About Me

Welcome to my personal website. I am Miranda Christine Lutz-Landesbergen and currently a PhD candidate at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. I research the role of cognitive control in psychopathology. I am also a mother of two daughters, happily married and own two cats.

I am an advocate for PhD well-being and I endorse open-science practices. How is it to do a PhD in the Netherlands in Psychology and being a parent? How do you combine this with all the extra-curricular activities? Read more about what and how I do on this website!

In short:

  • Residence the Netherlands
  • E-mail miranda.c.lutz@gmail.com
  • Job PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology
  • I stand for Transparency and honesty
  • Research topics cognitive control, EEG, Flanker task, meta-analysis, developmental psychology, behavioral addiction

Experience

PhD Candidate Clinical Psychology

2017- Current Erasmus University Rotterdam

Role of cognitive control in the development of psychopathology. See for extended overview of my PhD dissertation on the academic activities page.

Research Assistant

2016-2017 Leiden University

I was a research assistant for the Health, Medical and Neuropsychology department, where I assisted several PhD students on their projects which are part of the ERC consolidator grant ‘Empowering expectations for health and disease: Training the immune and endocrine system’. PI: Prof. Dr. Andrea Evers.

Several research traineeships

2014-2017 Leiden University

1. Assist in research on Routine Outcome Monitoring and the role of process feedback in therapeutic settings. Collaboration with and supervised by Dr. Kim de Jong, Clinical Psychology, Leiden University. 2. Assisting during a pilot study on self-concepts in adolescents: an MRI study. PI: Prof. Dr. Eveline Crone 3. Assist on an intervention study on the improvement of working memory and school outcomes in primary school children. Supervised by Dr. D. D. Jolles and Dr. A. K. J. Karlsson.

Licensed swimming teacher

2008-current Local swimming pool

Licensed swimming teacher at a local swimming pool. Previously also life-guard.

Education

Several graduate courses

2017- Current External graduate schools/Erasmus University Rotterdam

PhD courses on scientific integrity, meta-analysis (in R), growth curve modeling, mediation and multli-level SEM in MPlus, data processing (EEG), presenting and communicating your research.

Master Education and Child studies: Clinical Child and Adolescent Studies specialization

2015-2016 Leiden University

Research Internship: Social judgement in socially anxious adolescents: An EEG study. Supervisor: Dr. Melle van der Molen. Thesis topic: Cortical thickness, surface area and volume and functional polymorphisms of Disrupted in schizophrenia-1 in typically developing children and adolescents. Supervisor: Dr. Tim Ziermans.

Master Education and Child studies: Neuroscience in Child and Educational Studies specialization

2014-2015 Leiden University

Research internship: Longitudinal study on social cognition in 7- to 12-month old baby's. Supervisor: Dr. Szilvia Biro Thesis topic: Resting-state frontal asymmetry in 11-month-old infants: Role of infant temperament and maternal sensitivity. Supervisor: Dr. Szilvia Biro

Bachelor Pedagogical Sciences

2010-2014 University of Amsterdam

Including courses on Educational sciences

MYP & DP, International Baccalaureate Organisation

2002-2009 Oegstgeest

Teaching Experience

  • Master Clinical Psychology/Child & Adolescent Psychology Thesis (internship) supervision
  • Bachelor Psychology Thesis supervision
  • Practical Psychodiagnostics Teacher
  • Practical Behaviour therapy interventions Teacher
  • Practical Cognitive therapy Coordinator & Teacher
  • Bachelor Research Traineeship Supervisor

Several Achievements

Reading the scales below

When the scale is more filled (to the right), I feel more advanced about it. This is not a validated instrument, so imagination is required.

Research Skills

R

SPSS

EEG

Systematic Literature & Meta-Analysis

Psychometric validity

Learning Now

structural/functional MRI (AFNI)

MPlus

Mediation

Growth Curve Modeling

Other Skills

Open Science Practise

Organzing/Hosting Events

Presenting

Networking & Connecting

My Imprefections

Saying no

Insecurities

Lingering on details

Typo's

My PhD dissertation

We need our brain to do many complex processes when we do our everyday activities. For instance, when we have to perform a certain task, we have to monitor our steps carefully, meanwhile controlling our emotions and avoiding negative outcomes.

We monitor our performance, our brain is busy learning from mistakes. In some individuals, these processes work differently. For instance, when you are anxious, you might react overly sensitive to an error, where as if you are impulse, you might not even notice you made a mistake.

In my PhD, I investigate how the brain reacts to errors and how one's performance monitoring is related to psychological disorders and the development of these conditions (psychopathology). We often use the terms cognitive control and error processing when we are monitoring our performance. We also have fancy equipment to measure brain activity and display such as EEG (electroencephalogram) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) while we perform these tasks.

