Staff Catalogue

MARIA IOANNOU

MARIA IOANNOU
+357 22 892068
...
LECTURER
Department of Psychology
FEB 01 - Faculty of Economics and Management, B203
University Campus

Maria Ioannou holds a degree in Psychology (University of Cyprus) and a master's in Psychological Research Methods (University of Oxford). She undertook her doctoral studies in the field of Social Psychology at the University of Oxford as a Commonwealth Scholar. Upon her PhD completion, she returned to the University of Cyprus for two postdoctoral research fellowships and a year-long period of working as a senior researcher at the civil society sector. From 2016 to 2023 she worked first as lecturer and then as assistant professor at the Liberal Arts and Sciences programme of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. She is currently coordinating an Erasmus + funded project entitled Digitizing the Tales of a City sharing the Wisdom of the Other (DigiFolk), an interdisciplinary project aiming at producing story-based interventions targetting host societies's attitudes towards marginalised communities inhabiting different European cities. She has published her work in international refereed journals such as the Journal of Experimental Psychology (JESP), Group Processes and Intergroup Relations (GPIR), and Journal of Applied Social Psychology (JASP). She is currently serving as an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Social Psychology.

My interests lie predominantly in the social psychological study of intergroup relations; more specifically the study of  prejudice and prejudice reduction. I have worked on creating and evaluating interventions aiming at prejudice reduction drawing on the framework of intergroup contact (the positive interaction between members of opposing groups). I have been particularly interested in examining the affordances of indirect (non face-to-face) contact including imagined contact, vicarious contact, and mediated contact in reducing prejudice. While my research has mostly focused on ethno-religious conflicts and especially the one between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus, I am currently expanding my scope to include other intergroup relations such as the ones between host-society members and migrants. I am also interested in intergroup emotions, especially negative intergroup emotions elicited in intergroup encounters, and what their ramifications are for intergroup relations.

Counihan, M., Ioannou, M., de Ruiter, N. (2024). It’s easier to see what’s missing: How migration shapes activist self-identity in international students. In Rose-Redwood, C. & Rose-Redwood, R. (Eds). International Student Activism and the Politics of Higher Education. Rowman & Littlefield.

Avraamidou, M., & Ioannou, M. (2022). Migrants as 'pawns': Antimigrant debates on Twitter and their affinity to European border politics and discourses. European Journal of Cultural Studies. DOI: 10.1177/13675494221120838.

Avraamidou, M., Ioannou, M., & Eftychiou, E. (2021) “Innocent” hashtags? A cautionary tale. The #IStandWithGreece as a network of intolerance in Twitter during a land border crisis. International Journal of Communication, 15, 2849-2869.

Ioannou, M., Boot, M., Wittingslow, R., & Mattos, A. (2021). Patriotism and nationalism as two distinct ways of loving one’s country. In Cushing, S. (Ed,) New philosophical essays on love and loving. Palgrave MacMillan.

Ioannou, M. & Panagiotou, E. (2020). Opening the black box of contact: Unravelling the ways through which positive contact is imagined in a post-conflict context. Journal of Community & Applied Psychology, 30, 660-672.

Ioannou, M. (2019). The week after: Do the effects of imagined contact last over time? Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 49, 459-470.

Ioannou, M., & Kassianos, A. P. (2018). The development of prejudice in children: Concepts and arguments and the case of Cyprus. In Kyritsi, T. & Nikolaou, P. (Eds). A History of Nationalisms in Cyprus: Identity, Politics, Gender and Class. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kadianaki, I., Avraamidou, M., Ioannou, M., & Panagiotou, E. (2018). Understanding media debate around migration: The relation between favorable and unfavorable representations of migration in the Greek Cypriot press. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 24, 407-415.

Ioannou, M., Hewstone, M., Al Ramiah, A. (2018). An experimental comparison of direct and indirect types of contact. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 393-403.

Žeželj, L. I., Ioannou, M., Psaltis, C., Franc, R., & Martinovic, B. (2017). The role of inter-ethnic online friendships in prejudice reduction: Evidence from Cyprus, Serbia, and Croatia. Computers in Human Behaviour, 76, 386-395.