Research & Expertise news at HSE University

Sociologists at HSE showed that preschool education has its own hidden curriculum: kindergarten teachers transmit social norms to children, including conservative ideas of femininity and masculinity. Girls are expected to have “proper” character and behavior, to be obedient and pretty, take an interest in music and dance, and to like the color pink.

The 18^th issue of Higher Education in Russia and Beyond (HERB) journal is available online. HERB is a quarterly informational journal published by HSE University since 2014 in cooperation with Boston College Center of International Higher Education. The current issue explores the issue of academic inbreeding.

On December 18, Sergey Kadochnikov, Director of HSE University – St Petersburg, and Georgy Vilinbakhov, Deputy General Director of the State Hermitage Museum, signed an agreement on cooperation between the university and the museum in the education and research.

Scientists of the Higher School of Economics, Indiana University, and École normale supérieure clarified how alcohol influences the dopamine and inhibitory cells in the midbrain that are involved in the reward system and the formation of dependency on addictive drugs. The results of the study were published in the article ‘Dynamical ventral tegmental area circuit mechanisms of alcohol-dependent dopamine release’. 

Dr Anna Whittington is currently a Research Fellow at The International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences through the end of August 2019. She recently spoke with the HSE News Service about her work on changes in Soviet-era language policy, her thoughts on life in Moscow and how the city has changed, and much more.

Natalia Lyskova is spending her 2nd year as a postdoc at HSE Faculty of Physics working in a Joint Department of Space Physics with the Space Research Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The HSE Look talked to her about the ongoing research and upcoming plans.

On November 26, the HSE Faculty of Computer Science held the ‘IT Girls Night’ for the fifth time. This year the event was organized within the University of London’s campaign ‘Worldwide Conversation on Women’s Higher Education and Equality in the Workplace’. This campaign celebrates 150 years since the University of London opened up its ‘Special Examinations for Women’, the first university-level examinations offered for women in the UK. Ten years later, this step led to the University of London becoming the first institution of higher education in the UK to open up full degrees for women.

One of the most obvious changes that comes with ageing is that people start doing things more slowly. Numerous studies have shown that ageing also affects language processing. Even neurologically healthy people speak, retrieve words and read more slowly as they get older. But is this slowdown inevitable? Researchers from the Higher School of Economics have been working to answer this question in their article ‘No evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing in sentence processing’.