How Your Body Reveals Your Personality: Exploring Embodied Dynamics Across the Lifespan

This blog about the PhD thesis “Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Dynamics in Personality Expression: A Complex Dynamical, Enactive, and Embodied Account” by Nicol Arellano-Véliz, explores how embodied dynamics express personality, linking early motor patterns to adult traits and offering new insights into human behavior and development.

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Who makes sure that research is done ethically? And what does that even mean?

For a little over three years now, I’ve been a member of the Ethics Committee Psychology (ECP). One of the things I have learned on this committee is that, as a researcher—and as a participant—I was largely unaware of the systems, laws, and protocols in place. Now, viewing research from both sides, I have a new perspective on all this.
How is a study evaluated, and what rights and laws come into play? And what else goes through the mind of an ECP member when they review a study?

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When Ethology Meets the Social Sciences: A Primatological Perspective on Human Behavior during Conflicts

Virginial Pallante, a visiting researcher from the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, explains how ethology intersects with the social sciences. Through a primatological lens, Virginia examines human behavior during conflicts, exploring the role of emotions and bystander responses. Her interdisciplinary approach not only enriches the understanding of human behavior but also emphasizes the necessity of collaborative work in addressing complex societal questions.

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Capturing the dynamics of learning and forgetting through adaptive retrieval practice

Across virtually all levels and topics of education, students need to learn facts. The SlimStampen algorithm, developed at the UG, aims to optimize the process of fact learning. PhD student Thomas Wilschut explains how the algorithm works, what it tells us, and how future work (including his own) can improve it.

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The Flow of Life: It Matters What You Do Before Arriving

Setting goals efficiently drives long-term goal pursuit, but it also facilitates the experience of flow states – such an intense focus on the present activity that goals, as future-oriented objects, lose importance and experience becomes deeply meaningful. Metaphorically, what makes a journey meaningful is not its destination, but the process itself.

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The synergy of meditation and psychedelics

Both psychedelics and meditation have the potential to elicit self-transcendent experiences that are deeply meaningful and healing. This post addresses the question is whether it is possible to create a synergistic combination of psychedelics and meditation. A recent study addresses this topic, and is the subject of a documentary, “Descending the Mountain”, which will be screened on April 30, 2023.

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The blessing and the curse of classifying neuroimaging data

Machine learning in cognitive neuroscience In modern cognitive neuroscience, it has become common-practice to apply machine learning techniques to data obtained through neuroimaging. Despite this widespread use, however, there is something amazingly enigmatic about it. On the one hand, there is this organ that for millennia has eluded scholars: billions of neurons connected in myriads […]

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