Katarzyna Wisiecka

SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities | SWPS · Faculty of Psychology

Previous research suggests a link between oral contraceptives and executive functioning in women, yet the results are contradictory and limited by methodological inconsistencies. This study is a meta-analysis of studies comparing naturally cycling women with women taking oral contraceptives on measures testing three executive functions: updating, s...

Fear of evaluation and a negative view of the self are the core aspects of social anxiety. Self-compassion and self-esteem are two distinct positive attitudes toward the self, which are positively related to each other, well-being and good psychological functioning. It is less clear, however, how they interplay in socially anxious individuals and i...

Computer-mediated collaboration has become an integral part of our every day functioning. Despite decreased non-verbal communication and face-to-face contact with partners of collaboration, people learned how to remotely work together. The consequences of decreased non-verbal signals such as gaze communication in remote collaboration are however no...

Introduction Fear of evaluation and a negative view of the self are the key characteristics of social anxiety, which is one the most prevalent anxiety problem. Self-esteem refers to views of oneself, including individual’s personal feelings towards self, whereas self-compassion refers to caring attitude toward oneself. Both constructs are two disti...

Objectives Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is an evidence-based treatment to prevent relapse in individuals with recurrent major depressive disorder (MDD). It is not clear if MBCT is an effective therapy for current depression, and it is not clear what mechanisms are responsible for the effectiveness of MBCT. Theoretically, MBCT is belie...

Irony is one of the linguistic means in which intended and expressed meaning diverge. It serves social-communicative functions, requires the understanding of the speaker's mental state and its comprehension takes place at an advanced stage of language acquisition. In the present study, we investigated 8-year old’s irony comprehension and social ski...

The enhancement hypothesis suggests that deaf individuals are more vigilant to visual emotional cues than hearing individuals. The present eye-tracking study examined ambient-focal visual attention when encoding affect from dynamically changing emotional facial expressions. Deaf (n = 17) and hearing (n = 17) individuals watched emotional facial exp...

The aim of the study was to evaluate the impact of an 8-week Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) training on anxiety, depression and perceived stress in socially anxious people. Even though this pilot study was done on a small sample and further research on larger groups are needed, the present results suggest that MBCT is a promising interv...

In the current research we aimed at evaluating how social anxiety interacts with self-compassion and self-esteem. We found a negative correlation between social anxiety, self-compassion and self-esteem and a positive correlation between self-compassion and self-esteem. Self-esteem mediates the effect of self-compassion in social anxiety.

In the current research we aimed at evaluating if socially anxious individuals are characterized by fear of happiness. We didn't find support for this assumption. However we found that fear of happiness correlates positively with age, depression and resilience in this group.

We wanted to evaluate the relationship between fear of happiness, social anxiety levels and difficulties in emotion regulation. We found a significant positive correlation between difficulty in emotion regulation and fear of happiness in participants with moderate social anxiety (30 < 95 on the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale). There was however no...

The aim of the study was to capture the visual processing of dynamical facial expressions during recognition of anger, sadness and happiness. We examined if we could detect differences in speed and accuracy of recognition between faces expressing motions of positive and negative signals. Half of the participants had tested as socially anxious. Resu...

This paper demonstrates the utility of ambient-focal attention and pupil dilation dynamics to describe visual processing of emotional facial expressions. Pupil dilation and focal eye movements reflect deeper cognitive processing and thus shed more light on the dynamics of emotional expression recognition. Socially anxious individuals (N = 24) and n...