ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Belief systems research is vital for understanding democratic politics, extremism, and political decision-making. What is the basic structure of belief systems? Clear answers to this fundamental question are not forthcoming. This is due to flaws in the conceptualization of belief systems. The state-of-the-art treats a belief system as a theoretical latent variable that causes people’s responses on attitudes and values relevant to the belief system. This approach cannot assess a belief system because it cannot assess the network of connections between the beliefs–attitudes and values–that make up the system; it collapses across them and the interrelationships are lost. The Belief Systems Project conceptualizations belief systems as systems of interconnecting attitudes and values. I conceptualize attitudes and values as interactive nodes in a network that are analysed with network analyses. With these conceptual and empirical tools, I can understand the structure and dynamics of the belief system and will be able to avoid theoretical pitfalls common in belief system assessments. This project will move belief systems research beyond the state-of-the-art in four ways by: 1. Mapping the structure of systems of attitudes and values, something that is not possible using current methods. 2. Answering classic questions about central concepts and clustering of belief systems. 3. Modeling within-person belief systems and their variations, so that I can make accurate predictions about partisan motivated reasoning. 4. Testing how external and internal pressures (e.g., feelings of threat) change the underlying structure and dynamics of belief systems. Using survey data from around the world, longitudinal panel studies, intensive longitudinal designs, experiments, and text analyses, I will triangulate on the structure of political belief systems over time, between countries, and within individuals.

1 496 944 €

Start date: 2018-07-01, End date: 2023-06-30

Positive peer experiences are crucial for young people’s health and wellbeing. Accordingly, multiple studies (including my own) have described long-term negative psychological and behavioral consequences when adolescents’ peer relationships are dysfunctional. Paradoxically, knowledge on adult social consequences of adolescent peer experiences –relationships with others a decade later - is much less extensive. Informed by social learning and attachment theory, I tackle this gap and investigate whether and how peer experiences are transmitted to other social contexts, and intergenerationally, i.e., passed on to the next generation. My aim is to shed light on how the “ghosts from peer past” affect young adults’ relationships and their children. To this end, I examine longitudinal links between adolescent peer and young adult close relationships and test whether parents’ peer experiences affect offspring’s peer experiences. Psychological functioning, parenting, temperament, genetic, and epigenetic transmission mechanisms are examined separately and in interplay, which 1) goes far beyond the current state-of-the-art in social development research, and 2) significantly broadens my biosocially oriented work on genetic effects in the peer context. My plans utilize data from the TRAILS (Tracking Adolescents’ Individual Lives’ Survey) cohort that has been followed from age 11 to 26. To study intergenerational transmission, the TRAILS NEXT sample of participants with children is substantially extended. This project uniquely studies adult social consequences of peer experiences and, at the same time, follows children’s first steps into the peer world. The intergenerational approach and provision for environmental, genetic, and epigenetic mediation put this project at the forefront of developmental research and equip it with the potential to generate the knowledge needed to chase away the ghosts from the peer past.

1 464 846 €

Start date: 2018-02-01, End date: 2023-01-31

In dementia at the end of life, cognitive and physical decline imply that control is typically lost. CONT-END will examine control in the context of three emerging interventions which contain a controversial element of striving for control in the process of dying with dementia: advance care planning of the end of life, use of new technology to monitor symptoms when unable to self-report, and euthanasia. To perform outstanding research, the proposed research examines control at the level of clinical practice, but also at the level of end-of-life research practice. The latter provides ample opportunities for researchers to control the research process. That is, research designs are often flexible and we will study if and how this impacts research in an emotionally charged area. I will take an empirical mixed-methods approach to study the two practices in parallel. The work is organised in three related Work Packages around three research questions. (1) In a 6-country study, I will examine if and when people with dementia, family caregivers and physicians (900 respondents) find the interventions, shown on video, acceptable. (2) A cluster-randomised 3-armed controlled trial in 279 patients and their family caregivers assesses effects of two types of advance care planning differing in level of control (detailed advance treatment orders versus goal setting and coping based) on outcomes ranging from favourable to less favourable, and whether effects differ in subgroups. Cases in which the technology is preferred or applied are observed. (3) Ethnographic fieldwork in two different end-of-life research practices and a Delphi study to synthesize CONT-END’s findings assess how researchers shape findings. This greatly improves the quality of CONT-END and provides the input to develop new methodology for improving research quality and integrity.

1 988 972 €

Start date: 2018-12-01, End date: 2023-11-30

How did three soldiers override their initial freezing response to overpower an armed terrorist in the Thalys-train to Paris in 2015? This question is relevant for anyone aiming to optimize approach-avoidance (AA) decisions during threat. It is particularly relevant for patients with anxiety disorders whose persistent avoidance is key to the maintenance of their anxiety. Computational psychiatry has made great progress in formalizing how we make (mal)adaptive decisions. Current models, however, largely ignore the transient psychophysiological state of the decision maker. Parasympathetic state and flexibility in switching between para- and sympathetic states are directly related to freezing, and are known to bias AA-decisions toward avoidance. The central aim of this research program is to forge a mechanistic understanding of how we compute AA-decisions on the basis of those psychophysiological states, and to identify alterations in anxiety patients in order to guide new personalized neurocognitive interventions into their persistent avoidance. I will develop a neurocomputational model of AA-decisions that accounts for transient psychophysiological states, in order to define which decision parameters are altered in active and passive avoidance in anxiety. I will test causal premises of the model using state-of-the-art techniques, including pharmacological and electrophysiological interventions. Based on these insights I will for the first time apply personalized brain stimulation to anxiety patients. Clinically, this project should open the way to effective intervention with fearful avoidance in anxiety disorders that rank among the most common, costly and persistent mental disorders. Theoretically, conceptualizing transient psychophysiological states as causal factor in AA-decision models is essential to understanding passive and active avoidance. Optimizing AA-decisions also holds broad societal relevance given currently increased fearful avoidance of outgroups.

2 000 000 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31