The Habit Lab was represented at Lowlands 2016! At the Lowlands Science tent, visitors of the festival demonstrated their creative skills in a monster-drawing task that was part of the study conducted by the Habit Lab.The winner of the monster contest will be announced via Facebook!
To goal of this study was to examine processes hindering or promoting creativity. It turned out to be a great success! A special thanks to all the enthusiastic participants and great volunteers!
The Habit Lab is going to conduct research at Lowlands! Lowlands, a large-scale three-day festival held from August 19 to August 21 , is one of the most important festivals of the Netherlands. As part of this festival, the event Lowlands Science is organized. Nine research teams will conduct a study in which Lowlands visitors can participate. The study conducted by our lab group will be about processes that promote or hinder creativity. Participants will show their most creative side during a creativity task in which they will search for a new monster that haunts Lowlands…
If you are visiting Lowlands, make sure to drop by at the Lowlands Science tent!
More info about the project: lowlands.nl/programma/monsterlijk-creatief
More info about Lowlands Science: lowlands.nl/programma/monsterlijk-creatief/#category-Lowlands_Science
UvA news: www.uva.nl
Lowlands Science wordt georganiseerd door BKB, New Scientist en Lowlands en wordt mede mogelijk gemaakt door IBM, De Hersenstichting, SIA en KNAW.
To celebrate the accomplishments of this academic year, we organized a Dutch-style Habit Lab “borrel” last Friday.
It was a sunny afternoon, with a nice pick nick in the park, during which we reflected on a successful academic year while already looking forward to the projects that will come next.
Cheers to a great academic year. Enjoy the summer!
On Wednesday July 6th, the Habit Event took place at the International School Groningen. The day started with an educational talk on habits by Sanne. This was followed by interactive workshops on diverse aspect on habits and how to break them, including ‘Train your brain’ (by Poppy), ‘Planning to turn good intentions into good habits’ (by Aukje), and ‘Bootcamp’ (by Sebastian). Then, it was time for the Habit Games. During these games, the students found out themselves how habits work and how difficult it is to change your routines. The day ended with the award ceremony. The Habit Games were won by the all-boys team number 6! What an interesting, active and educational day it was!
This meeting was part of the Attention & Performance meetings that started in 1966. This 27th meeting took place during the 9th-12th of June ’16 in “Priorij Corsendonck” (Oud-Turnhout, Belgium). The organizing committee consisted of Marcel Brass, Jan De Houwer, Christian Büchel, Senne Braem and Baptist Liefooghe.
The theme of the meeting concerned the implications and applications of learning via instructions:
Unlike other animals, humans have the unique ability to share and use verbal instructions to prepare for upcoming tasks. For example, using language we can learn without trial and error the route to a new city, how to build a cabinet, or how to prepare a meal. Furthermore, instructions also indirectly influence our behaviour. For example, knowledge about the efficiency of a medical treatment can change the effects of this treatment. Although verbal instructions are omnipresent in daily life and psychological research, the mechanisms via which they influence behaviour are still poorly understood. In this meeting, we bring together different experts from a variety of disciplines, from fear conditioning to cognitive control, using different manipulations, from stimulus-response instructions to hypnotic suggestions, to study the omnipresent effect of verbal instructions on brain and behaviour.
On Wednesday, July 6th, the Habit Lab will organize a habit event at the International School Groningen. This special event involves a whole day of learning about habits, engaging in interesting workshops on breaking and making healthy habits, and participating in interactive habit games.
Check the program here!
On Wednesday the 29th, the poster fair of the Health Psychology master took place (Psychologie van Gezondheidsgedrag) at the University of Amsterdam. Of these students, five were involved in Habit Lab’s Healthyways project, and also presented their findings. It was a very successful afternoon with interesting research, a lot of room for discussion and many tasty (healthy and unhealthy) home-made snacks!
The 3rd European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN) meeting took place in Porto this year (23-26th of June). Sanne took part in a symposium organised by Henk van Steenbergen of the University of Leiden – together with Jan Glascher, Mara Mather, and Matthias Pessiglione, entitled: “how emotions drive attention and decision making”. Her talk focused on motivational influences on Pavlovian-instrumental transfer.
