communication&health

Gaëtan Cousin, University of Neuchatel

After my Bachelor at the University of Lausanne, I started a trilingual Master (English, German, French) of Clinical and Health Psychology in Freiburg.
I am particularly interested in affective processes, but also in Cognitive Psychology (cognitive schemas, automatic thoughts) and Social Psychology (interpersonal sensitivity, dominance).

For my Bachelor thesis, I made a systematic review of the literature on time perception by people suffering from depression.
I successively analysed fifty studies, and selected ten of them on the basis of their constructs operationalization, experimental designs, and internal/external validities.
The distinction was made between the studies which try to understand the subjective feeling about time (e.g. feeling that time flies or goes by too slowly), and these which focus on objective time perception (capacities in estimating durations).
The analysis revealed among other things - that subjective experience of time is highly altered by depression, while time estimation capacities remain unchanged.

I currently work on a study directed by Professor Schmid Mast at the IPTO in Neuchatel, which aims at understanding the relationship between styles of leadership and interpersonal sensitivity.