Development and plasticity of control and control beliefs.

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• Professor Nikolaus Steinbeis, UCL
• Tuesday 18 November 2025, 16:00-17:00
• Hybrid: Cambridge/Teams.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Louise Gray.

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Abstract:

My lab studies processes that control our thoughts and actions and their role in driving healthy psychological development. I will present ongoing work on two such processes, namely cognitive control and control beliefs.

In the first part I will show data from a recently completed randomized control trial aiming to improve cognitive control in 235 6-11 year old children showing no effects across a host of behavioural and neural outcomes.

In the second half I will present more recent work on control beliefs and their relationship with stress. I will present on (i) the buffering effects of heightened control beliefs against later stress and (ii) how control beliefs shape adaptive responding to stress.

I will discuss these findings in line with recent frameworks characterising control as a highly rational and dynamic process and outline implications for interventions.

Speaker Bio:

I obtained my PhD (on the neuroscience of music) in 2008 from the Max-Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. I then did a postdoc at the University of Zurich and became a group leader back the Max-Planck Institute, starting my work on developmental social neuroscience.

In 2015 I joined the department of developmental psychology at the University of Leiden as an Assistant Professor and in 2017 moved to UCL ’s Division of Psychology and Language Sciences as an Associate Professor and became Full Professor of Developmental Neuroscience there in 2021.

My work has been funded through various fellowships (Jacobs Foundation, Humboldt Foundation, German-Israeli Foundation) and funding bodies (the German Research Foundation, ERC , ESRC, MRC ).

This talk is part of the Centre for Child, Adolescent & Family Research Seminar Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Centre for Child, Adolescent & Family Research Seminar Series
• Hybrid: Cambridge/Teams
• Psychology talks and events
• Yishu's list

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