Background:
From 1995 till 1999 I studied Chemical Technology at the University of Twente. After a year of
solving the millenium bug I decided to continue my studies in Groningen.
There I studied experimental psychology for a bit longer than 4 years and wrote my thesis
on the effects of mental fatigue on working memory. This was an EEG study. Just after
finishing that project I started working on my current project which deals with empathy within
criminal patients diagnosed with autism or psychopathy.
Current project:
My research project focuses on empathy within criminal patients diagnosed with autism or psychopathy.
In the Dutch forensic system, criminal offenders that have committed a crime which can be partly or
entirely attributed to a mental disorder are imprisoned in a secured psychiatric hospital after they
have first served their sentence in a normal prison in most cases. The
rationale behind this is that if these disorders stay untreated, these criminals will relapse
quicker. Treatment outcome and recidivism numbers, however, show a pessimistic picture on the
possibility to reintegrate these patients effectively.
One of the known deficits of the patient groups mentioned above is a lack of empathy, which
is very important for adequate social functioning. In this project, empathy will be linked to activity within
the mirror neuron system for (affective) touch. We will investigate the brain activity of
participants while they witness tactile stimulations being applied to other people. This activity
will be compared with the brain activity of the participants while they experience similar tactile
sensations. At the moment healthy volunteers are being compared with individuals with a high
psychopathy score on the PCL-r of Hare. We expect that if the activity observed in somatosensory
areas during the observation of other individuals being touched is indeed at the bases of our
empathic understanding of the other peoples mind, the latter subjects should have significantly
smaller activity in these regions compared to the healthy controls. This finding would bring
fundamentally new insights into the mental disorder of these patients.
