The focus area Safety within the program Brain & Cognition - social innovation in health care, education and safety aims at two important areas of social safety: 1) reduction of severe antisocial and violent behavior and 2) support of professionals who are charged with safeguarding society and have an increased profession-related risk of being exposed to (traumatically) stressful events. The research projects within the focus area Safety aim at bridging the gap between neuroscientific knowledge that is being developed at universities, and the need of such knowledge in professional practice (for instance judicial practice, penitentiaries, police, youth institutions, and more). A crucial aspect is that the research projects make steps forward towards (future) use of knowledge in practice. The focus area Safety includes the following research themes: 1) Effectiveness of interventions for severe antisocial behavior. Although several effective interventions exist, there is always a substantial group for whom these interventions do not work. Professionals in the field need more insight in What works for whom. Therefore the research programs Antisocial behavior; measuring and supervision and Improving control of aggression will investigate the additive value of neurobiological and neuropsychological assessments for prediction of treatment success in three cognitive behavioral treatment intervention programs, and a pharmacological intervention. The behavioral interventions are: Aggression Replacement Therapy (ART) for adult and adolescent forensic psychiatric patients, Parent Management Training Oregon (PMTO) for parents of children with problematically aggressive behaviour, and Enhanced Thinking Skills (ETS) for detainees. 2) New insights in underlying mechanisms of antisocial behavior. Two innovative research programs within the focus area of Social Safety intend to provide new insights in the underlying mechanisms of different forms of severe antisocial and aggressive behavior. The aim is to provide new leads for succesful prevention and interventions. The research program Improving control of aggression investigates innovative physiological and biochemical treatment methods for adults with severe aggressive behavior. The innovative program A good start - early prevention of antisocial behavior investigates which factors are promotive or protective of development of antisocial and aggressive behavior in young children of high risk families. 3) Support for professionals who need to make decisions under high pressure and for professionals with high traumatic stress exposure. The quick result project Better decisions under high pressure aims at developing methods to reduce negative effects of strong emotions on decisions made under high pressure by for instance local administrators. The innovative program Resilience and vulnerability following stress aims at new insights in factors that promote resilience or vulnerability to stress, and will develop interventions to promote resilience and prevent stress-related pathology in professionals such as police, soldiers, firefighters, and ambulance personnel.

The proposal aims at a comparative legal-historical study of access filters at the Supreme Courts in European and American jurisdictions. After studying the roles these courts were meant to fulfil according to their mainly 19th century origins, their changing roles in modern societies will be focused on within the context of the various mechanisms and theories on access to the supreme court. These mechanisms and theories will be evaluated from the perspective of a society under the rule of law. The research project not only aims at increasing academic knowledge but also at providing recommendations for reform projects

For at least a century, legal historians have been looking for examples of well-defined ideal-types of private partnerships, like general partnerships, limited partnerships, contractus trini, etc., in the early modern Low Countries. But whats in a name? This project hypothesizes that early modern entrepreneurs did not think or act in terms of model categories which were devised by contemporaneous, and particularly French, jurisprudence and legislation. On the contrary, the proposal claims that entrepreneurs created a much more diverse and dynamic spectrum of corporate structures, and that this complex universe of private partnerships resulted from a customarily established degree of contractual freedom which allowed them to create those kinds of structures which served their needs at best in a given situation. In order to test the aforementioned hypothesis, the project will describe the legal and organisational features of private partnerships in three different economic centres of the early modern Low Countries (Amsterdam, Liège and Antwerp). Therefore, it will make use of an untouched set of archival sources, more specifically notarized partnership agreements for they represent more accurate reflections of actual corporate practices. With its focus on and opening up of mercantile sources, the project is anticipated to have significant implications for economic history as well, for it will allow its practitioners to assess the actual role of equity capital organization as a means to finance business and to provide a better understanding of the emergence and development of capitalism in the early modern period. By showing how the use of mercantile sources, like partnership agreements, can result in a much more accurate understanding of corporate structures and usages, the project demonstrates to legal historians the indispensable need for researchers capable of reading, translating and interpreting such sources, competences that are becoming more and more scarce in the twenty-first-century Netherlands.