A new year is upon us, and for many of us, this means it is a time of reflection and resolutions. No matter what changes you might want to make, you need to believe you can! Therefore this month theme is centered around mindsets, how you view yourself, your abilities and characteristics.
Anouk Tuijnman talked about Moving Stories on the NOS op 3 Tech Podcast (in Dutch).
Social media have been growing in popularity for years now. As the name implies, the activity is supposed to be social, bringing individuals together and promoting feelings of belonging. However, first glances can be deceiving, and social media have increasingly been associated with another phenomenon taking our 21st century society by storm: loneliness.
Student life is regularly considered as one of the best periods in your life. It usually takes place in vivid and dynamic environments, with lots of opportunities to connect to others, to hang out on the campus or in bars, to play sports together, to go on cultural outings, to exchange ideas, opinions and so on. This provides students with various opportunities for making friends. In fact, one never has to be alone and one could suppose that there is no reason for students to feel lonely. However, that is not what a recent survey on our Radboud campus tells us… One out of four students feels lonely!
It makes me feel comfortable knowing that I can be by myself and enjoy that time on my own, however when I start to frequently choose to be by myself rather than join others out and about am I being self confident or retreating into loneliness?
December is already upon us and the end of the year is just around the corner. Last month’s theme was focused on kindness and prosociality, but this month’s theme looks at what happens when social relationships are lacking; loneliness. Unfortunately, it is a feeling most of us will experience sooner or later.
As the end of this month approaches and a new theme finds its way to our lab, we have decided to celebrate this month's theme - prosociality and kindness - with a Let's Play! In this edition, Anouk, Babet and myself have played a fun yet chaotic cooking game called Overcooked!, in which we venture to conquer the kitchen in our quest to beat the giant meat ball boss.
Yesterday we had the pleasure of welcoming Alan Sanfey from the Decision Neuroscience Lab at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience for a GEMH Talk celebrating this month's theme: prosociality and kindness. While Alan is a psychological scientist by education, he has adopted methods from neuroscience (fMRI) and economics (computational modeling) in order to create a better and more precise understanding of people's behaviours, and in particular people's decision-making. In his talk, Alan has shed some light on different reasons for people to be prosocial and how studies of the brain can disentangle processes that result in the same behaviour but are very different in motivation.
On November 14 Markus Paulus (Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich) gave a lecture at the BSI on the early development of helping, sharing, and comforting in young children. How does prosocial behavior develop? Is early instrumental helping based on other's needs? Or is there another motivation? Why should we even study prosocial behavior?
The majority of popular video games nowadays allow (or even require) multiple players to join in at the same time. More than ever before, gamers are being dropped in virtual worlds together with their friends, family, but also total strangers. What kind of effect does this have on our social behavior?