People

is a political scientist at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on emotional manipulation, disinformation, and propaganda in extended reality (VR/AR/MR), examining how immersive technologies are reshaping political communication and collective memory. She currently leads the project Halbwachs in the Metaverse: Storyliving and democracy in the age of immersive spatial computing (2025–2028), funded by the Kone Foundation. The project maps how virtual reality (VR) is used in political communication, studies user experiences, and develops theory on XR’s democratic potentials for a sustainable media environment. 

Selected publications:

• Kazlauskaitė, R. (2025). A framework for qualitative analysis of non-fiction virtual reality storyworlds. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 24.
• Kazlauskaitė, R. (2025). Pictures in our heads: Politics of space, time, and memory in Polish virtual reality storyworlds. Memory Studies, 18(4), 1004–1018.
• Kazlauskaitė, R. (2023). Virtual reality as a technology of memory: Immersive presence in Polish politics of memory. Memory, Mind & Media, 2, e7.
• Kazlauskaitė, R. (2022). KNOWING IS SEEING: Distance and proximity in affective virtual reality history. Rethinking History, 26(1), 51–70.
• Kazlauskaitė, R. (2022). Embodying ressentimentful victimhood: Virtual reality re-enactment of the Warsaw Uprising in the Second World War Museum in Gdańsk. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 28(6), 699–713.  
   

is a postdoctoral researcher in social psychology at the University of Helsinki. Her work focuses broadly on intergroup relations, with particular emphasis on intergroup contact and the reduction of social inequalities. She investigates these topics primarily through experimental paradigms that use virtual reality.

She is also interested in how emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, can be applied to social psychological research. Matilde currently works on the Kone Foundation-funded , which examines intergroup contact, collective action, and social identity processes in virtual reality. She serves as Human-Computer Interaction Editor at .

Selected Publications:

Tassinari, M., Aulbach, M. B., Harjunen, V. J., Cocco, V. M., Vezzali, L., & Jasinskaja-Lahti, I. (2024). The effects of positive and negative intergroup contact in virtual reality on outgroup attitudes: Testing the contact hypothesis and its mediators. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 27(8), 1773-1798.  

Tassinari, M., Aulbach, M. B., & Jasinskaja-Lahti, I. (2022). The use of virtual reality in studying prejudice and its reduction: A systematic review. PloS one, 17(7), e0270748.

Tassinari, M., Harjunen, V. J., Cocco, V. M., Vezzali, L., & Jasinskaja‐Lahti, I. (2024). The virtual cure for real‐world prejudice? Secondary transfer effects of intergroup contact in virtual reality. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 34(5), e2879.  

Tassinari, M. (2025). Validating AI-Generated Stimuli for Assessing Implicit Weight Bias. In: Brooks, A.L., Banakou, D., Ceperkovic, S. (eds) ArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation. ArtsIT 2024. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 650. Springer, Cham.  

Ville J Harjunen currently works in the Department of Psychology and Logopedics, University of Helsinki where he leads the . Harjunen's research is related to psychophysiology of non-verbal communication of emotions, social cognition and decision-making. His methodological expertise includes EEG, autonomic nervous system measures and virtual reality simulations.

Inga Jasinskaja-Lahti is Professor of Social Psychology at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki (Finland). Her main research interests include intergroup relations with a focus on the social identities and inequalities, prejudice, racism, and discrimination as well as immigrant integration. She is currently leading two projects focusing on intergroup relations among majorities and minorities in real life and virtual reality. In the WP2 of the SRC funded DECA-project, her team focuses on collective epistemic rights and capacities among cultural majority and minority groups in Finland. ERA-VR project (Kone Foundation) is, in turn, designed to investigate intergroup contact, identity processes, and behavioral change during virtual intergroup interactions.

is a doctoral researcher in Social Psychology at the University of Helsinki. His research explores intergroup relations through immersive virtual reality (VR) environments. He examines how social psychological processes operate in VR and how virtual environments can be used to study and better understand social identities and intergroup behavior beyond VR. His work contributes to a deeper understanding of how to foster intergroup relations that are equitable and cohesive in contemporary societies. He conducts this research as part of ERA-VR, a Kone Foundation-funded multidisciplinary initiative that leverages VR to examine and challenge social inequalities through the combined lenses of social sciences and multimodal art.

Selected publications:

Elovainio, R., Tassinari, M., Vezzali, L., Cocco, V. M., & Jasinskaja-Lahti, I. (2025). Exploring the role of collective psychological ownership in cooperative virtual intergroup contact [Manuscript submitted for publication]. 

Szebeni, Z., Jasinskaja-Lahti, I., Elovainio, R., & Martinović, B. (2025). Collective psychological ownership and welfare chauvinism: exploring double standards in Finnish immigration attitudes/Propiedad psicológica colectiva y chovinismo del bienestar: explorando los dobles estándares en las actitudes hacia la inmigración en Finlandia. International Journal of Social Psychology, 02134748251377992.

Szebeni, Z., Elovainio, R. J., Martinović, B., Nijs, T., & Jasinskaja-Lahti, I. (2025). “(The story of) This country is ours!": The territorial and epistemic dimensions of collective psychological ownership among the national majority and immigrants. Advances. in/psychology, 2.