Foreign news, nearby consequences: How media portrayals of distant situations affect local group relations

This Thursday, Thijs Bouman will defend his doctoral thesis in which he explains the influence of foreign news on how we perceive groups within our nearby surroundings. Generalizations from global to the local situations seem to specifically occur for negative news and rely on often trivial and unconscious associations between the foreign and nearby groups.

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How beer automatically attracts attention

and the relation with adolescent substance use

Did you ever find yourself drinking another beer when you actually had to stop at the previous one? Then you can imagine how this automatic behavior might be involved in the development of substance abuse and addiction. Illuminating this relationship is the very reason Madelon van Hemel-Ruiter started her PhD research.

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Are Exams Killing Learning?

Is the way we assess learning in higher education killing its very central aim: learning? It is, if Eric Mazur from Harvard University is to be believed and he makes a very convincing case in the talk he gave in Groningen a few weeks ago. Read on to see what students and staff from our department think about it.

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Duo-Interview: Perspectives on Social Coordination

People tend to coordinate their actions, feelings, and thoughts with others in social situations. But how does this work? We asked two experts of our department, Dr. Ralf Cox (Developmental Psychology) and Dr. Pontus Leander (Organizational Psychology), who examine this intriguing topic from two different perspectives.

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How problematic are sleep problems in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder?

Do you sometimes feel that after a bad night sleep, you cannot take in anything that is being said during a lecture? If so, then maybe you can imagine the rising concern that patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD) might not benefit from trauma-focused treatment if they also suffer from sleep difficulties. I dug into this issue to figure out whether this concern was justified.

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