PhDr. Mgr. Ondřej Cerha
- PhD candidate in Social Psychology, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
- Visiting researcher at the Centre for Culture and Evolution, Brunel University London
Dear ACEF trustees,
Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude for providing me with your support. Despite all the unexpected circumstances given by the global pandemic, I have found my research visit at the Centre for Culture and Evolution to be an extraordinary moment in my early academic career.
I have been continuously working on my dissertation and refining the text while consulting my supervisor. In addition to my dissertation, I have successfully submitted the abstract of my doctoral research to the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology conference (oral presentation).
Another primary purpose of my internship at the CCE is to contribute to the growth of cultural and cross-cultural psychology in the Czech Republic. Apart from the months of national lockdown, I have access to the Brunel library with an impressive collection of literature on culture and psychology. Surprisingly, many of the titles are not digitized, and my presence is the only option for accessing these publications. The registration of my study dedicated to the Czech and Slovak community in Canada (the data collection is ongoing) has recently been released via the Open science websites. Moreover, my scholarly chapter on “Communication and Culture” (40 pages) will be published by Grada publishers soon as part of the textbook Psychology of Communication. Outside academia, the journalist from the prestigious independent newspaper Deník N quoted me in their article on different communication patterns across cultures. (https://denikn.cz/504501/jeho-otrok-chtel-svemu-panovi-rict-co-o-nas-prozrazuje-rodny-jazyk-a-to-zda-si-vykame-ci-tykame/)
As mentioned above, for a considerable part of my stay, my family and I have been deeply affected by the covid-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, I have succeeded in meeting the goals I set at the beginning. To summarize my activities at the CCE up to now, I put forward the following overview:
Attendance at the Centre for Culture and Evolution (CCE) seminar series (online): Decolonizing Psychology: Representing marginalized experiences in the study of culture, human behaviour, and evolution
- 18 November 2020. Dorsa Amir: The Development of Decision-Making Across Diverse Cultural Contexts
- 02 December 2020. Dr Agustin Fuentes: Diversity as the norm not the aberration: highlighting the role of diversity in human evolution and the human experience and illustrating how racism/bias harms societies and the practice of science itself
- 13 January 2021. Dr Rose Sokol-Chang: Improving Equity Through Open Science Practices
- 20 January 2021. Dr Maryanne Fisher: The Myth of the Maternal Instinct
- 27 January 2021. Dr Megan Bang: Towards Expanding the Science of Learning, Development, and Education beyond Western Constructions of Humans and Nature
- 17 March 2021. Dr Tuğçe Kurtiş: A Cultural Psychology of Relationship: Decolonising Love and (Well)Being
- 24 March 2021. Fanie Collardeau: Re-thinking shame: Acknowledging cultural contexts and power structures
Attendance at the CCE Journal Clubs: discussing the preprints with authors (online):
- 07 October 2020. Lotty Brand et al.’s preprint “Analogy as the core of cumulative cultural evolution”.
- 14 October 2020. Pat Savage et al.’s preprint “Sequence alignment of folk song melodies reveals cross-cultural mechanisms of musical evolution”.
- 11 November 2020. Nick Obradovich et al.’s preprint “Expanding the measurement of culture with a sample of two billion humans”.
Attendance at the CCE postgraduate writing group with Dr. Mícheál de Barra (online sessions on a weekly basis in Term 2 & Term 3)
Attendance at Academic English courses, Brunel University London (online)
- 07 October – 04 November 2020. Academic Grammar.
- 14 October – 02 December 2020. English for Research Writing (Doctoral Researchers only).
- 20 January – 17 February 2021. Listening to Fast Speech.
- 22 January – 05 March 2021. Pronunciation.
Attendance at other seminars and webinars (online)
- 23 October 2020 – Webinar: Using Testable to create and share behavioural experiments.
- 08 February 2021. The 6th Culture and Psychology Online Mini-Conference. De Montfort University Leicester.
- 25 February 2021. Research Methods Training Sessions: Qualitative Methods.
- 16 March 2021. Research Methods Training Sessions: Scale Development.
- 18 March 2021. Research Methods Training Sessions: An Introduction to Structural Equation Modelling.
- 23 March 2021. Webinar series on Decentering Intercultural Competence Research: Listening to Underrepresented Voices. The World Council on Intercultural and Global Competence in collaboration with the Center for Intercultural Research and Practice. University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
My research, publications & conferences submissions:
Cerha, O. (2020, July; postponed to 2021, July). The Effect of Priming on Independent and Interdependent Views of Self. A Cross-Cultural Study. Oral presentation at 25th International Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP), Olomouc, Czech Republic.
Cerha, O. (2020, November; postponed to 2021, July). Acceptance of disability and perceived life’s meaningfulness among people with visual impairment. Oral presentation at 8th European Conference Psychology and Visual Impairment (ECPVI), Prague, Czech Republic.
Cerha, O. (2021). Introduction to (Cross) Cultural Psychology. Handout for internal use in the seminar “Psychology in practical application”. (6 pages). Department of Psychology. FF UK.
Cerha, O. (2021). Personality and psychosocial Acculturation: A Case Study of the Czech-Slovak Community in Canada. OSF public registration. DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/NJRHA.
Cerha, O. (in press). Communication and Culture. (40 pages). In Boukalová, H. (ed.). Psychology of Communication. Praha: Grada Publishers.
Lecturing and invited talks
Cerha, O. (2021, 22 January). Prospective fathers and a childbirth. Invited talk for Aperio, a healthy parenting association.
Cerha, O. (2021 29 January). Introduction to (Cross) Cultural Psychology. Invited talk for seminar Psychology in practical applications, Charles University.
Engagement at the home Department of Psychology, FF UK
- Announced offer of my supervision on bachelor thesis: Social Representation of Poverty
- Providing consultations to the undergraduate student on her bachelor thesis (Phenomenological comparison of the subjective experience of schizophrenia between two cultures)
- Attendance at the department meetings – monthly (online)
- March 2021. E-learning course completion: Academic Integrity and research ethics Course