- Promotor
- Co-promotor
- Date
- Thursday 10 Feb 2022, 13:00 - 14:30
- Type
- PhD defence
- Space
- Senate Hall
- Building
- Erasmus Building
- Location
- Campus Woudestein
On 10 February 2022, S.W. van de Groep will defend her PhD dissertation, entitled: ‘Growing in Generosity? Unraveling the effects of benefactor-, beneficiary-, and situational characteristics on the development of giving and its neural correlates in adolescence’.
Adolescence (ages 9-25) is an important period for building and maintaining social relationships, and contributions to society. Prosocial behaviors (i.e., other-benefitting behaviors) help adolescents to achieve these developmental goals. To understand and foster prosocial behaviors, it is important to investigate how certain types of prosociality, such as giving, develop, and which factors shape such behaviors.
In this dissertation I investigated how giving depended on context: who is the benefactor, the beneficiary, and what is the situation? To this end, I used economic games, in which adolescents divided valuable coins between themselves and others. To better understand this behavior I also studied possible neural mechanisms by examining brain activation during functional MRI scans.
This led to several important discoveries. First, my dissertation shows that adolescents, often regarded as ego centrical risk-takers, were generous towards others. Adolescents’ giving behavior was associated with activation in brain regions that ere important for cognitive control, emotional processing, and social-information processing. Older adolescents increasingly adjusted their giving to the social context: older adolescents differentiated more between friends and unfamiliar others. Moreover, older adolescents showed increased activation in control-related regions of the brain for ungenerous behavior, suggesting a possible role for these regions in incorporating the social context in giving decisions.
The PhD defences will not take place publicly in the usual way. A live stream link has been provided to candidate. The ceremony will begin exactly at 13.00.