We are delighted to announce the invited keynote speakers.

Dr. Geertjan Overbeek

Professor of Preventive Youth Care at the University of Amsterdam

Title: When mummy and daddy get under your skin: How parenting affects children’s stress reactivity, self-regulation and disruptive behavior

Child maltreatment is a widespread, global phenomenon that affects the lives of millions of children. In children who experience chronic maltreatment or highly dysfunctional parenting, stress reactivity is significantly upregulated towards hyperarousal, vigilance, and alertness. This upregulation reflects a physiological survival response that is nevertheless extremely harmful in the long run―increasing children’s disruptive behavior and hampering their self-regulatory processes. A crucial question for developmental scientists to consider is: can we undo this process in at-risk children? In this presentation, we will explore theory and research related to this question and consider pioneering evidence that suggests that by implementing known-effective parenting interventions, we can change not only the psychosocial, but also the epigenetic and neurobiological pathways that are responsible for impaired stress reactivity and self-regulation, and the development of disruptive behavior in childhood and adolescence.

Dr. Daniel Lakens

Associate Professor in the Human-Technology group at Eindhoven University of Technology

Title: Towards a more reliable and efficient psychological science

Problematic research practices, such as publication bias where only positive results are published, have been pointed out in the scientific literature for over half a century. Recently, large scale replication projects have suggested that not all published scientific research is as reliable as we want it to be. Psychological science has been at the forefront of improving research practices, due to a traditionally strong expertise in statistics, combined with an interest in how people change behavior and respond to reward structures. In this presentation I will talk about some of the problematic research practices that have limited knowledge generation in the past, how to recognize them, their consequences for the reliability of research findings, and ongoing efforts towards better research practices that have been developed in the last seven years. I will summarize some easy to implement improvements in designing and analysing experimental studies.

Dr. Eveline Crone

Professor of Developmental Neuroscience in Society at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Title: Adolescence as a window of opportunity for contribution to society

The dynamic brain development that takes place from childhood to young adulthood cooccurs with important changes in how young people relate to themselves and others. During this phase of their lives, young people develop relationships outside of the family context, they develop and alter their self-image, and they make a multitude of choices that have bearing on how they will continue their education, their profession, and their position in society. An important challenge for developmental science is to understand how these dynamic changes provide opportunities for young people to contribute to the societal challenges that the current generation faces.
Models of adolescent brain development have often suggested that the asynchronous development of reward-sensitive limbic and regulatory prefrontal brain regions results in a period of risk for disadvantageous outcomes. These models have often ignored that limbic contributions to rewards also provide opportunities for social adjustment, valuing collaborations and prosocial motivations. In this presentation, I will present data examining adolescence as a window of opportunity for giving, prosocial motivations, and ultimately, contribution to society.