Time: 12.00 - 13.00 h
Location: 0A28
Speaker:  Harriëtte Riese – Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

In this presentation Harriëtte Riese elaborates on the Therap-i RCT. In this study a personalized Experience Sampling Method (pESM) tool is integrated into routine outpatient care supporting psychological treatment for depression through monitoring and providing feedback on patients’ daily experiences. Qualitative findings show that pESM improved case conceptualization, shared decision-making, and patient engagement. In a clinical casus, a woman in her ‘70s diagnosed with a depressive disorder and avoidant personality disorder, pESM monitoring and pESM-derived feedback was successfully integrated into her schema therapy treatment. The patient and the therapist evaluated pESM to have enhanced understanding of psychiatric problems and informed therapeutic decision-making. Despite its potential, the presentation will also address challenges related to implementation, scaling, and long-term embedding of a personalized ESM tool.

Time: 13.15 - 14.15 h
Location: tba
Speaker:  Sebastiaan Mathôt -  Rijksuniversiteit Groningen 

Spontaneous fluctuations in pupil size are correlated with neural activity and behavior in many ways. These relationships are often attributed to a single underlying cause: arousal. This unitary account disregards other potential underlying causes. To address this gap, Veera Ruuskanen and I propose a comprehensive framework of four mechanisms that jointly underlie these relationships. In addition to arousal, we consider optical effects, brightness constancy, and self-generated visual stimulation as factors driving the complex and context-dependent relationships between pupil size, neural activity, and behavior. Taken together, we argue that pupil fluctuations should be considered beyond arousal: as a functionally important, yet still poorly understood, component of visual processing.

Time: 13.00 - 14.00 h
Location: SA.49
Speaker:  dr. Saskia Koch

Social anxiety can make daily social interactions feel overwhelming. Simple situations such as talking to a cashier or participating in a conversation can become sources of intense worry and avoidance. Human communication is flexible, ambiguous, and constantly changing. We continuously adapt to others, interpret subtle signals, and update our behavior based on shared experiences. Socially anxious individuals often struggle in these situations, not only because they feel anxious, but also because they may have difficulty adjusting their behavior and emotions as interactions unfold. Our project – SocialDynamics - aims to understand why social interactions are so challenging for socially anxious individuals by studying what actually happens during live social exchanges. Rather than relying on questionnaires or observer ratings alone, the project focuses on the real-time behavioral and neural dynamics of communication, emotion regulation, and learning in social situations. During this research seminar I will present how we study human communciation and introduce a series of experiments that we are currently setting-up to ultimately understand social anxiety where it matters most – during actual social interactions.

Time: 16.00-18.00 h
Place: SA0.49
Speaker:  Rob Ross is a Research Fellow in the School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University.

Abstract: A key assumption of psychology research is that participants provide sincere responses when completing questionnaires and other tasks. However, this assumption is rarely tested. In this talk I present research showing that insincere responding can be more common—and more pernicious—than you might think.

Speaker bio: Rob Ross is a Research Fellow in the School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University. He has a variety of research interests, including meta-science, big team science, and the cognitive science of belief

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