About the institute

The Institute of Psychology of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) is a prestigious research institute with a history spanning nearly six decades and shaping academic psychology in the Czech Republic. Although the institute employs only 5% of psychologists engaged in research in the Czech Republic, its staff produce 24% of the country's academic output  in the top 10% most-cited journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database. The average number of international publications cited in WOS per researcher employed by the Institute of Psychology is higher than in other important psychology research institutes in the Czech Republic (Area comment in module 2 of evaluation according to Methodics 17+ in FORD, 5.1 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences).

The institute focuses on research in areas broadly outlined by the names of its departments, that is, Personality and Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, and Methodology of Psychological Research. At the national level, the institute formulates recommended approaches to  statistical analysis, as well as to the analysis of qualitative data and data obtained from experimental instruments, and plays a prominent role in the verification and standardisation of psychometric instruments.

Since 2010, the Institute of Psychology of the CAS has been active in more than 70 grant projects, both in basic research (mainly supported by the Czech Science Foundation) and in applied research (Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, projects which are part of the Czechia’s Recovery and Resilience Plan and Programme Johannes Amos Comenius. The institute also participates in international grants and projects (Horizon 2020 G-VERSITY project, collaboration COST IS-1406, and others). In applied research, the institute focuses on the creation of both diagnostic methods and intervention approaches. Researchers of the institute often publish jointly with colleagues from abroad, for instance from Germany, USA, Great Britain, Austria, but also other countries.

The Institute of Psychology of the CAS has its headquarters in Brno and a branch of comparable size in Prague. The institute is divided into three departments:

• The Department of Personality and Social Psychology focuses on investigating the conditions of adaptive human psychological and social functioning across the lifespan. Studies conducted at this department tend to use longitudinal and experimental designs. The focus of the department (the study of psychological factors contributing to adaptive adjustment), its methods (longitudinal studies, experiments, cross-cultural studies), and design (qualitative, quantitative, mixed, patchwork) reflect current conceptual trends in the field.
• The Department of Cognitive Psychology studies the processes, states, and contents of the human mind as it perceives and interprets the external and internal world. It contributes to current knowledge in human perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, and consciousness. The department also conducts high-quality experimental research on visual attention and eye movements, sensory deprivation and changes in perception, visual space perception, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and methods that use experimental instruments.
  
  
• The Department of Methodology of Psychological Research focuses on developing methods used in psychology research, as well as methods that can enrich psychology as an applied scientific discipline. These include, for instance, methods for statistical data analysis, original approaches to qualitative data analysis, and the development of psychometric and psychodiagnostic methods and tools.

Researchers working at the Institute of Psychology of CAS are experienced in a wide range of observation-based and experimental methods in psychology and in the collection, evaluation, and statistical analyses of data. The institute also includes as a separate unit the Laboratory of behavioural and linguistic studies (LABELS) in Prague, which has the requisite technological and organisational facilities and experience to conduct research in a number of areas of cognitive and developmental psychology. The laboratory’s facilities include instruments and technology for tracking eye movements or for testing infants and toddlers by habituation and preference-based methods. Other equipment of the laboratory includes a functional near-infrared spectroscope system for monitoring cortical activity, and an encephalograph. The experience of experts who work there also extends to an evaluation of EEG signal in the form of event-related potentials.