Matteo Giletta from the University of Tilburg - GUTS member and researcher on the NeuroLabNL Start impulse - has received a prestigious ERC Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros for his research project ‘Outside-in: How Bullying in Adolescence Gets Into The Mind and Under the Skin’. In this research, he aims to uncover the mechanisms underlying the negative consequences of bullying victimization. To do so, he examines how bullying exposure can influence adolescents’ psychological and physiological functioning in real-time in their real-life. Moreover, he explores the possibility that bullying influences gene expression resulting in a profile that increases risk for health problems. These processes are investigated using a multi-method approach that integrates a variety of diverse methodologies, including ambulatory assessments of psychological and physiological data, genome-wide transcriptional profiling, and a longitudinal discordant monozygotic (MZ) twin-design. Together, this research will offer unprecedented insights about short- and long-term interplays between psychological, physiological and molecular processes through which bullying may get into the mind and under the skin.
