Traumatic stress, especially early in life, exerts substantial and long-lasting influences on the brain and is a major risk factor for psychiatric disorders. However, most people do not develop psychopathology following adversity. Focusing on resilience to trauma rather than vulnerability can enhance our understanding of key processes underlying psychopathology. Moreover, important methodological advantages are present due to the absence of psychopathology and medication in resilient individuals. Resilience to trauma depends on multiple neurobiological factors. I propose that the functionality of the γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) system in the brain is a key moderator of resilience to trauma. Prior research has shown that the GABA system and stress are closely intertwined: traumatic stress has long-lasting influences on the GABA system, and stress reactivity (including HPA axis functionality) is mediated by GABAergic circuitry. To test this hypothesis, I apply a fundamental and integrative approach in human subjects. First, I examine the effects of early life trauma on adult GABA levels in plasma and cerebrospinal fluid in an existing unique cohort study. Second, I investigate whether early life trauma affects in vivo GABA levels in the prefrontal cortex under basal and acute stress conditions using state-of-the-art 7Tesla magnetic resonance spectroscopy (7T-MRS) in a selected subgroup of this cohort. Third, I examine the interaction between combat-related trauma, plasma GABA levels, and resilience to psychopathology in an existing prospective military cohort. In all studies, I study (epi)genetic variation related to the GABA system to probe potential underlying resilience mechanisms. This proposal investigates the GABA system as a pro-resilience factor in humans and combines imaging, genetic, epigenetic, and neuroendocrine approaches within several unique cohort studies. It will yield novel neurobiological insights into GABA resilience circuitry and may identify innate resilience mechanisms which can be used for early intervention strategies.

Experts-by-experience are increasingly common in mental health care. The intuition behind this is that they have unique insights due to their experiences of illness and recovery. However, what such ‘experiential knowledge’ consists of remains unclear, making it difficult to determine the exact role of experts-by-experience. This project combines theoretical ideas from epistemology and phenomenology with a qualitative study on stories submitted to the ‘Psychiatry Story Bank’ by (former) patients in mental health care, in order to establish a conceptually sound view on experiential knowledge that can serve as a basis for determining the role of experts-by-experience in mental health care.

Both the international classroom and subsequent professional environments are prime examples of the increasingly diverse but cooperative settings of our globalizing world in which our students find themselves. In order to successfully wield the “double-edged sword” of diversity - reaping its many potential benefits while avoiding its equally manifold pitfalls - 21st Century skills of intercultural communication, cooperation and coordination are essential. In contrast to traditional cognitive approaches, we propose to develop a training module using a novel, evidence-informed strategy that adopts an embodied approach to fostering intercultural competence among students. Specifically, we will employ nonverbal synchrony as a means of establishing an inclusive and cooperative classroom climate and enlarging students’ 21st Century skillset and overall learning output in our international master Social, Health and Organisational Psychology at Utrecht University. A large body of research attests to the importance and benefits of synchrony for our social lives, and we suggest that synchrony could be a powerful but hitherto overlooked tool in intercultural competence training that we propose to harness. We will combine scholarly insights from the interpersonal, intergroup and intercultural communication fields, as well as from embodied social cognition. Within this framework, we will employ embodied practices derived from psychomotor therapy, somatics and the Japanese martial art of aikido, in an innovative and broadly applicable embodied-situated intercultural competence training module that we will progressively develop, test and adapt and systematically embed in our educational program. By harnessing synchrony, we focus on what connects and binds us, not what separates us.

Early life adversity is common and has a tremendous negative impact on both onset and progression of somatic and mental health. Our aim is to unite existing research groups, educational organization, health care organization and knowledge institutes in in order to understand the role of early life adversity in health, improve identification, prevention and treatment of its health consequences.

The feeling that we cause our own actions and resulting outcomes is natural to us. When I shout my friend?s name, he looks over his shoulder and laughs. It is clear my actions caused him to do so. Such experiences are fundamental for social communication and interaction, are usually automatic and need no attention. However, schizophrenia patients often experience no control over their behaviour and exhibit difficulties in distinguishing one?s own actions and outcomes from those of others. They hear voices speaking to them or feel their limbs being controlled by external sources. A friend looks over his shoulder because he thinks you smell, not because you called for him. My aim is to investigate the cognitive processes and brain areas that underlie self-agency and how self-agency relates to social functioning and schizophrenia symptoms by using a combination of three state-of-the-art approaches: social cognition, structural-MRI and functional-MRI. New in my research proposal is the focus on unconscious processes that can enhance self-agency experiences. The key objectives are 1) to investigate a model proposing a conscious and an unconscious route to self-agency experience, 2) to investigate agency ascription in patients with schizophrenia and their offspring, and 3) to identify the structural (SMRI) and functional (FMRI) brain correlates underlying self-agency in health and schizophrenia. I will target the first two objectives by developing new tasks that tap different aspects of self-agency, administering social functioning questionnaires and symptoms ratings in healthy individuals, schizophrenia patients and their offspring. For the final objective I aim to obtain structural and functional MRI brain scans to investigate the neural correlates of normal and abnormal agency ascription. Ultimately, this could be central to the development of new and effective treatments that can be tailored to meet individual needs at the level of social functioning in healthy and disease.