In this after-summerbreak’s SYNC Spotlight, Yara Toenders is writing about her project, which is about mood swings in adolescents. You can read it here.
On Friday, 24 June 2022, Jochem Spaans has defended his PhD dissertation, entitled: ‘Happy to Help. Neural mechanisms of vicarious gaining in adolescence’.
Dissertation in short
Prosocial behavior describes those actions that benefit another person, group, or community, without necessarily involving a clear benefit for the actor. During adolescence, children continue to develop social skills such as perspective taking, allowing them to develop healthy relationships and more mature prosocial goals.
In my dissertation, I investigated one element of prosocial behavior that might partly explain why we tend to perform prosocial behavior without a material benefit for ourselves; the experience of positive emotion, or a feeling of reward, when we help others. This experience is often referred to as a vicarious reward or a vicarious gain experience. These experiences are associated with activity in a specific region of the brain, the ventral striatum (i.e., the Nucleus Accumbens), which is also active when obtaining rewards for oneself of a wide variety.
I investigated these vicarious reward experiences in a longitudinal sample of adolescents (investigating the same group for three consecutive years), using fMRI to gain insight in neural activity when adolescents earned money for themselves and for a self-chosen charity.
Two highlighted results: First, whether or not vicarious reward experiences occur when gaining for charity in adolescence is related to individual differences in perspective taking skills and the tendency to donate to charity yourself. Second, the developmental trajectories of activity in the ventral striatum when obtaining rewards for self and charity co-vary with changes in donation behavior and perspective taking over time. This suggests a developmental pattern towards more similar neural activation for self gains and charity gains.
Proud promotors: Eveline Crone & Sabine Peters
Well done, Dr. Jochem!!
In this week’s SYNC Spotlight, Suzanne van de Groep writes about her own experiences in combining her academic career with being a mom and also provides us with some tips to help (future) moms. Read her blogpost here.
In this week’s SYNC Spotlight, Eveline Crone tells us about some results of research during the pandemic and effects on youngsters and adolescents and why it is important to listen to them. Read it here.
In this week’s SYNC Spotlight, Sophie Sweijen tells us about the importance of teamwork during your PhD. Want to find out why she finds this so important? Read her blogpost here.
In this week’s SYNC Spotlight, Mark Mulder tells us about his work on making Open Science easier. Curious how? Read it here.
In this week’s SYNC Spotlight, Karlijn Hermans explains why it is important to motivate children to become curious about science! How can we spark their curiosity and what did they learn in our social lab during #expeditienext? Read it here.
In this week’s SYNC Spotlight, Simone Dobbelaar writes about the importance of in-person conferences. Read her blogpost here.
In this week’s SYNC Spotlight, Mara tells us her favorite things of being a scientist and how this is related to her research interest. Read her blogpost here.
On 5 April 2022, Bianca Westhoff will defend her PhD dissertation, entitled: ‘Learning together: Behavioral, computational, and neural mechanisms underlying social learning in adolescence’.
The overarching goal of this thesis was to examine the behavioral, computational, and neural mechanisms underlying social learning in adolescence. The first aim was to examine developmental patterns across adolescence of two forms of social learning: (1) learning about other people, specifically, whether they are (un)cooperative and (un)trustworthy, and (2) learning for other people (prosocial learning) to know what actions may benefit or help others. A second aim was to examine underlying mechanisms and factors that account for age-related and individual differences in social learning.
The first chapter’s findings point to early-mid adolescence as a developmental window for a rapid change in adaptive social learning, with improvements especially in the cooperative domain.
In the second chapter, the results point to adolescence as a period for developing adaptive social trust learning abilities, which become increasingly flexible from mid-adolescence onward. Yet, one’s family environment may impact adolescent’s adaptive social learning abilities.
These findings in the third chapter point to early-to-mid adolescence as a developmental phase in which adolescents become more open-minded about possible individual differences in other people’s trustworthiness, which allows them to flexibly learn that some people are highly trustworthy while others are not.
The findings from the last chapter show that prosocial learning abilities improve early-to-mid adolescence on both a behavioral, computational, and neural level. The various indices provide a complementary perspective showing that especially learning for others undergoes developmental transitions, consistent with the conclusions of the previous chapters showing that age-related differences are most pronounced for other-oriented behaviors.
Proud promotors: Eveline Crone & Anna van Duijvenvoorde.