Position:
Ph.D. student
- Christian Keysers
Research Project:
Spiegelonderzoek
The “Spiegelonderzoek” involves an extensive study that addresses emotion recognition, experience and empathy on a behavioral, cognitive, and neurobiological level in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia compared to healthy controls. By combining psychology with biology the study aims at improving diagnostics and ultimately also the treatment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia. The core approach of the project is to combine three approaches to the investigation of empathy and its dysfunctions in ASD and schizophrenia:
1. an in-depth psychometric assessment (NPO) of the subjects to capture their social psychological profile (IQ test, tests of social cognition, questionnaires);
2. reports on their daily (social) functioning, and;
3. a neuroimaging study aimed at identifying spatial patterns of neural activity linked to differences in the social psychological profiles.
My colleague Marieke Pijnenborg supervises the psychometric part of the study, while my main focus is on neuroimaging through a.o. functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). At the basis of the fMRI experiment is the concept of shared circuits. In short, the observation of an action or mental state triggers activation of a similar neural substrate in the observer, which establishes an intuitive understanding of the mental world of another person. Overlap in brain areas between the observation of an action, sensation or emotion and its execution or experience points to the existence of shared circuits for empathy. We expect that there is a disturbance in the mirror mechanism of patients with ASD and patients with schizophrenia.
Read more (in Dutch).
Academic Profile:
I studied Cognitive Psychology at the University of Leiden (2001-2005) where I graduated cum laude on the neurobiology of empathy. At present (2006-....) I am doing my PhD on emotion recognition, emotion experience and empathy in autism and schizophrenia. With social cognitive neuroscience as a main interest I aim to bridge brain and behavior and look beyond boundaries of disorder classifications.
Peer reviewed publications in scientific journals:
PubMed (go there)