Tibor Polya

Dr. Tibor Polya is an Associate Professor at the Department of Intercultural Psychology and Social Psychology within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Károli Gáspár Reformed University. He also serves as a Senior Research Fellow at the HUN-REN Natural Sciences Research Center, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology. His academic career spans over two decades with significant contributions to social and narrative psychology.

• PhD (2003): Social Psychology, University of Pécs
• MA (1996): Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University
• Habilitation (2021): University of Pécs

Dr. Polya's research focuses on the intersection of social psychology and narrative analysis. His work examines how narrative structures reveal emotional states, cognitive processes, and social identities. He investigates national identity formation through historical narratives, collective victimhood, and emotional intelligence indicators in storytelling. His innovative approach combines traditional psychological methods with computational text analysis to uncover patterns in how people construct meaning through narratives.

Analysis of Dr. Polya's recent publications reveals a consistent focus on narrative psychology applied to social identity, emotional processing, and historical representation. His work demonstrates increasing sophistication in computational narrative analysis methods while maintaining strong theoretical grounding in social psychology. The research spans multiple domains including national identity, collective memory, emotional intelligence, and cognitive dissonance, showing his interdisciplinary approach to understanding human narratives.

• Bolyai Memorial Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2009)

Dr. Polya has supervised several doctoral students including Judith Gabriella Stengel (2024) on transgenerational transmission of national identity and Attila Izso on semantic relationships in projective drawings using large language models. He has served as opponent in numerous doctoral defenses on topics related to national identity, Machiavellian strategy, and legal psychology. His research has been supported by multiple OTKA grants including K 124206 (narrative construction as emotional intelligence indicator), K 81633 (historical trajectory in national identity), and K 109009 (collective victimization in national identity).