Two ICS researchers have made stays at Harvard and KU Leuven thanks to research grants.

Carmen Callizo, researcher of the group 'Infinity: family, love and sexuality' and Javier Yániz, predoctoral researcher of the group 'Vínculos, creatividad y cultura' of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra, have carried out research stays at Harvard University (USA) and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), respectively.

Carmen Callizo has traveled to Boston, USA, to work with the Human Flourishing Program and the School of Public Health at Harvard University thanks to a José Castilejo scholarship . "This stay has been a core topic to consolidate and project our line of research on the psychological instructions of forgiveness, a highly developed topic in the United States but still incipient in Spain," she said. Specifically, her research has focused on a dimension of forgiveness hardly treated by psychology: the experience of feeling forgiven by God in Christians. The expert seeks to understand how this experience influences the well-being, mental health and staff flourishing of believers.

During the stay, he worked with the Harvard team on the cross-cultural validation of a scale on 'reconciliation with God' with the goal of facilitating future research to explore its relationship with various psychological variables. This partnership, developed between May and July 2025, has materialized in a scientific article , as well as the development of new lines of partnership, in particular from a Harvard project linked to research of his group at ICS.

According to Callizo, the Human Flourishing Program is a pioneering institution in the study of forgiveness and its impact on mental health from an interdisciplinary perspective, since it combines medicine, psychology, Philosophy and theology. This is something that the researcher appreciates for its interdisciplinary trajectory. In addition, they use rigorous methodologies and advanced statistical techniques to study these phenomena.

Likewise, Callizo has appreciated this experience, which has involved a lot of work but has also allowed her to explore the city and meet many people. He especially thanked his supervisor Dr. Richard Cowden, a social personality psychologist, for his welcome. He also had the opportunity to meet several alumni of the University, such as Soledad Hersey, and to meet again with people he met during his previous stay in the city, such as his former supervisor, Dr. Wesley Wildman, philosopher and theologian.

Mediation in Belgium

Javier Yániz visited the campus of KU Leuven (the Catholic University of Leuven) between April and June 2025 to work with Geert Brône, professor of linguistics and expert in corpus and cognitive linguistics, and the research group Multimodality, Interaction & Discourse (MIDI), who study language and interactions as a social and/or conceptual internship . Thanks to this partnership, Yániz was able to broaden and deepen his research on multimodal analysis in the changes of gaze orientation in penal mediation.

In addition, the predoctoral researcher was able to collaborate with the department of Spanish linguistics of the KU Leuven and with the research group Functional and Cognitive linguistics: Grammar and Typology, focused on cognitive-functional linguistics, and, in particular, with the expert in Spanish linguistics Bert Cornillie. Within the framework these groups, Yániz gave two presentations entitled 'Gesturing during criminal mediation: multimodal routines in conflict management in Spanish' and 'Multimodal interactive routines in criminal mediation'.

For the researcher, the stay was an opportunity to broaden the multimodal approach of his thesis , to dialogue with researchers of reference letter in the study of gaze and gestures, as well as to learn new theoretical and applied perspectives of the study of goal-oriented interaction. "I cannot fail to mention the exquisite, attentive and close attention of Geert Brône and his team," she said.

This stay has been possible thanks to a mobility financial aid from the University of Navarra and the international predoctoral mobility financial aid from the Government of Navarra.