Gabriela Jiga-Boy
Swansea University
Welsh Crucible 2013
Gabriela obtained her BA degree in psychology at Babes-Bolyai University (Romania) and went on to complete an MSc and a PhD in experimental social psychology at Grenoble University, France. She is now working as a Senior Lecturer in the Psychology Department at Swansea University, after having done a 3-year post-doc in health behaviour change. In her research she is trying to understand how people can make better, more adaptive decisions regarding health and the environment. In her recent research she has shown that people are better at keeping task deadlines if they think about the effort they need to invest in those tasks, and the more effort they put into the tasks, the greater the anticipated feelings of happiness become when the tasks are successfully completed. Currently, Gabriela is using modern technologies (smart phones) to tackle inter-individual processes (emotions, comparisons with someone better, pro-environmental behaviour) from inter-disciplinary perspectives. She is keen to increase the public’s abilities to “debunk” popular myths from social sciences.