Optimists have the general tendency to always look at the bright side of life. This attitude toward life seems quite beneficial, as optimists lead happier and physically and mentally healthier lives than pessimists.
This is a Dutch summary of my PhD thesis Happy faces and other rewards. Positieve informatie roept vaak sterke reacties op, maar niet bij iedereen. Wie minder sterk reageert op positieve informatie heeft een zogenaamde lage positieve bias. In dit …
People generally show strong responses to positive or rewarding experiences, for example, winning a prize or seeing someone smile. However, not all people respond the same to positive information; some people show weaker responses to positive …
Background Anhedonia (loss of pleasure) is characterized by low responsiveness to rewards and, by virtue of being one of the two core symptoms of depression, by altered responses to stress. We investigated the effect of an acute stress experience …
My postdoc was part of Dr. Tina Kretschmer’s ERC funded project Ghosts from the Past: Consequences of Adolescent Peer Experiences across Contexts and Generations (CAPE).
In this project we investigated whether and how peer experiences are transmitted a) to adult friendships and romantic relationships, and b) across generations, i.
There is evidence that people commonly show a bias toward happy facial emotions during laboratory tasks, that is, they identify other people’s happy facial emotions faster than other people’s negative facial emotions. However, not everybody shows …
Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is a protein often studied in psychiatric populations. Commercial ELISA kits have been validated for measuring BDNF in blood plasma and serum, but blood collection is an invasive method which cannot always be …
Anhedonia is a major public health concern and has proven particularly difficult to counteract. It has been hypothesized that anhedonia can be deterred by engagement in rewarding social and physical events. The aims of the present study were to …
Many psychiatric problem domains have been associated with emotion-specific biases or general deficiencies in facial emotion identification. However, both within and between psychiatric problem domains, large variability exists in the types of …
Anhedonia is generally defined as the inability to feel pleasure in response to experiences that are usually enjoyable. Anhedonia is one of the two core symptoms of depression and is a major public health concern. Anhedonia has proven particularly …