Development and plasticity of control and control beliefs.

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Development and plasticity of control and control beliefs.

Professor Nikolaus Steinbeis, UCL.

Talk Summary:

My research focusses on understanding processes that regulate our thoughts and actions and their mechanistic role in driving healthy psychological development. I will present recent and ongoing experimental work on two such processes, namely cognitive control and control beliefs.

In the first part I will present data from a recently completed randomized control trial aiming to improve cognitive control in 235 children aged 6-11, showing no effects across a host of behavioural and neural outcomes. In the second half I will present more recent work on the relationship between control beliefs and stress. I will show data on (i) the buffering effects of heightened sense of control against later stress and (ii) that control beliefs shape adaptive responding to stress.

I will discuss these findings in line with recent frameworks characterising control as a highly rational and dynamic process and outline implications for interventions.

Speaker Biography:

I did my thesis at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences on the neuroscience of music and was awarded my PhD in 2008. I then moved to the University of Zurich for a postdoc in developmental social neuroscience at the Institute for Empirical Economics. I then returned to the Max-Planck Institute as Senior Researcher and Group Leader.

After fellowships at the Weill Cornell Medical School and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute I joined the Department of Developmental Psychology at the University of Leiden as an Assistant Professor in 2015. In 2017 I moved to UCL's Division of Psychology and Language Sciences as an Associate Professor and became Full Professor of Developmental Neuroscience there in 2021.

I have received various accolades and fellowships (i.e. Jacobs Research Fellowship, Humboldt Fellowship, German-Israeli Foundation Fellowship) and my work has been funded by the Jacobs Foundation, the German Research Foundation, the European Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council.

Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting out, this seminar series is perfect for anyone interested in child and adolescent development. You'll find it packed with the latest findings from family-based research. Check out the rest of the series.