Four researchers at Radboud University will receive a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). They will receive a grant of up to 1.5 million euros, which will allow them the opportunity to form their own research groups and expand on their research.
ERC Starting Grants are awarded annually to talented young scientists with more than two but less than seven years of experience since completion of their PhD. The recipients at Radboud University will be doing research into lies in politics, social anxiety, neuropsychiatric disorders, and molecular collisions.
SocialDynamics
Saskia Koch, Donders Institute
Social anxiety (SA) has a profound impact on social functioning, but there is limited understanding of how SA individuals navigate the challenges of everyday social situations. These challenges consist of deciding how to communicate with others and how to regulate emotions evoked by those interactions, often under time-pressure and swiftly changing demands. Yet, the field has largely neglected the dynamic and socially interactive character of the challenges faced by SA individuals.
This project builds on Koch’s conceptual innovation: SA should be studied where it matters most, during dynamic social interactions, considering emotion regulation decisions. It also builds on her methodological expertise: measuring neural dynamics during communication. These innovative backgrounds allow her to now develop a new neurocognitive framework for understanding the challenges SA individuals face when dealing with the communicative and emotional demands of social interactions. Explaining the social challenges that SA individuals face in daily live will move the field beyond traditional approaches unable to capture the dynamics of typically changing social situations.
DEMO-LIES
Maurits Meijers, Institute for Management Research
In today’s age of ’misinformation’, politicians are frequently accused of bending the truth to their advantage. As citizens rely on accurate and accessible information to meaningfully engage with politics, political lying violates the contract between citizens and their elected representatives. Political lying accusations therefore have the potential to erode citizens’ trust in and commitment to representative democracy as a system of governance.
While political lying accusations may be as old as politics itself, we know little about when accusations of political lying take root, how accusations of political deception are perceived by citizens, and what their effects are on citizens’ democratic citizenship. This project will shed light on the issue of political lying accusations and its implications for democratic citizenship. By addressing these critical knowledge gaps, this project will provide invaluable insights into the dynamics of political deception and its consequences for democratic citizenship.
IQ-SCORES
Jolijn Onvlee, Institute for Molecules and Materials
It is a long-held dream of physical chemists to explore and ultimately control interactions between individual molecules and atoms at the full quantum level. Crossed-molecular-beam methods combined with recent technology allow for highly-detailed experimental studies of molecular collisions. Yet, achieving fully-controlled reactive collision experiments with predetermined outcomes still remains an immense challenge, requiring control and detection of all relevant reactant and product parameters. Onvlee’s world-unique crossed-beam setup combining Zeeman deceleration and velocity map imaging would enable us to finally tackle this challenge, when combined with recent cutting-edge technologies. This setup has been used successfully to perform high-resolution inelastic collision studies, and we recently started investigating reactive scattering. Onvlee proposes to perform the first fully-controlled reaction experiment with predetermined outcomes. To this end, she will upgrade the IMM’s setup to reach collision energies as low as 6 mK, implement laser alignment for manipulating reactant orientations, and employ 3D imaging for detecting product orientations.
IQ-SCORES promises profound insight into the reaction (stereo)dynamics at the full quantum level and the long-desired power to dictate reaction outcomes with exceptional precision, thus providing an ultrasensitive test for theory. This pioneering and groundbreaking research will thereby truly revolutionize molecular reaction dynamics
COPE
Eliana Vassena, Donders Institute
Is this worth my effort? Should I persist and push through or give up and move on? We are constantly confronted with this fundamental question. Persisting through effortful endeavors at all costs is often the key to success in modern society. Reduced or excessive persistence is a hallmark dysfunction in many neuropsychiatric disorders (anxiety, depression, OCD, apathy, etc.) with massive individual and societal cost. Despite the urgency to better understand this process, how exactly we decide to cease or persist, and which cognitive, neural and neurochemical systems support persistence, remains unclear.
With COPE, Vassena proposes a novel neuro-computational theory of effortful persistence, able to predict decisions to Cease or Persist (COPE), and how they emerge from the dynamic multivariate optimization of costs and benefits across momentary and long-term time scales. She proposes that persistence depends on how much reward or punishment we expect, how effective our efforts are, and how surprising and unstable the environment is. COPE integrates the algorithmic, neural and neurochemical levels of explanation in a unifying model of effortful persistence, laying the grounds for phenotyping of abnormal decision-making in psychiatric disorders and personalization of treatment selection.
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour , Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging , Institute for Management Research , Faculty of Science , Nijmegen School of Management , Political Science , Faculty of Social Sciences
