Nicole Montijn

Nicole Montijn has been a PhD Candidate at the department of Clinical Psychology since April 2017. She studies the role of episodic future thinking in anxiety disorders as part of a NWO VICI grant awarded to prof. dr. Iris Engelhard. Episodic future thinking is an aspect of memory which allows us to pre-live possible future events in order to adapt current behaviour to achieve goals or avoid risk. In anxiety disorders this, usually highly adaptive feature, forms an important component of the pathology. As patients suffer from the constant anticipation of threatening future events. This project focusses on the mechanism by which these future events are constructed, and how this contributes to its pathological nature in anxiety disorders.  Nicole Montijn is supervised by prof. dr. Iris Engelhard, dr. Lotte Gerritsen, and dr. Dieuwke Sevenster. Research interests include: Episodic memory systems; future memory construction; Mental time travel; time perception; fear generalization and anticipation.