She also enjoyed Porto’s Festa da Sa Joao on the 23d of June during which people hit random strangers on the head with plastic hammers.
Link to ESCAN:
sites.google.com/site/escaneurosci/
New research demonstrating the role of habit learning in cocaine addicts is now published in Science. You can find the article on the Science website.
Reference:
Ersche, K.D., Gillan, C.M., Jones, P.M., Williams, G.B., Ward, L.H.E., Luijten, M., de Wit, S., Sahakian, B.J., Bullmore, E.T., Robbins, T.W. (2016). Carrots and sticks fail to change behavior in cocaine addiction. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf3700
This research also gained attention in the media:
– www.sciencenews.org
– www.eurekalert.org
– www.uva.nl
New research demonstrates that bias toward habits is associated with nonclinical Obsessive-Compulsive symptom dimensions. The article is published in Psychiatry Research.
Link: http://www.psy-journal.com/article/S0165-1781(16)30690-4/pdf
Reference: Snorrason, I., Lee, H. J., de Wit, S., & Woods, D. W. (2016). Are Nonclinical Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms Associated with Bias toward Habits? Psychiatry Research.
On April 21st, Poppy Watson successfully defended her thesis entitled ‘From Outcomes to Actions: Fundamental mechanisms in reward seeking’. The committee was impressed with the vast amount of high quality work reported in this thesis. Poppy conducted her PhD at the Dept. of Developmental Psychology at UvA, under supervision of Prof. Reinout Wiers, Prof. Bernhard Hommel, and Dr. Sanne de Wit. Poppy will continue her career as a postdoctoral researcher in the HabitLab. Congratulations dr. Poppy!
Dr Lee Hogarth (Exeter University, UK) will give the Rita Vuyk lecture titled “What dimension of drug conditioning is most closely associated with individual differences in level of drug dependence? Identifying the core learning process in addiction” on Wednesday 20th April at 4pm in room G -1.08. Dr Lee Hogarth is an experimental psychologist studying the learning mechanisms that underpin human addictive behavior. At the intersection of behavioral neuroscience and clinical psychology he has systematically and critically examined the role that attention to external drug cues plays in the control of drug-seeking behavior, the decision processes by which external drug cues control drug-seeking behavior and the role of habits in addiction. During his lecture he will discuss recent research focused on identifying the core learning process(es) that underlie human addictive behavior.
Click here to visit Dr Hogarth’s personal website.
At the end of March, Poppy Watson attended the Gregynog Associative Learning Conference in Wales. A small intimate conference, the highlights for her were talks from Andrew Nelson (Cardiff University) about whether goal-tracking and sign-tracking can be considered stable behavioral traits in animals, Mike le Pelley (UNSW) about maladaptive attentional capture by reward related stimuli and Ian McLaren’s lecture on the evidence for propositional vs associative mechanisms (or both) underlying human behavior.
Poppy Watson will defend her PhD thesis entitled ‘From Outcomes to Actions: fundamental mechanisms in reward seeking’ on Thursday 21st of April at 10am in the Agnietenkapel (LinkToDigitalDissertation). Poppy conducted her PhD at the Dept. of Developmental Psychology at UvA, under supervision of promotoren Prof. Reinout Wiers, Prof. Bernhard Hommel, and as co-promoter and daily supervisor Dr. Sanne de Wit. After her PhD, she has a postdoc position in the HabitLab.
