Karin Roelofs has been awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for her neurocognitive research into decisions under stress.
ERC Advanced Grants are awarded annually to exceptional, innovative and groundbreaking research. Recipients can use this grant to carry out their research with a team over a period of five years. The ERC Advanced Grant amounts to ¤2.5 million. This year, there were 38.5% more applicants than last year. Across Europe and across all disciplines, 281 researchers have been awarded funding in this round, for a total amount of ¤721 million.
Radboud University has been awarded one grant for HEART2ADAPT, a project led by Karin Roelofs, professor of Experimental Psychopathology at the Behavioural Science Institute and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. Roelofs has previously received two ERC grants: the ERC Starting Grant in 2012 and the ERC Consolidator Grant in 2017.
Making decisions when threatened
Why do some people stay calm and make flexible choices when faced with danger, while others can only freeze or flee? The answer may lie not just in the brain-but also in the body, our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems in particular.
Scientists have long studied how we make decisions under threat. But most research has overlooked a key factor: the balance between two major systems in our body that control stress-our sympathetic system in which the substance noradrenaline enables fast "fight-or-flight" reactions and our parasympathetic system in which the substance acetycholine enables "freeze-and-sample" reactions. During threat, these systems often act at the same time, but their relative balance has a large impact on how we perceive changes in the environment around us. It also has an impact on how our brains compute the optimal decisions to cope with the threat. Ignoring this balance may be why current science struggles to explain altered decision making under threat in healthy people and particularly in patients with anxiety disorders.
The HEART2ADAPT project aims to change that. Roelofs: "For a long time, we thought that anxious individuals were less well able to adapt to continuous changes in our environment. Here we test a radically different view, proposing that patients with anxiety disorders are in fact over-adaptive. Revealing this knowledge is essential to advance our understanding of -and interventions intoanxiety disorders."
Monitoring and directly influencing body and brain activity
By combining new insights from brain science and emotion research, HEART2ADAPT is building a new model to explain how our body’s stress state affects the way we decide to approach or avoid situations. For the first time, researchers will directly measure how the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic arousal shapes real-life decision-making in both healthy and anxious individuals.
HEART2ADAPT will use cutting-edge tools that monitor body and brain activity in real time, such as heart and posture tracking and advanced brain imaging. Additionally, it will test causal effects by using pharmacological interventions that impact the parasympathetic system, but also by leveraging recent innovations in neuromodulation: The team will further develop transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) techniques to target deep neural regions that could not be targeted before in a in a specific and noninvasive fashion. The team will also test whether new treatments that change how the body and brain communicate can help people with anxiety disorders make better decisions under pressure.
