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?
Today 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.
The 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.
In this blog, I will provide you with some (scientifically proven) steps and techniques to change your behaviour.
In 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.
This 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.
The 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.
The 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?