To understand the role of cognitive control in psychopathology, I will investigate the development of performance on a cognitive task (Eriksen Flanker) in a large longitudinal sample of primary school children. If data allows it, I will examine possible associations with emerging emotional problems. My PhD dissertation also included two reviews on two error processing event-related potentials (ERP's, measured through EEG). In a meta-analysis, where I combine effects found from different studies, I found that both error-related negativity and error positivity is diminished in patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, addiction disorders and other externalizing disorders and problems. Knowing this, I discuss to what extent we can use these neurobiological markers in the clinical field in a narrative review, written for a special issue for a journal.

The last two chapters of my PhD dissertation will be two articles in which I describe how error processing has a role in two different samples. One sample is a longitudinal study, in which we investigate the association between error processing, infant behavioral inhibition and current social anxiety. We also look where in the brain is most active in this study. In the last chapter, I study error processing in a unique sample. Here, I look at mediating role of error processing in the relationship between early childhood adversity (e.g. child abuse) and later externalizing problem behavior in a young adult males.

The data used in this project originates from an innovative approach of combing different type of studies, including longitudinal designs such as Happy Child, Happy Adolescent (VU Amsterdam), and a sample of vulnerable young male adults with behavioral and legal problems (De Nieuwe Kans, VUmc, Amsterdam). My PhD is made possible by the Erasmus Initiatives: Vital Cities and Citizens which stimulates research that uses collaboration between the different disciplines, in my case neuro-clinical psychology and developmental-pedagogical sciences.

I do my PhD in the section Clinical Psychology of the Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My supervisors are Prof. Ingmar Franken, PhD., Prof. Pol van Lier, PhD, (promotors) Rianne Kok, PhD (co-promotor) and former supervisor was Susanne Koot, PhD. I consider several other close colleagues as my mentors in my PhD journey, such as Kim de Jong, PhD and Prof. Pauline Jansen, PhD.

But what is doing a PhD really? You do research, but it's like executing several complex projects. So you learn to do project management, critical thinking, presenting and lots of writing.  But you do so many other things along the side, if you wish. You can teach, work on other project together with other parties/colleagues, etc. I will regularly write about what I do besides my PhD research in the blogs, see next window!

My Publications

  • Miranda C. Lutz, Rianne Kok, Ilse Verveer,  Marcelo Malbec De Vidts, Susanne Koot, Pol van Lier & Ingmar Franken (2021). Diminished error-related negativity and error positivity in children and adults with externalizing problems and disorders - Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience, 46 (6), E615-E627.  doi: 10.1503/jpn.200031
  • Miranda C. Lutz, Rianne Kok & Ingmar Franken (2021). Event-related potential (ERP) measures of error processing as biomarkers of externalizing disorders. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 166, 151-159. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2021.06.002
  • Kim de Jong, Judith M. Colijn, Roisin A. V. Gallagher, Alexandra S. Reshetnikova, Marya Heij & Miranda C. Lutz (2021). Using progress feedback to improve outcomes and reduce drop-out, treatment duration, and deterioration. Clinical Psychology Review, 85. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2021.102002

Member of

Current Collaborations/ Active Projects

Infant behavioral inhibition, social anxiety and error monitoring. With Daniel Pine, MD, NIMH.

OSF: https://osf.io/jkpsx In this prospective longitudinal study, we examine the association between infant behavioral inhibition (measured at 14 month), later social anxiety (measured at age 29) and error processing (measured with a social flanker task). The social flanker task, where there is one condition in which participants are observed by a peer, will be performed in a MRI-scanner, allowing us to investigate where in the anterior cingulate cortex activity most or least evident.

Steady State EEG. With Drs. Asmina Aslanidou

OSF: https://osf.io/nq745/ The ability to detect threats in ever-changing environments is of crucial importance to living organisms. Successful threat detection, on the one hand can help escape dangerous encounters and on the other hand avoid unnecessary fear. Differential fear conditioning paradigms have been extensively used to study threat identification, by pairing one stimulus CS+) with an aversive event such as a loud noise or an electric shock (US) signaling threat, while a second stimulus is never paired (CS-) signaling safety. Among other measures, steady-state visual evoked potentials or fields (ssVEP/Fs) have often been used as a method to capture this difference. With ssVEP/Fs the temporal frequency of an externally flickering stimulus can cause frequency locked potentials in EEG/MEG (Regan, 1989). These frequency locked potentials can be tracked and thus allow us to follow the dynamic changes of visuocortical processing due to learning (Wieser et al., 2016). The amplitude of ssVEP/Fs is modulated not only by low order physical characteristics such as colour and shape but also by cognitive processes such as selective attention (McTeague et al., 2015). The great temporal resolution of EEG/MEG as well as the excellent signal-to-noise ratio constitute ssVEP/Fs a promising method for capturing early cortical bias formation such as the difference between a threat and safety signals. Effect sizes for other widely used methods that measure conditioned responses, such as Heart Rate and Skin Conductance Response, have already been suggested (Ojala & Bach, 2020). Although ssVEPs have been used to capture this difference in differential conditioning paradigms for more than a decade, there is no meta-analytic evidence for its success. Therefore, with this study we plan to aggregate evidence from studies using ssVEP/Fs in differential fear conditioning paradigms and explore whether their use is justified.

