News & Updates
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November GEMH Talk by Alan Sanfey | Prosocial motivations in the brain
Nastasia Griffioen - 29-11-2017Yesterday 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.
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Early development of prosocial behavior
Anouk Tuijnman - 27-11-2017On 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?
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Toxicity and prosociality in online games
Geert Verheijen - 23-11-2017The 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?
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The Social Brain and Its Importance
Nastasia Griffioen - 13-11-2017Today is World Kindness Day, an international observance dedicated to promoting kindness, understanding and helping among people. To illustrate the importance of kindness and prosociality, I'd like to take this opportunity to tell you something about the 'social brain hypothesis', a theory that posits that social needs are even more essential to human beings than any other physical need, and that our brains reflect this.
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Examining Social Support in Guild Wars 2
Ken Koontz - 09-11-2017The GEMH Lab explores if we can make a player engage challenging situations confident that other players would help them personally. We chose the MMORPG Guild Wars 2 to examine how its unique combat system, map exploration and character progression could create a context for the player to experience personalized social support.
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How to change your own behaviour?
Aniek Wols - 26-10-2017In this blog, I will provide you with some (scientifically proven) steps and techniques to change your behaviour.
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Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) at school
Aniek Wols - 12-10-2017In September, Mariska Kool and Erna Terpstra visited the GEMH Lab. Mariska and Erna are involved in a very special project; they teach children by using Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) games.
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Smoking cessation among youth and young adults
Hanneke Scholten - 12-10-2017This month's theme is smoking cessation and behavior change. We are looking forward to share our activities and thoughts and to start a discussion with the community.
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Play is evolutionarily and developmentally important
Isabela Granic - 26-09-2017The study of the benefits of playing video games may be relatively new, but the positive function of play more generally has been an important field of study for a long time in developmental psychology.
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What About Cyberbullying?
Geert Verheijen - 22-09-2017The current week marks the official ‘Anti-bullying Week’ here in the Netherlands, and this year’s theme is Online Bullying. Should we be worried about cyberbullying?