica, S., Garrido, M., Saraiva, M., & Pandeirada, J. (2023, March 9-11). Adaptive memory in contamination context: Emotionality as a proximate mechanism. [Poster presentation]. International Convention of Psychological Science, Belgium.

Mariani*, S., Mitra*, M. L., Pelica*, S., Pyrkowski*, M., Toma*, S., & Silvia, F. (2022, August 19-20). Does tax choice increase tax compliance? A cross-cultural study. [Conference presentation]. JRP Conference, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. * Shared position.

Pelica, S., Aguiar, T., Frade, S., Guerra, R., & Prada, M. (2022, June 20–22). O Papel dos Emojis com Tons de Pele na Formação de Impressões [The Role of Skin-Tone Emojis in Impression Formation]. [Conference presentation]. XI Simpósio Nacional de Investigação em Psicologia [XI National Symposium on Research in Psychology], Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal.

Skills

Computational Skills
Programming Languages: R, Python, Markdown, minimal JavaScript (jsPsych, online PsychoPy).
Computational Tools & Software: Posit/RStudio, Jupyter Lab, PsychoPy, Git, Qualtrics, jsPsych, PsyToolkit, SPSS, JASP, Jamovi.

Statistical Skills
Analysis of variance (e.g., general linear models for fixed factors, repeated measures, multivariate analysis of variance), cluster analysis (K-Means clustering, DBSCAN), correlation, distribution fitting, multivariate analysis (e.g., principal component analysis, factor analysis), multilevel models and regression (e.g., multiple regression, mediation analysis, mixed-effects models, meta-regression), equivalence tests, bootstrapped t-tests, and power and sample size analysis.

Language Skills
Portuguese: Native.
English: Advanced.
Spanish: Beginner.
German: Beginner.

Other Skills
Media Processing: audio editing (Audacity), image manipulation (Adobe Photoshop, GIMP), video editing (DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro).
Web design: HTML, CSS, WordPress.
Painting: 4 years of training in Fine arts.
Film: 2 years of work experience as an assistant director.
Customer service: +1 year of work experience as a waitress.

Additional Training

Quantitative Analysis
› Multilevel Analysis in R, FLAMES Summer School at Hasselt University
› Power and Sample Size for Multilevel and Longitudinal Study Designs, University of Florida
› Data Science: R Basics, HarvardX
› Introduction to Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, Johns Hopkins University
› Introduction to EEG: acquisition, processing, and analysis of the EEG signal, LAPSO

Acoustic Analysis
› Course I & II: Advanced Praat and acoustic analysis, Labfon

Qualitative Analysis
› Qualitative Data Analysis with MAXQDA Software, Emory University

Programming Studies
› Introduction to jsPsych for Online Studies, University College London
› Introduction to PsyToolkit: Web-based experiment developing, LAPSO
› Optimize your Qualtrics Survey, LAPSO
› Introduction to E-Prime, LAPSO

Community Engagement

Volunteer at International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS)
2023 | Association for Psychological Science (APS)

Volunteer at XVII Ph.D. Meeting in Psychology
2022 | Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon

Member of the Pedagogical Commission
2017 - 2020 | Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon

Class Representative
2017 - 2019 | Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon