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Cooperation is a cornerstone of human societies, but there are many instances in which it breaks down—from minor daily conflicts to large-scale challenges such as human-caused environmental degradation. Researchers across multiple disciplines—social psychology, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology—have identified mechanisms that can promote cooperation and help avert ‘tragedies of the commo...
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Very preterm birth has a long-lasting impact on the functioning of survivors in a wide range of developmental domains. While the survival rates for very preterm birth have greatly improved over the last decades, parallel improvements of neurodevelopmental outcomes failed to occur. As such, increasing numbers of very preterm born infants grow up with impairments, requiring support throughout child...
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Understanding and preventing discrimination in children’s helping behaviour Social psychologist Jellie Sierksma examines how children help peers from different ethnic backgrounds and tests the consequences of receiving differential helping from peers. She also proposes and tests an intervention for reducing biases in children’s inter-ethnic helping. Her research is pivotal to preventing the negat...
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This dissertation focuses on two interrelated concepts: (1) the role of statistical learning in visual selection (Chapters 2-9), and (2) the role of attention in visual working memory (Chapters 10-14). Visual working memory, visual attention, and statistical learning are closely related topics in cognitive science.
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ADHD is a relatively common disorder in child and adolescent psychiatry. Although much research has been and is being done into ADHD, findings in the areas of neurocognitive functioning and of the brain are still unclear. A possible explanation for this may be that in earlier research (almost) none of the studies took one of the most common comorbid disorders into account: ODD, oppositional defia...
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Francesca Righetti (Social Psychology) was awarded a VIDI-grant by N.W.O. for her proposal titled "Torn between love and contempt: Ambivalence in close relationships". It is an irony of life that the people we love the most, such as our romantic partners, are also the people towards which we can feel very strong negative emotions. When people hold strong mixed feelings (positive and negative) ...
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Social interactions in health and psychosis Patients with psychosis often show problems in social interactions with other people. The dissertation entitled ‘Social interactions in health and psychosis’ examines the neural mechanisms underlying social decision making in adolescents with a first-episode psychosis, in patients at clinical high-risk and in health, using the trust game and the social ...
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Organizational neuroscience is an emerging field in management and organizational behavior that studies the role of brain and cognition in workplace behavior. The aim of this annual IBBA-symposium is to investigate how neuroscience and its methodological toolkit (from brain imaging to hormonal studies and AI) can advance theory and research organizational behavior in practice. The symposium is am...
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Mechanisms of Symptom Formation in Psychosis Psychosis is ahighly heterogeneous disorder, consisting of loose clusters of varioussymptoms, which differ in terms of severity, frequency and course. This poses achallenge for research on psychosis. The thesis entitled ‘Mechanisms of SymptomFormation in Psychosis’ was aimed at examining mechanisms of symptom formationat different levels of the ...
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An NWO-ORA grant called ‘The Active Observer’ was awarded to Eli Brenner (Human Movement Sciences VU) together with Katja Fiehler (Justus-Liebig-University Gießen) and Simon Rushton (Cardiff University). The topic of the project is how active observers deal with the continuously changing retinal images that arise from their own movements? Their hypothesis is that this depends on the task. They wil...
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