dr. L. Vandeberg (Lisa)

Lisa Vandeberg’s professional interests have always been driven by the curiosity to understand how communication affects people’s thinking and decisions. With this drive, she obtained her PhD degree in Cognitive Psychology, with fundamental research on people’s mental representations during language processing. In search of a more direct applicability of this knowledge to societally relevant questions, she took the leap to Communication Science. Since then, the uses various research methods to explore whether and how different forms of prosocial communication (e.g., personal stories on vaccinations) elicit diverse psychological mechanisms (both implicit and explicit, such as biases, heuristics, mental simulations, resistance) that may prove effective or detrimental in targeting comprehension, beliefs, or behavior change.