UCL academics receive EU funding to study joy, politics and friendship

A total of 281 academics from dozens of international universities were selected for funding from the ERC, sharing a pot of €721 million (£617 million). The grant bidding process is highly competitive and only ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs are able to successfully secure financial support.

The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research.

UCL’s recipients are:

• Professor Antonia Hamilton (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience): The project, The science of being in sync: Understanding how we make friends, seeks to understand how our cognitive mechanisms and behaviour help us build and maintain friendships. The research will be based on a model suggesting that three main factors – synchrony (moving together), homophily (having things in common), and tasks (working together) – are key influences on how we form friendships. In both small- and large-group experiments, Professor Hamilton’s team will measure the participants’ brain activities as well as their bodily reactions, such as motion and heart rate, while performing certain tasks. In doing so, the researchers aim to understand how working on tasks together, moving in sync with others and sharing common interests make it easier for us to develop friendships, and how these social bonds grow and change over time. Using these insights, the team hopes to provide strategies that could help reduce feelings of loneliness and improve our overall wellbeing.  
• Professor Benjamin Lauderdale (UCL Political Science): The project, Citizen Attitudes Towards National and International Problems, aims first to improve how political science measures which problems in the world citizens think are most severe and most in need of their governments’ attention. The resulting advances in measurement will enable a better scientific understanding of where these attitudes come from and how they shape citizens’ views of media and politicians. One important application of this work will be characterising how (and which) voters prioritise international problems versus national problems, and the implications of this for how national political leaders engage internationally on questions of climate change, security, migration, and trade.
• Professor Jo Cook (UCL Anthropology): The project, Cultures of Joy in the Metacrisis: Resistance, Resilience, and Repair in Troubled Times, investigates joy, which Professor Cook says is rarely the focus of the social sciences but is arguably more important than it has ever been, including for people living in and through crisis as it can support political resistance, psychological resilience and social repair. Professor Cook’s team will gather data on the value, experience and expression of joy across cultures, and develop a framework for understanding and researching joy.

The competition attracted 2,534 proposals, which were reviewed by panels of internationally renowned researchers.

Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation, said: “These ERC grants are our commitment to making Europe the world’s hub for excellent research. By supporting projects that have the potential to redefine whole fields, we are not just investing in science but in the future prosperity and resilience of our continent. In the next competition rounds, scientists moving to Europe will receive even greater support in setting up their labs and research teams here. This is part of our ‘Choose Europe for Science’ initiative, designed to attract and retain the world’s top scientists.”

Links

• ERC announcement
• Professor Antonia Hamilton’s academic profile
• UCL Psychology & Language Sciences
• Professor Benjamin Lauderdale’s academic profile
• UCL Political Science
• Professor Jo Cook’s academic profile
• UCL Anthropology

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• Left to right: Professor Hamilton, Professor Lauderdale and Professor Cook