Research Themes
Gene-environmental Interplay for Musical Expertise
Expertise development is shaped by a complex interplay between genetic predispositions and environmental influences. While intense, sustained practice is undoubtedly important, achieving musical expertise involves more than just dedicated practice, nor does practice have the same effect for everyone.
Genetic Markers Underlying Expert Musicality
Decades of twin studies, including work from our team, have established that musical expertise and other music-related behaviors are partly influenced by genetics, with heritability estimates of around 40%. Only recently, advances in DNA research have made it possible to pinpoint specific genetic variants involved in shaping human traits and behaviors.
Creativity and Substance Use
Despite much speculation and anecdotal claims about substance use in the arts and creative domains (e.g., professional musical engagement), little is known about The project seeks to uncover whether people in creative domains (such as music, writing, dance, etc.) use more substances and whether this association is causal, due to shared genetic factors, or personality traits like risk-taking tendencies.
Evolutionary Concepts Underlying Human Cultural Behavior
In this project, we are leveraging genetic data and designs to test specific hypotheses related to evolutionary theories such as the sexual selection theory for music or Psychological Life History theory (LHT-P). For example, we could show that there is only very limited support for the sexual selection hypothesis underlying music evolution, which proposes that music evolved as a signal of genetic quality to potential mates.
Music Engagement and Mental Health
The relationship between music engagement and mental health is multifaceted. While many people intuitively think that playing music has a positive impact on their mental health and results from intervention studies promote this, larger population-based studies offer a more nuanced picture.
Cultural Engagement, Creativity and Mental Health
Cultural activities (e.g., visiting museums, dancing, arts and crafts, creative activities etc.) are believed to improve our mental health, but artists who are intensively engaged in those activities are found to be prone to mental health problem. This contradiction raises the question: Does cultural engagement really benefit mental health, and if so, under which conditions?
Primal World Beliefs and Related Traits
While much research focused on how self-beliefs, such as "I am worthless", alter self-perception(s) and in turn health outcomes, little is known about how our beliefs about the world, such as “the world is safe”, relate to mental (and physical) health. Recently, Clifton et al. (2019) developed a questionnaire identifying core beliefs about the general character of the world – so-called primal world beliefs, or Primals for short.
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