Dr. Valeria Gazzola awarded €1.5 million NWO Vici grant to uncover how empathy inhibits aggression

Amsterdam, 26 February 2026 – Dr. Valeria Gazzola has been awarded a prestigious NWO Vici grant  of 1.5 million euros for her project “Empathy, helping and aggression: unravelling the missing neural link.” The Vici grant enables senior researchers to develop innovative research lines and build their own research group.

Aggression causes immense social and economic harm, yet we are still understanding how aggression works in our brains and how we can control it . Why does witnessing someone’s pain sometimes inhibit aggression — and sometimes not? Dr. Gazzola’s project addresses this question by studying how the brain converts empathy into restraint.

“We know that perceiving another person’s pain activates brain regions that are involved in empathy,” says Gazzola. “But how these signals influence decisions and prevent harmful actions remains poorly understood. “With this project, we aim to uncover how the brain turns empathy into self-restraint, and how the empathy-break adapts to different situations.”

A new way to study “heat-of-the-moment” aggression

The project introduces ThePush game: a new brain-scanner task where participants physically push against a virtual opponent during provocation. It brings the intensity of real conflict into the lab, letting researchers measure in real time how empathy and competition shape aggressive behaviour.

This approach is combined with brain imaging, physiological measures (such as heart rate), decision-making models, and in-depth interviews.  The project even studies harm-avoidance in mice to see whether similar brain mechanisms exist across species, forming an understanding on how empathy and restraint may have evolved.

Towards an understanding of aggression

By combining all these different ways of measuring aggression, the project goes beyond simply mapping where aggression is formed in the brain, it explores how aggression actually develops in a particular individual and situation.

While focused on fundamental science, the findings could eventually influence treatments for aggressive behaviour and strategies for rehabilitation. “In order to reduce violence in society, we need to further understand how the brain computes the dynamics between empathy, emotion regulation, motivation and context.” Gazzola emphasizes

The project will be conducted at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) in Amsterdam, in close collaboration with national and international partners.