Stress, attachment, and resilience across mice and humans

Stress, attachment, and resilience across mice and humans

The successful candidate will be embedded in two internationally recognized research groups at KU Leuven, providing a unique interdisciplinary training environment at the interface of clinical psychology, developmental science, and behavioural neuroscience.

Learn2Trust Lab – Research Unit Clinical Psychology

The candidate will be affiliated with the Learn2Trust Lab, part of the Research Unit Clinical Psychology within the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at KU Leuven. The Learn2Trust Lab investigates the developmental and learning mechanisms underlying attachment, trust, resilience, and mental health across the lifespan. Combining experimental, longitudinal, clinical, and intervention research, the lab aims to bridge fundamental attachment science with applications that improve the well‑being of children, adolescents, adults, and families. The research team has extensive expertise in attachment theory, emotion regulation, family processes, psychotherapy, developmental psychopathology, and translational research, and collaborates with leading international researchers and clinical partners.

Laboratory of Biological Psychology (LBP)

The candidate will also become a member of the Laboratory of Biological Psychology (LBP), one of KU Leuven's leading centres for behavioural neuroscience. LBP investigates the biological mechanisms underlying cognition, emotion, learning, memory, and behaviour through state‑of‑the‑art animal and human research. The laboratory offers outstanding expertise and infrastructure for behavioural phenotyping, genetics, electrophysiology, and translational neuroscience, with a strong focus on mouse models that are closely linked to human psychological research. The candidate will work within the longstanding collaboration between the research groups of Prof. Rudi D'Hooge and Prof. Guy Bosmans, contributing to innovative research that integrates behavioural neuroscience with attachment and resilience research.

An Interdisciplinary PhD Experience

This PhD offers a genuinely interdisciplinary research environment. The candidate will have a workplace in both laboratories, participate in the scientific activities of both research groups, and receive supervision from researchers with complementary expertise in attachment, developmental psychology, behavioural neuroscience, and experimental animal research. This unique dual affiliation provides exceptional opportunities to develop a broad methodological skill set, collaborate across disciplines, and contribute to cutting‑edge translational research spanning basic neuroscience and clinical psychology.

Why do some individuals remain resilient in the face of adversity, while others experience lasting emotional, cognitive, or physiological consequences of stress? What makes close relationships a powerful source of protection? And how can insights from basic neuroscience inform our understanding of resilience in families?

This PhD project offers a unique opportunity to address these questions within an ambitious translational research programme that bridges animal and human research. The overarching aim is to uncover the mechanisms through which secure attachment promotes resilience and buffers the impact of stress, from controlled experimental models in mice to complex family interactions in humans.

The project consists of two complementary research lines.

The first research line builds on an established collaboration between the laboratories of Prof. Rudi D'Hooge and Prof. Guy Bosmans. Using a mouse model, this programme investigates the cognitive consequences of chemotherapy treatment and the mechanisms that explain why some individuals show greater resilience than others. Building on this ongoing work, the PhD candidate will examine whether attachment‑related processes can serve as protective factors that buffer the detrimental effects of stress associated with cancer treatment. This line of research offers a unique opportunity to connect attachment theory with cutting‑edge behavioural neuroscience and experimental models of stress resilience.

The second research line focuses on an exceptionally rich human dataset collected in families with school‑aged children. The project includes triadic data from mothers, fathers, and children, who participated in a series of individually and jointly administered stress‑inducing laboratory tasks. The available dataset integrates multiple levels of analysis, including attachment representations, behavioural observations, psychophysiological responses, hormonal markers, epigenetic measures, emotional functioning, and cognitive processes. Because data collection has been completed, the PhD candidate can immediately focus on developing and testing innovative research questions.

Using these unique data, the candidate will investigate how secure attachment wi