My research interests revolve around
two main axes:
1) The development and diffusion of
alternative research/statistical methods and the resolution of the epistemological and methodological problems resulting from the statistical and methodological procedures actually
used and taught in psychology. The main purpose of these research
projects is to improve the training of researchers in social sciences
and to increase the social impact of scientific knowledge by reforming
current methods and approaches (e.g. by reactualizing the statistical
interpretation of the falsification principle, by using confidence
intervals and effect sizes instead of tests of significance and by
modelizing effect sizes as a function of individual scores).
2) The relationship between autobiographical
memory, cognitive
representations (attitudes,
beliefs and judgements) and social influences (suggestions,
misinformation and hypnosis), especially in the contexts of
dream
recall and forensic psychology. I mainly study the factors influencing
the relationship between events and autobiographical naratives (factors
like access to memories, beliefs, attributions, recall techniques,
misinformation, attentional processes,...). These research projects
have practical implications for eyewitness testimonies, for the use of
retrospective measures in research and for interviewing, recall and
psychotherapeutic procedures.
KEYWORDS: Quantitative methods,
falsifiability, autobiographical
memory, attitudes and beliefs, social influence, memory distortion,
cognitive representations,
dream recall, hypnosis, forensic psychology.
The following list presents more precisely the main research projects in which I am actually involved.
In collaboration with Jean-Roch Laurence (Concordia University)
- Beliefs about memory as predictors of the efficiency of memory distortion procedures. Experimentation in process.
- Research project on the malleability of dream recall. Article in preparation.
- Development and validation of a multifactorial questionnaire on
attitudes towards dreams. Experimentation and analysis in process.
- Development of a statistical variation on the t-test that allows to evaluate and
modelize the heterogeneity of an effect size (and thus the
heterogeneity of variances) in a context of group differences or of
repeated measures. Article submitted.
- Epistemological assumptions and their methodological consequenses
in psychology (e.g. falsifiability and hypothesis testing). Chapter
submitted (Cambridge Scholar Press) and article in process. Independent
project.
- Study of the mental health of sexual minorities via a french national survey. Article in process. In collaboration with the INPES (France).
- Development of an experiential validation procedure to
conceptually validate factorial solutions through people's cognitive
representations. Experimentation in process. Independent project.