Irini Mavrou

Dr Irini Mavrou is a faculty member at Universidad Antonio de Nebrija, Spain, where she belongs to the School of Language and Education in the area of General Linguistics. She is an active researcher in two institutional groups: CINC Nebrija Research Center on Cognition and LAELE Nebrija Research Group on Linguistics Applied to the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Education:

• PhD, Universidad Antonio de Nebrija, 2015 – Thesis: Memoria operativa y complejidad cognitiva en la expresión escrita de aprendientes griegos de ELE (Working memory and cognitive complexity in the written expression of Greek learners of Spanish as a foreign language)

Research interests lie at the intersection of cognitive linguistics, second-language acquisition, and emotion research. She investigates how working memory capacity and emotional intelligence modulate L2 writing performance, the ways bilinguals and heritage speakers verbalise emotions across their languages, and how foreign-language medium influences moral judgements and social evaluations.

Across her publications, a clear trend emerges: rigorous experimental designs (behavioural and mixed-methods) are applied to authentic populations—immigrant learners, heritage adolescents, and multilingual adults—in order to understand the cognitive and affective variables that shape language use. The work spans pragmatic impoliteness, moral psychology, heritage language maintenance, and pedagogical interventions for vulnerable groups such as minors in foster care.

Scientific awards: None explicitly mentioned in the provided text.

Doctoral supervision & research leadership: While her own 2015 thesis was supervised by Dr Cecilia Ainciburu and Dr Angeliki Alexopoulou, she now participates in the training of new scholars within Nebrija’s doctoral programmes and research groups, though specific advisee names are not listed.

Laboratories & teams: Dr Mavrou carries out her research within CINC (Nebrija Research Center on Cognition) and the LAELE group, both of which provide psycholinguistic testing facilities, eye-tracking, and writing-process technologies for experimental studies.