TOMAS PALMA

I did my training in Psychology at ISPA, Lisbon, in the area of Organizational and Social Psychology. After receiving my Master Degree in the end of 2007, I worked as a research assistant for Leonel Garcia-Marques and his Social Cognition team (SOCAS).

Now I am working as a PhD student at ISCTE- Lisbon University Institute. My research is supervised by Margarida Garrido (ISCTE) and Gün Semin.

Research Interests

My research interests are grounded in Social Cognition, more specifically in the relation between the areas of person memory, situated and embodied cognition.

At present I am interested in understanding if (1) memory processes (e.g., encoding and retrieval) in impression formation are constrained by the social context. The questions that guide this line of research are, for example: will it be that when we form an impression of a person we include in that impression the details of the context that we found relevant? Does the use of such contextual details help make the process of forming impressions easier, cognitively less demanding?

Another research line equally relevant for me, and closely related to the prior, focuses in (2) the relevance that physical states and movements seem to play in the processing of social information. Can our body posture influence the way as we encode and retrieve information about a social target? What about the movements and postures of others? What are the cognitive mechanisms underlying this possible relationship? These are some of the questions that currently guide my research.

In addition, I do some research in the area of methods and statistics, namely using structural equation modelling.

Palma, T. & Maroco, J. (2008). Motivação Interna e Motivação Externa para Responder sem Preconceito: Tradução, adaptação e validação das duas escalas para a população portuguesa [Internal Motivation and External Motivation to Respond without Prejudice: Translation, adaptation and validation of the two scales for the portuguese population]. Laboratório de Psicologia, 6, 13-22.