Environmental problems like climate change are accelerating. Psychology can help facilitate sustainable behaviors, but most of the existing research is limited by small samples and few behaviors. I propose a partnership with the official app developer of a major international campaign with millions of reported sustainability behaviors. We can finally address questions about whether and how such behaviors lead to others, the validity of self-reports across different countries, and what types of people do which actions. These answers could help reduce environmental impacts and to preserve a healthy way of life for everyone.

The ‘intelligent lockdown’, that The Netherlands has implemented, deals severe damage to society. Therefore, it is imperative that we find a workable exit strategy as soon as possible. This project crowdsources the generation and evaluation of candidate exit strategies by setting up a massive Open Science collaboration. In this collaboration, epidemiologists, network scientists, programmers, data scientists, psychologists, and economists will work together to find ways out of the current lockdown.

To date, traditional models of emotion have largely overlooked the phenomenon that people are curious of highly negative information. Even though ?Morbid curiosity? (MC) is commonly observed in response to movies, the news, art, literature and negative events in real life (e.g., disaster-tourism), it has received limited theoretical and experimental attention. For example, experiments that present negative stimuli typically assume that participants experience a state of unpleasantness that promotes avoidance behavior as opposed to a state of curious approach. This misrepresentation of how people experience negative stimuli severely limits scientists? understanding of affectively laden phenomena ranging from consumer behavior to mental health. The overall aim of this project is to advance the understanding of the determinants and implications of MC. I argue that negative stimuli have informational value that can evoke approach rather than avoidance behavior. Based on this assumption, I will first develop an innovative paradigm that operationalizes MC as an active choice to approach negative stimuli. Then, I will use this paradigm to examine the physiological and cognitive indicators of MC and to investigate the contexts in which people are inclined to approach, rather than avoid, negative stimuli. Finally, I investigate the neural mechanisms that engage when people actively approach negative stimuli. I test the novel hypothesis that MC shows neural overlap with cognitive reappraisal and reward processing. The findings of the present project potentially change traditional models of affect, emotion and motivation by countering the assumption that negative stimuli are experienced as aversive to all people in all contexts. Furthermore, the findings challenge conventional models of motivation arguing that reward and approach motivation are exclusively linked to positive stimuli. And finally, the present project translates a folk-phenomenon into a scientific research program that will begin to explore how MC intersects with both healthy and unhealthy human behaviors.

Creativity is important for individual adaptation, successful entrepreneurship, and organizational effectiveness. Especially in a continuously changing world characterized by crises and competition, it is vital to understand how creativity comes about and what factors foster versus inhibit it. In this proposal, I set out to uncover the way threats and uncertainty influence creativity. This is important because although threats and uncertainty are ubiquitous features of crises and competition, past work has shown they can both increase and decrease creativity, without providing convincing reasons why. To solve this conundrum, I propose that threat and uncertainty may lead to increased creativity, but crucially, mainly when creativity helps achieving valuable outcomes (regaining predictability and averting the threat). In three research projects, including several lab and field studies, I focus on how uncertainty and threat (in intrapersonal and interpersonal situations) affect creativity. Uncertain and threatened individuals are highly motivated to cope with their situation and systematically focus their resources and attention on averting the threat and regaining predictability, and not on information that is irrelevant to their current needs. Therefore, I predict that effects on creativity are primarily driven by the systematic, effortful, and in depth examination of only a few options and perspectives and not by divergent thinking and fast switching among different options and perspectives. This systematic mode of thinking, in turn, leads to enhanced creativity in domains that are relevant to their concerns, but to reduced creativity in domains that are irrelevant. Thus, by putting the functionality of creativity forward, the proposed set of experiments will help to predict when people are creative, but also how people achieve their creativity. This research program may therefore yield valuable insights into ways of fostering creativity in organizations and the creative industry and, interestingly, may benefit utilizing and even combat the current financial crisis.

JASP is een revolutionair statistisch software programma ontwikkeld aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam (jasp-stats.org). JASP is modern, gebruikersvriendelijk, visueel, en dynamisch; daarnaast kent JASP een uitgebreide suite aan Bayesiaanse analyses. JASP Professional Services ontwikkelt modules (algemeen en maatwerk), organiseert workshops, verkoopt technical support, en werkt samen met grote consultancy bedrijven zoals PWC.