معرفی
Dr. Geert-Jan Will serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology within Utrecht University's Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. His research bridges clinical psychology, neuroscience, and computational modeling to investigate how low self-esteem creates vulnerability to mental illness, with primary focus on depression mechanisms.
Core expertise areas include:
- Self-Perception and Self-Esteem Dynamics
- Neuroimaging of Social Feedback Processing
- Computational Modeling of Belief Updating
- Clinical Psychology Interventions for Depression
Will examines how social adversity shapes negative self-beliefs through behavioral experiments combining laboratory paradigms with real-world experience tracking. His work particularly emphasizes adolescent mental health, revealing how parental interactions and childhood trauma modulate neural responses to social feedback. Recent publications demonstrate increasing integration of longitudinal ecological methods to translate lab findings into clinical applications.
Analysis of his 15 most recent publications shows dominant research trajectories in self-esteem reactivity to social prediction errors, neural correlates of eye contact processing, and computational frameworks for understanding depression vulnerability. The work consistently employs fMRI and mathematical modeling to quantify social learning biases in clinical populations.
He actively contributes to Utrecht University's academic programs as instructor for Clinical Psychology (Master), Neuroscience and Cognition (Master), and Psychology (Bachelor) curricula, teaching courses including Foundations of Clinical Psychology, Neuroscience of Social Behavior, and Research Seminar in Social Neuroscience.
