13th September 2026
The 40th Annual Conference of the European Health Psychology Society (EHPS 2026), held in Pafos, Cyprus, 1–5 September 2026, was a landmark event for the Behavioural Science in Health Lab both for the science we contributed and for the privilege of helping to bring the conference home.
Organising the conference
Our Lab Director, Angelos Kassianos, served as Chair of the Local Organising Committee (LOC) for EHPS 2026, leading the organisational effort to host this major European conference in Cyprus for the first time. Laura Panagi also served as an LOC member, contributing to the conference’s smooth delivery. Dr. Kassianos additionally served on the Scientific Committee, helping to shape the programme.
The conference opened with a ceremony that underscored the significance of health psychology at the national level. HE Neophytos Charalambides, Minister of Health of the Republic of Cyprus, and Marios Charalambides, Patient Ombudsman, both honoured the audience with formal greetings, a recognition of the field’s importance and a meaningful mark of institutional support for the work that health psychologists do across Europe.
EHPS 2026 also marked the end of Dr. Kassianos’ four-year term on the EHPS Executive Committee, where he served as Grants Officer and Special Interest Groups (SIG) Liaison, roles through which he supported the society’s research funding activities and its network of specialist communities across European health psychology.
BSiH presentations
Angelos Kassianos presented in the symposium “The Journey from Cancer Diagnosis to Survivorship”, with a talk on “Multimodal deep learning to estimate quality of life in advanced cancer patients”, sitting at the intersection of AI and health psychology and reflecting the lab’s growing work in digital health innovation for oncology.
Athina Manoli delivered an oral presentation on “Attentional biases toward health-threat stimuli: Eye-tracking evidence from a dot-probe paradigm” presenting new empirical work using eye-tracking methodology to understand how people process health-threatening information.
Veronica Hadjipanayi presented a scoping review on “Models and Practices of Psychosocial Oncology Care Provision in EU countries” as part of the DESIPOC project mapping the current landscape of psychosocial cancer care across Europe.
Pania Kalou, who interned with the Lab, also took the stage to present her dissertation research a proud moment for the whole team.
Collaborator contributions
The conference also featured important contributions from researchers in our wider network. Paula Proestou (CSI collaborator) presented a poster on “Factors associated with mental health outcomes in adults with cancer: A systematic review” connected to the DESIPOC programme.
Andrie Panayiotou, a collaborator through the PERFECTO project, presented on “Developing a Personalized Communication Model to Enhance Risk Communication in Inherited Dyslipidemias in Cyprus”.
Finally, Nicos Middleton, a long-standing collaborator, delivered a keynote address at the conference.
Looking ahead
EHPS 2026 was a reminder of how much health psychology has to offer at the intersection of evidence, practice, and community and how much the lab has grown. We are proud of every team member who contributed, presented, and engaged across the five days. Watch this space for outputs from the conference and the research it showcased.
