Speaker: Marieke van der Schaaf - Tilburg University
Time: 13.15-14.15 h
Place: 1A01

When you're sick, you'd rather stay in bed than go for a run or go to a party. Physical and mental fatigue are considered inherent to acute disease, but little is known about the mechanisms that underlie these sickness behaviors. In this talk, I will review several theoretical models of mental fatigue, show how acute immune manipulations (i.e. lipopolysaccharide) change behavior and cognition, and discuss the potential neurobiological mechanisms of fatigue and cognitive impairment in disease. In addition, I will discuss how this knowledge challenges the way we should assess cognition in disease, and how this can help us understand long-term disabling fatigue after disease. 

Marieke van der Schaaf is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Cognitive Neuropsychology at Tilburg University. She did her PhD at the Donders Centre for Neuroimaging in Nijmegen on dopamine and motivational learning with prof Roshan Cools, after which she continued with a postdoc at the Expert Centre for Chronic Fatigue in Nijmegen to study the neurobiology of fatigue in MECFS. Fatigue remained a central theme in her research with a grant from the Dutch Cancer Foundation to study Cancer-related fatigue and a recent ZonMW grant to study cognitive symptoms in MECFS in which she studies the role of immune-brain interactions in fatigue.

Speaker: Jakob Kasper, PhD stduent UvA
Time: 12.00 -13.00 h
Place:0B04

Affective polarization and its consequences for democratic functioning are a central concern in contemporary democracies, motivating growing interest in interventions aimed at reducing polarization, anti-democratic attitudes, and support for political violence. In the first part of the talk, I present a conceptual replication and extension of an intervention tournament designed to reduce these outcomes. In a randomized survey experiment with a quota sample of N = 22,500 Dutch citizens, we tested 14 interventions based on established strategies such as correcting misperceptions about political opponents, emphasizing common identities, and using pro-democratic elite cues. Several interventions had small but beneficial effects, with the most successful emphasizing the promises of liberal democracy and correcting misperceptions about how political opponents view democracy. Our findings suggest that some intervention strategies generalize across contexts, while also underscoring the need for more cross-national research. 

Although interventions among adults may help strengthen democratic resilience, many political attitudes and identities form earlier in life, and adolescence remains an understudied developmental period. In the second part of the talk, I therefore turn to a cross-national study of affective polarization among adolescents. Drawing on survey data from adolescents (N = 7,031) and adults (N = 9,997) across five European countries, we examine age differences in affective polarization across adolescence, differences between adolescents and adults, and variation around a major political event. Across ages 11 to 25, affective polarization shows little systematic variation, challenging the expectation of a pronounced rise across adolescence. In several countries, adolescents are less affectively polarized than adults. Panel evidence from the Netherlands further suggests that adolescent affective polarization is responsive to political context, increasing during the 2023 Dutch parliamentary election. These findings suggest that adolescents are not uniquely polarized, but are responsive to their political environment, which has implications for educational interventions that foster democratic engagement and constructive political disagreement.

Time: 11:15 - 12:15 h
Place: 5A37

During this "Responsible Research hour" we welcome any topic (broadly related to responsible research), but we especially want to hear from everyone: where do you go with questions, dilemmas, and considerations regarding good practices and research integrity? This meeting is also an opportunity to meet the new confidential counselors we have at our institute! Everyone is welcome at these monthly meetings, whether you want to listen or actively contribute to the discussion.

The goal is to provide space for reflection and mutual learning. If you would like to propose a topic for discussion in advance, or if you would like someone else to raise it for you (with or without mentioning your name), please feel free to let a member of the Research Committee know (or contact the chair of this committee, Anna van 't Veer, directly).

During the last meeting, for example, we exchanged experiences and ideas about posthumous authorship and briefly touched on how to handle retracted publications on our university's staff websites. Suggestions have already been made for future meetings to discuss responsible publishing and the use of AI as a researcher.