Past projects

Under the founding Director of the Calleva Centre, Professor Jennifer Lau, work was conducted in a first series of projects which looked at a set of interconnected research questions, including:

  • The effects of social context on adolescent and adult risk-taking behaviour, using experimental tasks to investigate the decisions that adolescents (and adults) make about risky situations, and how this is modulated by social context.
  • Learning to look out for cheats. Here, the team were interested in examining whether people have cognitive biases for individuals who have defected in a social exchange. They extended this work to examine how cognitive biases for defectors might emerge through development, as adolescents’ social worlds become more complex.
  • Navigating the social world: Higher-order mentalizing in adolescents. Humans are unique in their capacity to mentalize – that is, to think about others’ beliefs, desires, and intentions. This project involved adapting an existing measure of mentalizing ability to make it appropriate for adolescents and use it to examine both typical development of mentalizing through adolescence and how individual differences in adolescent mentalizing relate to social and emotional wellbeing.
  • The development of interpersonal information integration. The team used social psychophysics to test how interpersonal information integration change with age.
  • Detection of interpersonal cues encourages altruism. They investigated how the presence of interpersonal cues can elicit more generous patterns of behaviour from people, and whether individual differences in mood can enhance these effects further.

Select publications:

  • Haller, S. P. W., Bang, D., Bahrami, B., & Lau, J. Y. F. (2018). Group decision-making is optimal in adolescence. Scientific Reports 8: 15565. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-33557-x
  • Haddad, A. D. M., Harrison, F., Norman, T., & Lau, J. Y. F. (2014). Adolescent and adult risk-taking in virtual social contexts. Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1476. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01476
  • Bang, D., Aitchison, L., Moran, R., Herce Castanon, S., Rafiee, B., Mahmoodi, A., Lau, J. Y. F., Latham, P. E., Bahrami, B., & Summerfield, C. (2017). Confidence matching in group decision-making. Nature Human Behaviour 1: 0117. doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0117

From 2014 two projects extended the Centre’s work further:

Professors Stuart West, Kevin Foster and Tom Norman investigated Cooperation and Conflict, since one of the greatest problems for the biological and social sciences is to explain cooperative social behaviours. Cooperation should in principle reduce the relative fitness of the cooperator and hence be selected against; but cooperation is common at all levels of life. Bacterial pathogens cooperate to overcome the immune response of their hosts, meerkats babysit the pups of other individuals, and ants live in complex social societies. Within humans, our underlying psychology, morality, institutions and societies are all based around cooperative interactions. This project exploited two systems that offer very different advantages for studying the evolution of cooperation: humans and bacteria. Humans offer excellent opportunities for studying how levels of cooperation are adjusted conditionally in response to local conditions, as well as a unique ability for examining the underlying mechanisms and motivations. Bacteria offer excellent opportunities for experimental evolution studies, since it is possible to study how cooperation evolves in different environmental and social conditions.

Select publications:

  • Burton-Chellew, M. N., & West, S. A. (2021). Payoff-based learning best explains the rate of decline in cooperation across 237 public-goods games. Nature Human Behaviour 5: 1330–38. doi:10.1038/s41562-021-01107-7
  • Mavridou, D. A. I., Gonzalez, D., Kim, W., West, S. A., & Foster, K. R. (2018). Bacteria Use Collective Behavior to Generate Diverse Combat Strategies. Current Biology 28: 345–55. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.12.030
  • Burton-Chellew, M. N., El Mouden, C., & West, S. A. (2016). Conditional cooperation and confusion in public-goods experiments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 113: 1291–96. doi:10.1073/pnas.1509740113

Professors Felix Budelmann, Robin Dunbar and Laurie Maguire investigated Adults at Play(s), to study the psychology of dramatic audiences. At the heart of this project was the notion of make-believe, which is psychologically puzzling: audiences know that what they see or read is fictional (the characters, the plot) but they respond to it emotionally as if it were real – a form of ‘cognitive dissonance’. This oddity raises psychological questions: what psychological mechanism(s) make(s) these seemingly contradictory mental states (knowing while pretending) possible? What benefit do audiences derive from this investment and engagement? At the same time a reciprocal literary question arises: how do dramatists manipulate the nature and the degree of the audience’s commitment to the transaction (‘I know this is not real but I temporarily behave as if it is’)? Adults at Play(s) explored the psychological and literary questions in tandem, with methodologies drawn from both psychology and the humanities and a focus on Greek and Shakespearean tragedy.

