Professor of Developmental and Neuropsychology Lydia Krabbendam and assistant professor Tieme Janssen, together with seven other scientists, form the interdisciplinary research group SENSA (Social Educational Neuroscience Amsterdam) at the Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit. They won the first Ammodo Science Award for groundbreaking research, in 2020 in the Social Sciences domain. We spoke to them about their research and the impact of the award.
What brings the various researchers of SENSA together?
Lydia Krabbendam: We are all interested in the question: how do you promote positive social interactions? To answer that, we are investigating how to motivate people to be social. In doing so, we want to make the connection from the lab to everyday life, the real world. Real impact comes with that last step: out of the lab. Lab work forms the basis, but by linking it to the outcomes of research outside the lab, the insights become more generalisable and therefore directly relevant.
That sounds logical. So isn’t that happening already?
Tieme Janssen: It doesn't happen much yet. In the lab, you can do controlled experiments, but outside, the context is automatically more complex and more factors play a role. To actually take that next step perspectives from multiple disciplines are needed. Within SENSA, insights from social psychology, developmental and neuropsychology, and educational neuroscience, among others, come together. By joining forces, our research becomes more interesting and relevant. We can tackle more complex research questions than if everyone only approached it from their own discipline.
Can you give an example of translating lab research into the 'real world'?
Tieme Janssen: In one of my studies, in collaboration with PhD student Laura Fornari, we focus on social proximity and its effect on cooperation. We try to manipulate that social proximity through the fast friends procedure - which is a list of questions that become increasingly personal. It starts with questions such as "Where are you from?" and "Where would you like to travel to?", continues with, for example, "Do you find it easy or difficult to get to know new people?" and ends, for example, with "Tell the other person what you already appreciate in him/her". Half the participants go through these questions in pairs, getting to know each other quickly and efficiently. We already know from the literature that this can lead to increased social closeness, but its effect on cooperation is still unknown. We start this research in the lab, where we can form pairs between people who do not know each other. But ultimately, it is really interesting to investigate this in the context of a school classroom, where cooperation is a very important element of learning.
But students from the same school class naturally already know each other.
Tieme Janssen: That's right, which is why we are first making the move to develop and test a research design with young adults in a controlled environment. Then we will move the research to secondary schools where we want to investigate social processes and cooperation and the role of age. At the same time, we measure synchronisation in brain activity between cooperation partners. Higher synchronisation is associated with social cognition, such as shared attention and shared intention. It is a rather complex measure, but brain synchronisation seems to be uniquely predictive of collaboration effectiveness.
Lydia Krabbendam: So in this research, you are seeing all these disciplines coming together: from education and social psychology to developmental psychology and neuroscience.
How do you measure synchronisation in brain activity? Can that be done outside the lab?
Tieme Janssen: Yes, these days we can! Using advanced wearable EEG technology, a sort of hat with sensors, we can measure the brain-to-brain synchronisation of multiple participants as they interact. We call this hyperscanning. However, the technology for this is very expensive, under development and not yet very user-friendly. This is partly why it is still relatively rare within social science. Together with Nienke van Atteveldt, we lead an international network investigating real-world neuroscience, i.e. neuroscience in the context of the 'real world', in which hyperscanning is also used. Through this network, we have access to a lot of expertise.
Lydia Krabbendam: You can't determine the location of brain activity very specifically with portable EEG. To know exactly where in the brain activity is taking place, you still really have to go back to the lab and use an fMRI or an MRI scanner. So lab research is still necessary. Fortunately, within SENSA, we also have expertise in this; Barbara Braams and Mariët van Buuren do a lot of fMRI research, for instance.
Tieme Janssen: From a purely scientific point of view, it is interesting to know whether increasing social proximity leads to more synchronisation in brainwaves and better cooperation. If it does, that obviously opens up immediate possibilities for applications in education: by increasing social proximity between students in a class, mutual cooperation and learning performance are also likely to improve.
What is your scientific passion and how is it expressed within SENSA?