Delorme, C., Salvador, A., Valabrègue, R., Roze, E., Palminteri, S., Vidailhet, M., de Wit, S., Robbins, T.W., Hartmann, A., & Worbe, Y. (2016). Enhanced habits formation in Gilles de la Tourette syndrome. Brain, 605-615,doi: dx.doi.org/10.1093/brain/awv307
Link: brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/139/2/605.long
For a scientific commentary by Harvey Singer, see:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/brain/awv378 312-316
Aukje participated in this Synergy meeting that brought together international experts on the topic of implementation intentions (August 2014), and participated in the writing of a joint paper with recommendations for research and practice:
‘Implementation intention and planning interventions in health psychology: Recommendations from the Synergy expert group for research and practice’
Reference: Hagger, M. S., Luszczynska, A., de Wit, J., Benyamini, Y., Burkert, S., Chamberland, P.-E., Chater, A. M., Dombrowski, S., van Dongen, A., French, D. P., Gauchet, A., Hankonen, N., Karekla, M., Kinney, A. Y., Kwasnicka, D., Lo, S. H., López-Roíg, S., Meslot, C., Marques, M. M., Neter, E., M., Plass A., Potthoff, S., Rennie, L., Scholz, U., Stadler, G., Stolte, E., A., ten Hoor G., Verhoeven, A. A. C., Wagner, M., Oettingen, G., Sheeran, P. and Gollwitzer, P. M. (in press). Implementation intention and planning interventions in health psychology: Recommendations from the Synergy expert group for research and practice. Psychology & Health. doi:10.1080/08870446.2016.1146719
Link to article: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08870446.2016.1146719#.VugkdfkrLrc
Link to meeting: http://www.ehps.net/content/implementation-intention-and-action-planning-interventions-health-psychology-evaluating
At the ARPH (Association for Researchers in Psychology and Health) congress in Maastricht during the 28th-29th of January 2016, Aukje gave a presentation on the preliminary findings of Healthyways coaching of eating habits. For this (still ongoing) project she recruited female volunteers (via fitness centers and our website) who aimed to improve their eating habits. Her presentation was entitled: “Planning to change unhealthy snacking and the role of mental associations”
Link to ARPH 2016: www.arphconference.nl
Watson, P. , Wiers, R.W., Hommel, B., Ridderinkhof, K.R. & de Wit, S. (2016). An associative account of how the obesogenic environment biases adolescents’ food choices. Appetite, 96, 560-571, doi: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2015.10.008
“How to master your habits and take control of your life” – written by Neal Burrell
Link: www.newscientist.com/article/mg22930560-600-take-control-of-your-life-by-mastering-the-force-of-habit/
The textbook ‘Motivation and Cognitive Control’ (edited by Todd Braver) has just been published. Researchers with different research traditions and perspectives on motivation and cognitive control have contributed chapters. Sanne de Wit & Anthony Dickinson wrote a chapter on ideomotor mechanisms of goal-directed behavior, in which they review relevant animal and human research into action control.
Link to publisher site: www.routledge.com/products/9781848726468
During the conference of the ‘Associatie van Sociaal-Psychologische Onderzoekers’ (Amsterdam, 10-11 Dec 2015), Aukje Verhoeven presented her recent research into the effect of implementation intentions on the ability to suppress learnt responses in a computer paradigm. The title of her presentation was: Breaking the chains of habit with implementation intentions: An experimental investigation.
Link to ASPO: www.sociale-psychologie.nl
On Monday 23/11, Paschal Sheeran, professor in Psychology (UNC, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA) visited the Habit Lab. With the presence of a large audience, he gave an inspiring talk entitled “From Health Beliefs to Behavior Change”‘.
In de Oplossers rubriek van Vrij Nederland wordt besproken hoe we ervoor kunnen zorgen dat kinderen gezonder gaan eten…
Link naar artikel: www.vn.nl/de-oplossers-kinderen-gezond-eten
At the beginning of this year, the Healthyways coaching program was launched at the large pharmaceutical company MSD. The Healthyways coaches train employees of MSD in transforming their unhealthy snacking habits into healthy ones. In this way, the participants are supported in changing their eating habits, and they are contributing to scientific research of the Habit Lab. In April, we are ready to start coaching the third cohort of motivated employees!
Would you like to learn more about the Healthyways coachings project? Please visit: www.healthyways.nl.
During 6th-10th of September, the HabitLab visited the first ‘Leipzig International Meeting for Interdisciplinary Obesity Research Leipzig’. Aukje Verhoeven, Poppy Watson and Sarah Knot gave poster presentations. Aukje presented a poster on part of her PhD research into: promoting healthy eating habits using implementation intentions as a meta-cognitive strategy. Poppy presented her research into Pavlovian-instrumental interactions and their potential role in food-seeking behaviour in obese individuals. Sarah presented the HealthyWays coaching research (for eating and exercise habits) that she participated in for her research master’s thesis. Finally, Sanne de Wit gave a talk about external stimulus control in an obesogenic environment.
Link to LIMIOR website: www.ifb-adipositas.de/en/research/limior
