Faces of ESLR: Ana da Silva Pinho
My background is in education, human development, and developmental psychopathology (University of Porto and Amsterdam). I am currently a PhD candidate in the Connected Minds Lab and at the developmental psychology department, University of Amsterdam (UvA). My PhD research broadly focusses on social learning and decision-making under the jointly supervision of Dr. Wouter van den Bos, Dr. Lucas Molleman and Dr. Barbara Braams. In one line of research, I investigate how individuals learn from each other, how this is shaped by their environment (e.g., social norms, networks, affiliations) and how this affects behavior and its diffusion over the course of development. In another line of work, I am interested in the mechanisms (e.g., cognitive, computational) involved in reward learning and social media behavior. To address my research questions, I will use a wide range of methods: surveys, experimental tasks, computational modeling, and neural measures.
I have always been passionate about deepening my understanding of human socio-emotional and cognitive development, and behavior. Prior to my PhD, I completed a MSc in child development where I specialized in developmental psychopathology. During my master, I integrated two different projects. In one project, I investigated typically developing 12-month-old infants’ pupillary responses and fixations to facial emotional stimuli, using an eye-tracking paradigm which took place in the Babylab at UvA. In the other project, I investigated the effects of adolescent and child personality on parenting and juvenile delinquency, using a meta-analytic structural equation modeling approach. This research was the result of a collaboration with the intergenerational transmission of criminal behavior cluster of the Netherlands Institute for the study of crime and law enforcement. Before my PhD, I have also worked as a counselor in a prison facility and as a data analyst in a media company. Besides science and research, I enjoy (improvising my skills in) photography.
About the author
Ana is a PhD candidate in the Connected Minds Lab and at the University of Amsterdam. Her PhD research broadly focusses on social learning and decision-making. In one line of research, she investigates how individuals learn from each other, how this is shaped by their environment (e.g., social norms, networks, affiliations) and how this affects behavior and its diffusion. In another line of work, she is interested in the mechanisms (e.g., cognitive, computational) involved in reward learning and social media behavior.