Research at Webster Vienna

Dr. Ronald Hochreiter has been invited to present at the annual ARS Investment Funds Conference in June 2021. The event is targeted towards professionals in the fields of banking, law, and accounting, among others. Dr. Hochreiter’s keynote address, “AI, Fintech & Asset Management”, will give context to investing in current market conditions considering ongoing regulatory developments, economic megatrends, and the effect of AI on asset management.

Dr. Hochreiter is thrilled to have the opportunity to share his knowledge on the cutting-edge issues effecting today’s business decisions. He will be joined by several leaders in the field of finance and investment from Austria and abroad, including WVPU adjunct instructor, Dr. Armin Kammel.

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Faculty - Business and Management

Faculty and Staff

Panel Discussion at WVPU published in “Le Grand Continent”

Following the Online Panel Discussion “The European Commission: The political engine room of European integration?” organized by the International Relations Department at WVPU, the debate featuring Prof. Frédéric Mérand and Prof. Dr. Martin Selmayr was now published by the magazine “Le Grand Continent”. The magazine features geopolitical, European and legal issues as well as intellectual and artistic debate and is a project founded by the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In case you missed the online event you now have the chance to follow-up on the discussion which is available both in English and in French.

• English version
• French version

The online panel discussion, moderated by Prof. Dr. Jozef Bátora, took place on April 14, 2021.

Commentary on recent protests in Russia

Anatoly Reshetnikov, Assistant Professor at WVPU’s International Relations Department, and his co-author Tobias Spöri from the University of Vienna have published a commentary on the Russian protests that took place in January 2021. In their analysis, commissioned by the Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association, Reshetnikov and Spöri conclude that there is little hope for success of the democratic protest movement in Russia, as the opportunity structures for protest remain narrow. Russian political elites form a single-pyramid network with a ‘chief patron’ on top, elections are neither free nor fair, the uncoopted opposition does not have real allies in power, while the regime’s capacity and propensity to repression is graphically demonstrated at every unsanctioned protest.

However, there are still reasons for hope. First, Russia’s information landscape is changing irreversibly as the tightly state-controlled television is losing its audience, while the share of social media users is growing day by day. Second, the leading Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny and his team have managed to drastically increase their visibility and popularity in the recent years, despite the unceasing pressure and assaults exercised by the Kremlin. Finally, the newly adopted smart mobilization strategies, such as neighbourhood assemblies and online protest mapping, may bear fruit and help the uncoopted opposition to mobilise more effectively.

Click here to read the full commentary.

Franco Algieri has published an evaluation of the EU’s China policy in the Yearbook of European Integration 2020. In light of ongoing controversies in EU-China relations, the article deals with the re-orientation of the EU’s strategy towards China.

Franco Algieri: Die Europäische Union und China, in : Weidenfeld, W./Wessels, W. (Hrsg.), Jahrbuch der Europäischen Integration 2020. Baden-Baden. Nomos, 2020, 371-376.

Faculty - International Relations

Faculty and Staff

"Fighting Censorship: A Shift from Freedom to Diversity"

In April, Anthony Löwstedt’s "Fighting Censorship: A Shift from Freedom to Diversity" was published as the opening chapter of Media and Law: Between Free Speech and Censorship, edited by Mathieu Deflem and Derek Silva. It is a conceptual investigation into some of the most pressing regulatory communication problems of our time.

Drawing on his professional experience of working to counteract, contain, and minimize censorship, having worked for over ten years for the International Press Institute and the United Nations Development Programme, Dr. Löwstedt explores what must, should, and should not be said in the public sphere of information, ideas, opinions, and tastes. The chapter develops a theoretical framework for combating censorship not only with the legal concept of liberty, but, increasingly, with the principles of cultural and media diversity. A wide range of censorship is considered, from hard to soft, to self-censorship. In a chaotic, post-Cold War world of digital media ubiquity, alternative facts, inflammatory hate speech, fake news, media ownership concentration, corporate censorship, copyright censorship, and rampant plagiarism, the frontlines have relocated and transformed, and neither libertarian nor liberal principles are going to be sufficient to regulate the media in ways that will keep censorship in check. The chapter also builds a bridge to a closely related kind of activism, namely for biodiversity. Following an historical analysis of the development of the concept of freedom, he argues that the wider ideal of promoting biocultural diversity will be needed as a prioritized principle beside, and not behind, liberty, equality, and human rights.     

Dr. Löwstedt has been invited to present this new approach to censorship and communication values in mid-July at the annual conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research. The conference, originally scheduled to be held in Nairobi, has since switched to an online format, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Löwstedt, A. (2021). Fighting Censorship: A Shift from Freedom to Diversity. In Deflem, M. and Silva, D.M.D. (Ed.) Media and Law: Between Free Speech and Censorship (Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Vol. 26), Emerald Publishing, Bingley, UK, pp. 9-23. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1521-613620210000026002  

Faculty - Strategic Communication

Faculty and Staff

Using facial behavior to predict psychological maladjustment

Previous research suggests the existence of connections between nonverbal behavior and emotional processes. Given the association between emotion and psychological disorders, nonverbal behavior may be relevant cues of the processes underlying psychopathology. In an attempt to corroborate this idea, we investigated the relationships between facial behavior and psychological maladjustment.

Dyadic interviews were conducted in the CanBeLab in which participants discussed a series of events in relation to fundamental life situations. These interviews were recorded with cameras and microphones and the video recordings were used in automatic facial behavior analyses. Scores obtained on the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS) were taken as measures of an individual’s maladjustment. Correlation analyses revealed a number of moderate negative associations between facial behavior and self-reported depression and stress, suggesting that individuals who scored high on the depression subscale of the DASS tended to be less expressive facially.

The variability of facial behavior over time was also negatively correlated with scores on the stress subscale. People displaying low variation in facial behavior reported feeling more stressed. All in all, the idea that facial behavior can be used as an indicator of maladjustment processes is supported by our data and further research will examine whether these associations hold for other expressive modalities such as vocal and bodily cues. This research suggest that systematic measurements of nonverbal behavior appear to be valuable in the assessment of psychopathology, which makes it particularly relevant for the practice of counseling and psychotherapy. 
 
This study was part of Ielyzaveta Golovina's Senior Thesis research, supervised by Dr. Marc Méhu. The data used in this research was partly collected by students of the MA in Psychology with an emphasis in Counseling Psychology within the remit of the course Applied Statistics and Research Methods in Spring 2019.                      

Faculty - Psychology 

Faculty and Staff