Team

Christin Scholz is an Assistant Professor at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam. She is interested in the social life of persuasive media messages and its effects on health and societally beneficial behaviors in individuals and large populations. Her work relies on multi-methodological approaches including neuroscientific methods like fMRI and social science techniques such as observational geolocation tracking, field experimentation, and survey methods to capture both detailed decision-making processes and real-world behavior.

Dr. Scholz’ work has been funded by a Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Commission, a Veni grant from NWO, the Amsterdam School of Communication Research, DARPA, and the Templeton World Foundation.

Xinyao Zhang has graduated from the Research Master’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences of the University of Amsterdam. She is interested in a wide range of topics in the field of social and affective neuroscience, especially attitude polarization on social media and the role of emotion in this process. She is now working as a research internship student at the lab, focusing on how people perceive counterattitudinal messages when consuming online media content.

Eowyn (Yijia) Zhang is a student in the Research Master programme of Brain and Cognitive sciences at the University of Amsterdam. She has an interdisciplinary background in clinical psychology and neuroscience. She is interested in the physiological changes and neural correlates underlying cognitive processes, for instance, daily decision-making about risky drinking behaviour. She is working in the lab to develop her skillset for data collection & organisation and fMRI safety training, as well as knowledge of persuasion from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Tianlai Ye is a research master’s student in communication science at the University of Amsterdam. She is interested in various topics in the field of health communication, especially how social influence plays its role in people’s daily health decision-making processes. She is now working as a research intern at the lab, hoping to explore better ways to promote pro-health decisions in complex real-world situations and to gain hands-on experiences in handling as well as understanding various types of data.

Spela Dolinsek is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR). Her research interests lie in the fields of persuasive and health communication. She is also interested in interpersonal communication, especially on social media.

Her PhD project focuses on characteristics of persuasive messages and their potential impact on mental well-being of the recipients. Additionally, she is researching whether mental well-being as a trait plays a role in how persuasive messages are processed, both of which are especially relevant in times of crises, such as a pandemic. Through use of innovative methods such as interviews enhanced with digital trace data, she aims to highlight the role of social media interactions in coping with threatening health messages.

Bennet Hübbe is a research master student specializing in brain and cognition and psychological methods. He is interested in social cognitive neuroscience, with a special interest in information-processing, information spread and decision-making in political contexts. During his bachelors, he conducted research on the effects of a virtual reality intervention on social perception in an embodied cognition framework.