Catarina Rosa is a researcher at CINTESIS/University of Aveiro since 2013. She is a member of the AgeingC group, where she stands out for her research in the area of maladaptive strategies of emotional regulation, namely rumination, and, more recently, in a project on ideologically motivated hate crimes.

She was born 44 years ago in Coimbra but has lived most of her life in Aveiro. Personally, she calls herself “a being in relationships”. At an academic level, she enrolled in the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences at the University of Coimbra, and finished her degree in 2002, having specialized in Family and Couple Therapy. In 2003, she started her PhD at the Psychology School of the University of Minho, with funding from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), studying the regulation of identity in couples at different moments of the marital cycle.

She always felt the need to research, but to go into the field to understand reality. Therefore, at the end of her doctorate, she was a psychotherapist and supervisor in a Temporary Foster Care Center for Adolescents, from 2008 to 2011. In the academic year 2011/2012 she was a visiting assistant professor at the School of Social Sciences of the University of Évora. From 2013 to 2018 she did postdoctoral research in Psychology at the Department of Education and Psychology of the University of Aveiro, also funded by the FCT. Since 2019 she is a PhD researcher at the same Department and an integrated researcher at CINTESIS.

“CINTESIS emerged as the Center that best matched my interests, in clinical and health care, as well as, more recently, in societal challenges. It was the center with the most appropriate mindset for my type of research,” she justifies.

As a researcher, she collaborates with projects as a family and couple therapist. Her work focuses on the processes of regulation and adaptive change and, more recently, on maladaptive strategies of emotional regulation, namely rumination.

Currently, she coordinates the research project “Rumination Room”, whose goal is to link two domains of Experimental or Basic Psychology (in the Laboratory) and Applied Psychology, achieving more effective clinical interventions in the prevention and treatment of mental illness.

“Rumination can be described as a form of avoidance, characterized by imprisonment in negative thoughts. The person avoids acting in order not to make a mistake. This process is associated with the development and severity of major psychiatric disorders (anxiety and depression), poor sleep quality, and impairment in problem-solving ability and task execution. In the context of the current pandemic, this maladaptive strategy of emotional regulation has been pointed out as one of the warning signs that should be assessed and managed by mental health professionals”, she says.

Through laboratory studies, she has tried to stimulate the application of rumination reduction strategies, namely training the activation of executive control to enhance the ability to inhibit negative stimuli that are not important for the task at hand. These negative stimuli are selected and recorded by the participants themselves, exposing and training them to inhibit their interference. It is now intended to convert these laboratory studies into clinical strategies. At this point, the project has already validated a base of positive, negative and neutral audio recording stimuli.

Hate crimes is another relevant line of research initiated with a recent FCT funded project, in which she was the co-principal investigator. The project aims to contribute to the investigation of the phenomenon of ideologically motivated hate crimes, which has been aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic and represents a direct threat to human rights, peace and security.

“The project aimed to make a characterization of the phenomenon and to know which were the precursors of hate crimes in Portugal. We highlight here two studies that focused on possible precursors of hate crimes: implicit biases (in this case, in Portuguese security forces) and ideological polarization (in this case, in the identification of the general population with polarized parliamentary discourses in the Portuguese political sphere),” she explains.

In addition to the precursors of hate crimes, the researcher studied protective factors such as empathy. “The effective use of emotion regulation strategies in interconnection with the ability to read the emotions of others are important factors in how we deal with and manage socially sensitive issues (race, ideology). The greater the insecurity in a strained interpersonal relationship, the greater the tendency for bias. The greater the empathy, the lower the tendency for bias,” she exemplifies.

1-Year Ambition

People are living longer, but with more and more serious mental health problems. As researchers, we must respond to the challenge of rethinking approaches to mental health. The continuation of my research line “Rumination Room” will constituté an important contribution to the development of more ecological and personalized clinical strategies, fulfilling the goal of developing and implementing actions that increase the empowerment of individuals throughout life. Following the Hate Crimes project, this year a study will be developed to document training in law enforcement and develop a training module guided by the data found on implicit bias.

10-Year Ambition

We face unprecedented social, environmental and economic challenges today and it seems that the vital importance of science, technology and innovation in responding to these challenges has never been more recognized. The way knowledge is produced, distributed and acted upon has to be reinvented to respond to global emergencies and increase the resilience of societies. To have a real impact of what is studied and understood, it is essential to involve the target audience in the construction of knowledge through the citizen science aspect of open science. To invent new innovative ways to address societal challenges, we need to involve those most affected, the citizens themselves.

I intend to continue contributing to improve the connection between science and society, to empower each person and contribute to change.

Life Beyond Teaching and Research

As a psychologist, I am a relational being and even my free time is devoted to people (family and friends). I love to walk. This year I fulfilled an old dream and walked the Portuguese Way of Santiago de Compostela. I have always had a connection to music, I did the basic violin course at the Conservatory and they say I am a good fado singer!