💬 WhatsApp & Signal
Note that WhatsApp and Signal group links for a given society or network will only be posted approximately two days before a conference starts, and be removed and deactivated approximately two days after that conference ends.
Currently, HPSS hosts these links for the following groups:
- ARPH: the Association for Research in Psychology & Health
- EHPS: the European Health Psychology Society
This page also has the history of the EHPS WhatsApp groups.
Groups
These are social groups that enable health psychologists to conveniently communicate during and in between conferences.
Note that the HPSS Code of Conduct applies to participation in these groups.
ARPH
There is currently one ARPH-related Signal group and one ARPH-related WhatsApp group. Links to these groups will appear here approximately two days before the conference starts.
- ARPH Social: This group is for all social talk and coordination, for example to share your location when you’re having drinks in the evening, so others know where to come to join 🍻💃
EHPS
There are currently six EHPS-related Signal groups and seven EHPS-related WhatsApp groups. The WhatsApp groups have been subsumed into a WhatsApp community in the summer of 2025. To join that community, use the link that will appear here approximately two days before the conference starts. Signal groups are joined separately; also with links that will appear the list below approximately two days before the conference starts.
- EHPS Nightlife talk: the original group (see the history below 🙂), meant to coordinate social meet-ups. Use it to share your location when you’re having drinks in the evening, so others know where to come to join 🍻💃 Or, if you want to meet up with people, ask where people are, and groups out in the city can let you know!
EHPS Daylife talk: this group is a spin-off from the original group created just after the original group exceeded 250 participants (just after EHPS 2022 in Bratislava). It mostly serves the same purpose as the Nightlife talk group, but for people who prefer their social events during, well, daytime, or at least the early evening ☕
EHPS Work talk: a group meant for work-related stuff: asking advise, sharing vacancies, that kind of stuff.
EMPOWER 💪🔌⚡: EMPOWER is the European network for early career & Mid-career researchers in health PsychOlogy focusing on Well-being & Empowerment of Researchers. This is the main group to meet each other and socialize. For more information, see https://ehps.net/about-empower.
EHPS Behavior Change: a group specifically to discuss behavior change-related stuff.
EHPS SciOps talk: a group specifically about SciOps (scientific operations, i.e. the operational side of doing science). Basically a group about designing and building the health psychology science infrastructure of the future! 🤖🚀💻
EHPS Corona talk: a group for pandemic-related discussions.
EHPS Conference Announcements: this group was created to enable collecting all announcements about the EHPS conference in a given year in one place, as well as avoiding spamming people who don’t attend the EHPS conference. Being an announcement group, to make sure that announcements don’t get lost in the chat history, by default only admins can post. Also, Local Organizers are admins of this group as well, not only HPSS community admins (i.e., the AWESOME people).
History
In 2016, GJ & Rik created an EHPS WhatsApp group (originally called “EHPS Social talk”, now called “EHPS Nightlife talk”) to facilitate meeting up at night (both ending up at the same bar with all groups, and for first-timers to easily come to the bars where the EHPS crew is hanging out).
Over the years, three spin-off groups were created, and the original group kept steadily growing, and is now over 200 members. This means we’ll probably need to think about some way to prevent abuse, and how to circumvent / deal with the maximum number of member limits for the WhatsApp groups.
Originally, the idea was to kind of try to only have EHPS members in the group, and so we didn’t share the WhatsApp group URL. However, these have been shared now anyway, so we might as well make it easy for people to find all the links to all the groups, which is why they were added to this document 🙂