This project aims to investigate the role of defensive psychophysiological states in approach-avoidance decision-making under threat. The project focusses on the primary defensive state that occurs upon threat confrontation in humans: the automatic reaction to stand still, attentively consider the environment, and prepare for action – the freezing response. By taking objective physiological measures of freezing states, incorporating them into computational models of decision-making, and assessing the associated neural correlates, we aim to provide a new neurocognitive perspective on approach-avoidance decision-making that does justice to the potentially significant role of the transient defensive state of the decision-maker. The project involves assessments using fMRI and MEG (Klaassen, Bramson). Additionally, the project involves theoretical work on the nature of freezing and its role in decision making (Roelofs & Dayan, 2022 NRN). Additionally the project involves a large
study in patients with affective disorders (Hulsman, Roelofs and Klumpers).
Selected publications
Klaassen F.H., de Voogd L.D., Hulsman A.M., O’Reilly J.X., Klumper F., Figner B., & Roelofs K. (2023). The neurocomputational link between defensive cardiac states and approach-avoidance arbitration under threat. Communications Biology
Roelofs K., Klaassen F.H., & Dayan P. (2023). Reply to ‘Post-encounter freezing during approach-avoidance conflict: the role of the hippocampus’. (2023). Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Klaassen F.H., Held L., Figner B., O’Reilly J.X., Klumpers F., de Voogd L.D., & Roelofs K. (2021). Defensive freezing and its relation to approach-avoidance decision-making under threat. Scientific Reports
Livermore J.A., Klaassen F.H., Bramson B., Hulsman A.M., Meijer S.W., Held L., Klumpers F., de Voogd L.D., & Roelofs K. (2021). Approach-avoidance decisions under threat: the role of autonomic psychophysiological states. Frontiers in Neuroscience
Hulsman AM, Klaassen FH, de Voogd LD, Roelofs K*, Klumpers F* (2024). How Distributed Subcortical Integration of Reward and Threat May Inform Subsequent Approach-Avoidance Decisions.
J Neurosci. 44(48):e0794242024.