Lydia Krabbendam: My background and specialisation is in neuropsychology. Originally, I did a lot of research in psychiatry. Over the years, I became very interested in adolescence. That is a phase when psychological problems often arise. I have also long been interested in the underlying social processes. How do social networks and peer relationships influence development? From there, my passion is to ask how we can scientifically study these complex social, interactive, and dynamic processes and figure out the underlying mechanisms, both in the brain and in behaviour. Ultimately, the goal is to contribute something to adolescents' lives. It is a special phase with a lot of vulnerability and a lot of potential. During that period, you want to protect people on the one hand and stimulate them as much as possible on the other.
Tieme Janssen: My background is in developmental psychology and neuroscience. I did a lot of research in schools, where I researched motivation, for example. My own motivation is to increase the resilience of adolescents. Within SENSA, I focus on cooperation, which of course is also an important factor in resilience. You are more resilient if you have a group around you and feel supported.
Lydia Krabbendam: What I love about SENSA is the collaboration with people with other areas of expertise. As a neuropsychologist with a focus on the individual's brain, I work together with social psychologists who know all about interactive processes, such as group dynamics and the role of status. We also have researchers who focus on childhood (Jellie Sierksma and Christel Klootwijk) or young adulthood (Tuongvan Vu). As a result, as a group we cover almost all of childhood, which is otherwise almost impossible. Moreover, our social psychology colleagues are very good at developing appealing experiments, such as the 'social mindfulness measurement' developed by our team member Paul van Lange. This joining of forces really adds great value.
Social mindfulness, what does that entail? And how can you measure it?
Lydia Krabbendam: Social mindfulness is about pro-social behaviour at the level of small, everyday interactions. Are you paying attention to another person? Do you recognise that the other person also desires choice? This, unlike grand altruistic acts, has not been the subject of a great amount of research. To illustrate, here is a simple measurement example: there are two pieces of apple pie and one piece of cherry pie on the table. You get to choose first and then someone else gets to choose. If you choose the cherry flan, the next person actually has no choice, as there will only be apple pie left. It shows social mindfulness if you choose in such a way that the other person is also left with a choice. It is a very simple experiment and yet we see that it has important correlations with pro-social behaviour. There are also all kinds of leads for research. For example, you could investigate from what age people choose mindfully. And are children who choose mindfully liked more by their peers? And does it affect mutual cooperation? Is it easier to cooperate with someone who chooses pro-socially? We can pursue research questions like that.
What has winning the Ammodo Science Award brought you?
Lydia Krabbendam: The chance to do something really innovative. A special aspect of this award is that the research does not have to be worked out in detail beforehand. That gives space to all researchers involved, from project leaders to PhDs. Very socially mindful, in fact! Of course, we have a clear idea of our overarching questions with which we want to stretch the boundaries of social science, but when working them out, there is still plenty of creative and scientific room for the researchers themselves.
Tieme Janssen: And you really see that happening. For example, a PhD student Rebecca van Rijn, together with Nikki Lee and Barbara Braams, devised a study on pro-social risk behaviour: helping others when it might damage your own reputation. She naturally feels much more ownership of that project than if someone else had thought it all out in advance. The space for ownership motivates enormously and produces better science as well as better scientists. Unfortunately, there is less and less room for this type of uunfettered research. You almost have to be able to demonstrate in advance that something is going to be successful in order to get funding for it. What makes the Ammodo Science Award unique is that it offers room to take risks.
Lydia Krabbendam: Besides, you can't think of everything in advance. Some good ideas grow over time. The fact that there is room for that within this Award is really cool.
Tieme Janssen: Also, collaborations between the different disciplines have become much more intense, creating many more and much shorter lines of communication. SENSA PhD students have an interdisciplinary PhD group, which is great for both them and the supervisors. Knowledge spreads better between the disciplines, and from this comes ideas for new collaborations.
Lydia Krabbendam: In addition, giving an award to a group rather than to a figurehead also has a kind of induced social closeness effect. When you are honoured as a team, you also start to feel more involved with the team. And the extra media attention is also very gratifying and useful. Both for the young researchers and the more senior researchers. You get noticed more, inside and outside the university. Paul van Lange was able to talk about his research on national television and the whole team was celebrated at the VU's Dies-Natalis last year. All very motivating and, of course, it gave us a lot of positive social interactions!
Published on 17 May 2023.
Photos: Florian Braakman
