Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Project Spanish Federal Research Fund: ""Emotion, memory, linguistic identity and emotional acculturation: influences on the learning of Spanish as a migrant language""" "Kris Buyse" "Leuven Language Institute (ILT)" "Within this project (funding by the Spanish Federal Research Fund (FFI2017-83166-C2-2-R; Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad. Gobierno de España; PI: Susana Martín Leralta (Universidad Nebrija, Madrid), 27.467€) we investigate the possible impact of migration on language and emotions. Emotional experiences are closely related to the cultures to which we belong and the languages we speak. As a result of migrations, when people and groups with different cultures and languages come into contact with each other, acculturation processes or adaptation of cultural patterns take place, which are translated, in the case of emotions, in processes of emotional acculturation. In this sense, we wonder how the relationship between the maintenance of the language of origin and the emotional acculturation of Spanish migrants in Belgium and their descendants (""heritage speakers"") of Spanish, in comparison with non-migrant Spanish people, in several European countries.This project hosts one doctoral project at KU Leuven (cotutelle with Universidad Nebrija): Marta Gallego García (28/4/2020 - 28/4/2024). One other doctoral thesis within this project is codirected by Kris Buyse at the Nebrija University itself." "Mapping of Sustainable Agriculture Indicators in Africa using remote sensing (WA+) and hydrological models (SWAT+)" "Ann Van Griensven" "Hydrology and Hydraulic Engineering" "The project aims at integrating management of agricultural, land and water resources by developing and evaluating a framework for integrated management of evapotranspiration (ET). ET is the key link between agricultural water productivity (more crop per drop) and catchment hydrology. Water productivity and ET efficiencies will be estimated for interventions proposed by farmers and policy makers using field observations, remote sensing data and models. The main goal of the project is to provide suitable indicators for Sustainable Agriculture (SAI) in Africa that enable evaluation of the health of water resources within a basin. SAIs have been developed by many organisations. The innovation in the project lies in developing SAIs using T and ET estimations derived from remote sensing techniques and agro-hydrological models. Since a time-integration is needed to calculate total water consumption, it is also important to account for the sub-daily and seasonal variability as well as cycles of (evapo)transpiration processes and irrigation patterns. Agro-hydrological models are able to provide simulations for present and future scenarios, though a new calibration and evaluation strategy is needed to provide reliable estimations. In this project, we propose a new methodology that uses remote sensing data for the calibration and evaluation of the crop and plant processes of agro-hydrological model SWAT+." "Prosody and emotion in (colloquial) Greek: its analysis, synthesis and its apllication in Text-To-Speech" "Piet Mertens" "Comparative, Historical and Applied Linguistics, Leuven" "This project studies the functional pitch contours in Modern Greek in neutral speech and for two types ofemotion (happy, sad).First, we describe the pitch movements found in three different speech corpora of spontaneous speech (for emotion-free,happy and sad speech) considering the alignment with syllable structure.The stylization method introduced by P. Mertens and C. d'Alessandro (1995) is used. It is based on a model of tonal perception which assumes the syllable as the basic perceptual unit for speech.Then, by means of three laboratory speech corpora (including the same material uttered in three differentways for neutral, happy and sad speech) we conduct a detailed comparative and quantitative analysis, measuring prosodic parameters of local events (F0 and duration attributes of the pitch contour where the main pitchvariations are captured).A final goal is the application of our findings in speech synthesis in order to synthesize utterances expressing particular emotions. Our results will be evaluated by perception tests conducted on Greek native speakers." "A Cultural Psychological Approach to Acculturation" "Jozefien De Leersnyder" "Social and Cultural Psychology" "In the current research program, I further develop and empirically test a cultural psychological approach to acculturation. This approach centers on the notion of ‘cultural fit’ – i.e., the extent to which an individual’s pattern of psychological functioning is similar to the typical pattern of others in the socio-cultural context. I start from the cultural psychological insights that people are socially ‘wired’ to fit their socio-cultural context and that cultural fit bears positive consequences in terms of both well-being and social thriving. I then bring these insights into traditional acculturation psychology to argue that when people migrate to another socio-cultural context, not only their explicitly endorsed cultural attitudes and identities may change – as has been the focus of traditional acculturation research – but also the ways feel, think and act may change, such that immigrant minorities may come to fit their new/other socio-cultural context.I spell out four research lines to empirically test this novel theory, thereby drawing on both my expertise and previously gathered preliminary evidence in the domain of emotion. Research line 1 makes use of cross-sectional studies to map the acculturation of a wider range of psychological processes (e.g., cognition, motivation, self-concept). Research line 2 employs two large scale studies that document the complex interplay between the acculturation of explicit domains (e.g., identity) and implicit domains (e.g., cognition) across time and different social contexts. Research line 3 consists of a series of longitudinal, interactive experimental studies that investigate the socialization processes that occur in intercultural interactions, and that may account for psychological acculturation and cultural fit. A final research line cuts across all other three to address the question how acculturation – in its complex, multi-faceted and context-dependent form – is associated with minorities’ well-being and educational outcomes." BIOMOT "Dirk Lefeber" "Applied Mechanics" "The BIOMOT project (Motivational strength of ecosystem services and alternative ways to express the value of biodiversity) addresses the problem of building and sustaining motivation to act for biodiversity by means of a comprehensive rethinking of what value and motivation actually are for people. Many economists and ecologists claim that biodiversity has total economic values running into the trillions of euros worldwide and hundreds of millions even for 'minor' ecosystem services on local scales. The problem addressed by the BIOMOT project is that, in spite of these immense values, biodiversity in Europe is still declining. Politicians and the public in general in Europe do not appear to respond swiftly and effectively to prevent further biodiversity degradation. Why is that? Why are total economic values not compelling? What could really work to motivate publics and politics into action for biodiversity? Scientific research can help address this challenge by means of a comprehensive rethinking of what value and motivation actually are for people. On this insight then, practical guidelines for methods and languages with greater motivational capacity can be built. BIOMOT, funded by the EUs research programme FP7, takes this relatively 'deep' approach of investigation. This implies that we can (and need) to exploit the full richness of scientific disciplines that relate to BIOMOT's main question. Primarily, these disciplines are: Economics, both in its neo-classic and alternative versions Governance science, with al its project-level insights in 'what works' and why Psychology, with its strong quantitative and qualitative methods and theory. BIOMOT is organized along these disciplinary lines, but then of course faces the challenge of how to remain truly comprehensive and interdisciplinary. At this point, BIOMOT engages the power of philosophy to act in its classic role of the 'mother discipline'. The philosophers in BIOMOT have both a critical and a synthetic role. Critically, they analyse the underlying assumptions of the other disciplines and propose improvements. Synthetically, they help build the common framework and the common outputs of the project."