Validation of Assessment for Signal Clients. With Kim de Jong, PhD

Clinical support tools such as the Outcome Questionnaire Assessment for Signal Clients (OQASC) can help therapists identify reasons for a client´s lack of progress during psychotherapy. The OQ-ASC questionnaire assesses four domains that moderate treatment outcomes: therapeutic alliance, social support, motivation, and life events. The utility and usefulness of the OQ-ASC is dependent on its psychometric qualities. This study aims to investigate the psychometric properties of the Dutch version of the OQ-ASC. Combining three independent samples of Dutch outpatients, 318 participants were included in the analysis. A confirmatory factor analysis revealed an acceptable fit for the four factors that were originally proposed for this questionnaire. The internal consistency was good for all scales. The convergent and divergent validity was good for the Therapeutic Alliance, Social Support, and Life Events scales, but was unsatisfactory for the Motivation subscale. The OQASC scales were able to distinguish between clients who were on track and not on track for recovery, except for the Motivation subscale. Overall, the OQ-ASC can be a useful tool to assess reasons for potential stagnations in treatment progress, and as such, can be a valuable addition to routine outcome monitoring measures used in the Netherlands.

Task performance and cognitive control. With Peter Clayson, PhD

Empirical paper (pre-registration upon request). Forced choice response tasks are often used to investigate behavioral and neurophysiological indices of performance monitoring. The modal approach for investigating these indices is to examine interindividual differences in average scores of a single ERP component, and studies that include neurophysiological data rarely use individual-trial ERP data and target specific relationships between behavior and neurophysiology. Therefore, the present study will examine interindividual and intraindividual differences in the trial-by-trial relationship between behavioral measurements (response time, accuracy) and neurophysiology (the stimulus-locked conflict N2 and P3 and the response-locked error-related negativity [ERN] and post-error positivity [Pe] components of the ERP) recorded during a flanker task to determine the trial-by-trial correspondence between behavioral and neurophysiological instantiations of performance monitoring.

Reducing externalizing behavior in adolescents using co-creation. Michelle Achterberg, PhD & Lysanne te Brinke, PhD

OSF: https://osf.io/n9q6g/ During the covid-19 crisis, internalizing problems of adolescents have received a lot of attention, yet research shows that youths themselves and society as a whole also experience an increased burden of externalizing problems (i.e., misbehavior such as drug use and aggression). Therefore, effective policy and interventions to deal with these problems are needed. Currently, policy and intervention programs aimed to influence adolescent externalizing behaviors often fail because they (1) do not honor adolescents’ need for autonomy, status and respect, and (2) do not include adolescents in the design process. To reduce externalizing problem behavior in youth, we want to utilize a co-creation design including several stakeholders. We will invite 20 participants to the co-creation process, divided over four taskforces (see figure): 1) 16-18-year-old adolescents; 2) policy makers; 3) policy executors such as youth workers, teachers, and community officers; and 4) health care professionals such as school psychologists and child psychiatrists. We will adapt the suggestions of Stichting Alexander4, by including the following four steps: inform, create, evaluate and present. ► Inform: First, we organize separate brainstorm sessions with each taskforce in which we share recent scientific insight regarding adolescent’s need for autonomy, status, and respect, inform the taskforce about the project and have an open discussion on important features to reduce externalizing problem behavior. ► Create: The second step is to have a one-day hackathon event where the taskforces unite and work in synergy on solutions to reduce externalizing problem behavior in youth. The hackathon starts with a short overview of all the input given in the separate brainstorm sessions. ► Evaluate: The third step is to evaluate and communicate the co-creation outcomes, i.e., the solutions to reduce externalizing problem behavior. ► Present: The final step will be to present the outcome to the larger scientific community, and society as a whole. This project will provide output on two levels: both the method of cocreation will be evaluated (various taskforces with separate and joined co-create sessions) as well as the focus of the co-creation process (reducing externalizing behavior in youth). We will quantitively and qualitatively measure the experiences of participants with this cocreation design at three time points: before the start of the project, after the information sessions, and after the co-creation hackathon. We can use these experiences to improve our co-creation methods and explore whether adolescent’s trust in policy makers, policy executors and researchers increases as a result of co-creation.

Heading to next

June 2022: CPDD in Minneapolis, USA. Presenting CPDD_poster M36 on June 13th, 8 am-10 am CET entitled: Diminished Error-Related Negativity and Error Positivity in Adults With Addiction Problems and Disorders: A Meta-Analysis on Error Processing.

September 2022: SPR in Vancouver, Canada. Presenting SPRposter_LutzEtAll poster session 1-13 on September 28th from 7 to 9pm PDT, entitled: Relationship between within-person differences in error-related negativity and error positivity and correct-trial response-time means and variations in healthy participants. Results found here: SPR22_PosterResults_LutzEtAll.

Ph.D. dissertation defense: 2023

On the job market as of spring 2023: interested in a post-doc position

Find me

Or just e-mail me:

miranda.c.lutz@gmail.com

Interested in a post-doc or academic staff position from January 2023 onwards