drs. Denise van der Mee

My main research interest is psychophysiology. I developed this passion during my research master's in Neuroscience at the VU. 

During my Ph.D., I  got involved in a variety of topics related to autonomic nervous system activity (ANS) as an index of stress/effort. The main topic of my Ph.D. was the association between ANS activity and affect in daily life. To do so I have collected ANS and Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) data during a 24h daily life period as well as classical stress reactivity data in a laboratory setting. 

I started my scientific journey by validating a new electrodermal activity (EDA) measuring wristwatch (developed by Philips:  https://www.philips.com/a-w/about/innovation/ips/ip-licensing/programs/emography-stress-management-technology.html) against a golden standard device, the VU-AMS (https://vu-ams.nl/) in the laboratory setting. This study showed that this device is suitable for long-term daily life studies. Preliminary evidence on my daily life data, which I presented at the SAA conference 2021, shows that it is indeed possible to predict effects with the use of amongst others this smartwatch. My current research activities focus on expanding these findings. Specifically, I want to compare the laboratory-observed relationship between ANS and affect to their daily life counterpart and dive deeper into the possibilities to predict affect by combining different ANS measures into physiological profiles.

During my Ph.D., I also joined Smiddy Nieuwenhuis in her research on the relationship between the theory of intelligence (TOI; also referred to as mindset) and autonomic nervous system activity. In her papers, we investigated this relationship in a laboratory setting using a mental arithmetic task. I am continuing my study into this relationship as a post-doc in development psychology with the use of an ecologically valid stressor in the daily life of students: an exam. By combining questionnaire data on state mental health & TOI, emotion dynamics through ecological momentary assessment, and physiological dynamics collected through wearables I want to investigate if TOI is associated with differences in emotional and physiological dynamics in the weeks surrounding the exam.

In addition to my psychophysiological work, I have been involved in research regarding exercise behavior. Together with dr. Matthijs van der Zee I have classified all voluntary exercise behavior in the Netherlands Twin Registry in either internally paced or externally paced exercise and team sport or solitary sport. Not only has this exercise classification been related to specific reward and executive function alleles but has also provided valuable information regarding the longitudinal stability of exercise behavior.  I have incorporated my interest in exercise behavior in my psychophysiological research by investigating the relationship between physical fitness and laboratory and daily life stress reactivity.

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