Select publications:

  • Teasdale, B., Maguire, L., Budelmann, F., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2021). How Audiences Engage With Drama: Identification, Attribution and Moral Approval. Frontiers in Psychology 12: 762011. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.762011
  • Thompson, J. M., Teasdale, B., Duncan, S., van Emde Boas, E., Budelmann, F., Maguire, L., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2018). Individual Differences in Transportation into Narrative Drama. Review of General Psychology 22: 210–19. doi:10.1037/gpr0000130
  • Dunbar, R. I. M., Teasdale, B., Thompson, J., Budelmann, F., Duncan, S., van Emde Boas, E., & Maguire, L. (2016). Emotional arousal when watching drama increases pain threshold and social bonding. Royal Society Open Science 3: 160288. doi:10.1098/rsos.160288

Since 2017 ten projects have been funded and three have been completed so far:

Professors Lucy Bowes and Siân Pooley investigated Changing lives: Childhood experience, cumulative risk, and supportive environments across the life course. Their work focused on children who experience the most significant forms of adverse experience, from socio-economic deprivation to discrimination and violence. The aim of the project was to investigate how families, peers, communities, and the state make a difference to people’s lives. It was particularly interested in the complex and diverse impacts of both harmful and supportive relationships, measured in the short- and long-term. Changing Lives was an interdisciplinary project that innovatively brought together the complementary strengths of research from medical sciences and humanities to ask new questions about how experience affects the unfolding of human lives.

Three cross-disciplinary themes characterised the research:

  • Evaluating the impact of policies and interventions on young people’s lives
  • Placing children’s experiences and perspectives at the centre of research
  • Examining inequalities in childhood and cumulative disadvantage across the life-course

The project also received funding from the Wellcome Trust, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Select publications:

  • Guzman‐Holst, C., Zaneva, M., Chessell, C., Creswell, C., & Bowes, L. (2022). Do antibullying interventions reduce internalizing symptoms? A systematic review, meta‐analysis, and meta‐regression exploring intervention components, moderators, and mechanisms. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 63: 1454–65. doi:10.1111/jcpp.13620
  • Pooley, S., & Taylor, J., eds. (2021). Children’s experiences of welfare in modern Britain. Institute of Historical Research, University of London Press. doi:10.14296/2109.9781912702886
  • Degli Esposti, M., Humphreys, D. K., Jenkins, B. M., Gasparrini, A., Pooley, S., Eisner, M., & Bowes, L. (2019). Long-term trends in child maltreatment in England and Wales, 1858–2016: An observational, time-series analysis. Lancet Public Health 4: e148–58. doi:10.1016/S2468-2667(19)30002-7

Professor Robert Gilbert investigated Understanding evolution using molecules and their markers. This project asked how studies of atomic structures and macromolecular assemblies can help us understand evolution in deep time, and how lifetime experience imprints itself on cell biology through epigenetic changes and protein modification in cells. To do this the team studied and interpreted the atomic structures of proteins and their complexes important in infection and immunity and in the control of cell fate. The principal methods of the project included include X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy, with associated computational analyses of data and structural models. One set of molecules the project focused on was a family of pore-forming proteins which have evolved to attack cell membranes and cause the death of target cells. Another process it studied is the control of gene expression through epigenetic and genetic switches. A particular focus here was a set of enzymes which target small RNA signalling molecules controlling cell fate. Suppression of these microRNA signals leads, in some well-defined cases, to cancers affecting a variety of organs.

Select publications:

  • Yi, G., Ye, M., Carrique, L., El-Sagheer, A., Brown, T., Norbury, C. J., Zhang, P., & Gilbert, R. J. C. (2024). Structural basis for activity switching in polymerases determining the fate of let-7 pre-miRNAs. Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, in press. doi:10.1038/s41594-024-01357-9
  • Ni, T., Jiao, F., Yu, X., Aden, S., Ginger, L., Williams, S. I., Bai, F., Pražák, V., Karia, D., Stansfeld, P., Zhang, P., Munson, G., Anderluh, G., Scheuring, S., & Gilbert, R. J. C. (2020). Structure and mechanism of bactericidal mammalian perforin-2, an ancient agent of innate immunity. Science Advances 6: eaax8286. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aax8286
  • Yu, X., Ni, T., Munson, G., Zhang, P., & Gilbert, R. J. C. (2022). Cryo‐EM structures of perforin‐2 in isolation and assembled on a membrane suggest a mechanism for pore formation. The EMBO Journal 41: e111857. doi:10.15252/embj.2022111857

Dr Suzanne Schneider investigated Risk Frameworks and Human Security, to ask whether the language and logic of risk really makes us safe? The language and logic of risk has become pervasive in the twenty-first century. Criss-crossing the disparate realms of war and national security, healthcare, global finance, climate, and personal safety, risk operates at every scale; from online tools that calculate users’ propensity for heart disease to the predictive models used by hedge funds and the risk assessment matrices deployed by the U.S. military. However commonplace these practices have become, they are also of relatively recent vintage. Human life has never been without danger, but the idea that those hazards could be accurately identified and mitigated belongs to our own time; we should not take this framework for granted or assume that its ways of seeing and relating to the world are universally advantageous. Risk Frameworks and Human Security worked to de-naturalize risk and pose a number of questions related to the uses, and limitations, of risk frameworks as tools to organize social and political life. What structural forces—from computing power to geopolitical rivalries—propelled this development? How has the experience of risk evolved since the turn of the twenty-first century, against the backdrop of terrorism, financial crises and austerity, refugees and migration, climate catastrophe, and not least, a pandemic? And how might risk be managed in a democratic fashion, rather than—as has often been the case—merely offloaded to those with less power?

Selected outputs:

  • A working group held at Magdalen College in June 2023
  • Several publications forthcoming in 2024, including a special issue in the International Review of Applied Economics on ‘Risk, Uncertainty, and Democracy’