PhD Candidate

Gustavo C. Jesus is a PhD candidate at ASCoR and the Hot Politics Lab, University of Amsterdam. His research examines the neural and affective foundations of partisan bias, combining psychophysiological and behavioral methods to investigate how partisanship shapes cognitive–affective responses to political information. Recent work tested whether out‑group politicians’ faces elicit enhanced preconscious brain activity and whether political stimuli align with patterns observed in group research. He currently employs data‑driven EEG techniques to delineate the temporal neural dynamics of political incongruence. Broadly, his programme integrates affective neuroscience and political psychology to evaluate the hot cognition hypothesis. He completed a bachelor’s in Biology and a master’s in Neurobiology at the University of Porto. He is funded by the MSCA IP‑PAD project, which investigates the development of political attitudes, ideology, and identity, and is supervised by Bert N. Bakker, Gijs Schumacher, and Joe Bathelt.