Simone Dobbelaar

Leiden University | LEI · Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

Developing social skills is essential to succeed in social relations. Two important social constructs in middle childhood, prosocial behavior and reactive aggression, are often regarded as separate behaviors with opposing developmental outcomes. However, there is increasing evidence for the co-occurrence of prosociality and aggression, as both migh...

Dealing with a COVID-19 lockdown may have negative effects on children, but at the same time might facilitate parent–child bonding. Perceived stress may influence the direction of these effects. Using a longitudinal twin design, we investigated how perceived stress influenced lockdown induced changes in wellbeing of parents and children. A total of...

This study investigated behavioral and neural correlates underlying social feedback processing and subsequent aggressive behaviors in childhood in two age cohorts (test sample: n=509/n=385 and replication sample: n=354/n=195, 7-9 years old). Using a previously validated Social Network Aggression Task (Achterberg et al., 2020), we showed that negati...

Learning to control behavior when receiving feedback underlies social adaptation in childhood and adolescence, and is potentially strengthened by environmental support factors, such as parents. This study examined the neural development of responding to social feedback from childhood to adolescence, and effects of parental sensitivity on this devel...

Prior studies have indicated that prosocial behavior might be a protective factor for developing internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems. However, little research has been conducted on within-person changes of prosocial behavior and behavioral problems over time. With random-intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPMs), the current st...

Significance It is not well understood why and how memories of similar events sometimes strengthen each other, but at other times compete, causing either facilitation or impairment of memory recollection. Reasoning that the environment (spatial context) in which events occur is a critical component of memory function, we show that similar memories...

How neural correlates of self-concept are influenced by environmental versus genetic factors is currently not fully understood. We investigated heritability estimates of behavioral and neural correlates of self-concept in middle childhood since this phase is an important time window for taking on new social roles in academic and social contexts. To...

Prior studies have indicated that prosocial behavior might be a protective factor for developing behavioral problems. The current study analyzed longitudinal associations between prosocial behavior and behavioral problems in two twin cohorts (98% Western European): in early childhood (age M=4.77, 52% girls, N=440) and middle childhood (age M=7.94,...

For over a century, stability of environmental context across related episodes has been considered a source of memory interference. However, contemporary memory integration theory generates a diametrically opposite prediction. Here, we aimed to resolve this discrepancy by manipulating local context similarity across temporally disparate but related...

Whereas children are physically less affected by the COVID-19 disease, dealing with lockdown may have negative effects on their wellbeing. At the same time, the lockdown might also have positive effects for families, as it might facilitate parent-child bonding. One important factor that may influence the direction of these effects is perceived stre...

The transition period between early childhood and late adolescence is characterized by pronounced changes in social competence, or the capacity for flexible social adaptation. Here, we propose that two processes, self-control and prosociality, are crucial for social adaptation following social evaluation. We present a neurobehavioral model showing...

We outline a network method to synthesize a literature overview from search results obtained by multiple team members. Several network statistics are used to create a single representativeness ranking. We illustrate the method with the dispersed literature on a common misinterpretation of analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The network method yields a...