Welcome
I am a researcher at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, at Radboud University, Nijmegen, and the Department of Marketing at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, both in The Netherlands. The main theme of my research is the neural correlates of outcome and performance evaluation. Using both ERP en fMRI measures, I focus on the social and emotional factors involved in evaluating own and others’ performance, such as fair/unfair treatment by others, fear of exclusion by others, and the effects of individual differences like social status, but also differences in personality-related motivational orientations (approach/avoidance) on these processes.
Related to this, I am interested in individual differences in what people find motivating or rewarding. It appears that, while some people prefer to work to obtain potential gains, others appear to work primarily to avoid losses. I started this line of research when I was at the Neuro Imaging Center in Groningen, The Netherlands, in 2005. Then, in 2006, I collaborated with Prof. Philip Ward at the University of New South Wales, Australia, to investigate these differences in reward-/punishment motivation in people suffering from schizophrenia.
My interest in motivational processes resulted from my research for my doctoral thesis. From 2001 until 2005, I was a PhD student at the department of Experimental Psychology, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. During this time, I investigated the neural and cognitive processes involved in mental fatigue. My experiments led me to conclude that mental fatigue involves a negative motivational evaluation of costs and benefits of performing a certain task: when the energetical costs of performing this task exceed the potential gains, this is registered in the brain and certain neural processes are engaged to inhibit expending additional energy, resulting in feelings of fatigue (see Boksem and Tops, 2008 for a review).
