The placebo effect is more than just a sugar pill. The social context plays an important role in reinforcing beliefs about the treatment.
The placebo effect is often used to describe instances where improvements occur as a result of personal beliefs and expectations rather than active ingredients of a treatment. But what exactly does the placebo effect entail? How can it be explained? and why is it important to take into account?
In this blog we explore the potential of video games that respond to signals from the player's body, i.e. biofeedback games. Specifically, we discuss whether they can help people to become more aware of their body and to effectively regulate their emotions.
Why are mindsets important, how do they relate to (mental) health and can mindsets be changed?
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?
In this blog, I will provide you with some (scientifically proven) steps and techniques to change your behaviour.
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.
GEMH-lab will be at INDIGO 2017 to showcase the amazing VR game DEEP, so come and say hi!
Last week, my colleague Marieke van Rooij and myself ran and managed a study in the midst of Cinekid’s Medialab. This project turned out to be more ambitious than we had anticipated, but I think we pulled it off quite well. That said, I think a moment of reflection is warranted to go over all the choices and good fortune which facilitated our project’s success. All the materials mentioned here are available for download.