The overarching aim of this theme is to increase our understanding of the mechanisms underlying altered cognitive, affective, and social behavior in relation to mental health problems.

The cognitive and affective processes studied are either central to the symptomatology of a disorder, such as impulsive behavior or altered socio-emotional functioning, and/or key ingredients for treatment success, such as mechanisms enabling behavioral change, learning, attentional control, or empathy. To provide an integrated view, various approaches and methods are used, including behavioral experiments, EEG and fMRI techniques, biochemical  analyses, computational modeling, virtual reality as well as psychopharmacological manipulations. See for instance these websites as examples of the work of some of our PI’s:

• BAT: Breaking the Transmission of Anxiety in the Family
• The effect of an Emotional Working Memory training on emotion regulation capacities in Borderline Personality Disorder
• Social Performance Monitoring Lab

Research within our theme often employs a symptom-driven, rather than a syndrome-driven approach, thus enabling a transdiagnostic perspective on mental health. However, research may employ a disorder-specific focus as well. Examples of patient populations studied are borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and patients with anxiety and/or depression.

The symptom-driven approach entails that the populations of interest are not only diagnosed patients, but also healthy volunteers with varying scores on traits and relevant (sub-clinical) symptoms, such as anxiety, depression, trauma or dissociation. Within our theme, a wide range of ages are studied: young children, adolescents, and both young and older adults. For example, one research line concerns the intergenerational transfer of anxiety from parents to children, while another project focuses on menstrual cycle and hormonal fluctuations in girls and women using a lifespan approach. See for the latter project an example for our research.

Links

Our research is highly interdisciplinary, with theme members having ongoing collaborations both within our institute (e.g., cognitive, developmental, and health psychology) as well as outside (e.g., psychiatry, neuroendocrinology, and gynecology) and the research is embedded in the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC). Finally, the theme is strongly connected with bachelor and master courses focusing on experimental clinical psychology, research methods, pharmacological mechanisms, and biological underpinnings of mental health.