The aim of these informal meetings is to provide an opportunity to hear about colleagues' research projects, questions, and methods. The dean hopes that this meeting will see the same fruitful interdisciplinary interaction as the previous ones. The presentations and discussions are in English.

At this tenth lunch the speakers were:

Bernhard Hommel (Psychology)

God: Do I have your attention?

Religions are commonly taken to provide general orientation in leading one’s life. However, we recently developed the idea that religions may also have a much more concrete guidance function in providing systematic decision biases in the face of cognitive-control dilemmas. These biases serve as defaults under decision-making uncertainty and affect performance in any task that shares cognitive-control operations with the religiously motivated behavior that generated these biases in the first place. They can therefore be unraveled and objectified by means of rather simple, well understood cognitive tasks. E.g., we could show that Calvinism, Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and Buddhism systematically change the way people attend to and process visual stimuli, how efficiently they switch between different tasks, and how well they suppress conflicting information. In particular, religions emphasizing individual responsibility bias attentional mechanisms in a systematically different fashion than do religions emphasizing social solidarity.

Hanna Swaab (Education and Child Studies)

Outcome of childhood psychopathology, the search for precursors of psychosis

Clinicians are challenged to predict long term outcome of childhood behavioural and emotional problems, based on characteristics of psychopathology and the influence of upbringing and specific interventions. Psychosis is a very serious condition that is generally considered a disorder of early adulthood, but the pathological processes predisposing psychosis may already be present earlier in life. The results of a longitudinal follow-up study into adulthood of a cohort of 6700 children with a child psychiatric diagnosis will be discussed. Both specificity for psychosis of pre-psychotic behavioural abnormalities and cognitive performance, as well as age and sex-related risk for psychosis are discussed.