Shyness is perfectly normal, Michiel Westenberg stated in his farewell lecture. But that doesn’t mean that social anxiety shouldn’t be identified and addressed in good time. ‘Serious shyness has strong genetic roots; you don’t just get over it.’

Parents may pass anxiety onto their offspring by exposing them to anxious behaviors in novel situations. Just as the parents’ anxious signals lead to anxiety, parents’ confident signals can ward off anxiety in the offspring. This project is seeking a new way to break anxiety transmission in the family…

This article explores how to think about solidarity, considering the diverse stories, spaces, practices, bodies, and temporalities that shape a city.

M. Danhof, Co-promotor: O.E. Della Pasqua

Negative perceptions of ambiguous social cues, social performance and physical arousal in socially anxious youth

The interdisciplinary programme Social Resilience & Security is inviting proposals for seed funding. The programme aims to combine knowledge and expertise from five different faculties to study transgressive behaviours, its dimensions, aetiology, and effects of interventions with a multidisciplinary…

Societal challenges call for a resilient society. In taking steps towards a more resilient society, friendships play a major role. But how exactly do friendships relate to resilient behavior? In Dutch opinion magazine Vrij Nederland, Anne-Laura van Harmelen (professor Brain, Safety and Resilience at…

EU migrants receive less frequent and lower benefits and allowances than Dutch citizens. This is according to research by Leiden economists Olaf van Vliet and Eduard Suari Andreu published as part of the Social Citizenship & Migration research programme. The research is discussed in Dutch newspaper…

This project investigates ethnographically how patients, their relatives, and healthcare professionals in the Netherlands make decisions about end-of-life care. We study the new dilemmas around what constitutes

The call for a social media ban for children is louder than ever. Professor of Children's Rights Ton Liefaard argues in ‘Trouw’ newspaper that this would be unwise. 'For children, online and offline aren't different worlds'.

Investigating the making of knowledge in anthropology and natural history in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia.

During a meeting at the University on 10 November, staff spontaneously removed a painting by artist Rein Dool from the wall in one of the meeting rooms in the Academy Building, reversed it and placed it on the floor. A tongue-in-cheek action with a serious undertone. This has led to a lot of commotion…

The starting point of Hermans' research is how both children's physical play and dance improvisation by professionals can be considered somatic practices where sense-making manifests itself in and between bodies, and through movement.

Samir Negash, PhD candidate at Leiden University and Olaf van Vliet, Professor by special appointment Comparative Welfare State Analysis at Leiden University wrote a paper regarding the topic of immigration and the conditionality of unemployment benefits in OECD countries.

There’s a trend going around within administrative law: submitting court documents late to make things as difficult as possible for the opposing party. As Mr. magazine reports, Tom Barkhuysen, Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law and partner in administrative law at Stibbe, argues in the…

The starting point of Hermans' research is how both children's physical play and dance improvisation by professionals can be considered somatic practices where sense-making manifests itself in and between bodies, and through movement.

This project investigates which aspects of social media content adolescents attend to and how these relate to their credibility judgments, aiming to systematically understand their susceptibility to misinformation and inform effective educational programs that foster youth’s resilience to misinforma…

The Australian parliament passed a law banning social media for youth under sixteen in late November. This solves nothing, argues Simone van der Hof, Professor of Law and Digital Technologies, in NRC. ‘Services should be held to the law.’

On the first day at a new job, you have sweaty palms, nerves race through your system, and you feel insecure. Now, a couple of months later these feelings have left. You know what to do in your new role and have become part of the organization. The process leading to this result is called organizational…

As schools in the U.S., students have to enter through security gates; schools in Belgium were forced to remain closed for several days after the attacks there; and even in the Netherlands various bomb scares have led to children having to stay at home. And yet fear of terrorism remains a difficult…

Up to 50% of all children and adolescents growing up worldwide are exposed to at least one form of childhood adversity (CA), which is one of the strongest predictors for later-life psychopathology.

OSCL members, amongst which our representative in the Archaeology faculty, were part of Data Carpentry for Social Sciences. Here's what happened.

UnMiSSeD studies the interaction between misinformation and science in societal debates using a mixed qualitative-quantitative approach.

Collecting as much information as possible about administering a new medicine to people can save a lot of money.

Jelle van Buuren, university lecturer at ISGA, discusses the role that social media played in the storming of the Capitol last Wednesday

This omnibus brings together some old and some recent works by Jos Gommans on the warhorse and its impact on medieval and early modern state-formation in South Asia.

On Wednesday 14 May 2025 Remzi Çakırlar successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Bahar Şimşek defended her thesis on 4 May 2021.

Buried beneath a Suffolk forest, archaeologists have uncovered the earliest known human-made fire. A fire that was sparked 400,000 years ago. This stunning UK discovery rewrites our evolutionary story, pushing fire-making back by more than 350,000 years. Baked earth, heat-scarred tools and the world’s…

Psychologists Anna van ‘t Veer and Eiko Fried will start a scientific integrity workshop tour after the summer, called Responsible Scholarship: Psychology. Their aim: giving the subject a more prominent position in the academic’s mind.

Our researcher and PhD candidate Helena Ursic was interviewed with Druzina, one of the biggest weekly newspapers in Slovenia.

Lecture, European Union Seminar

With the emergence of online social networks (OSNs), the way people create and share information has changed, which becomes faster and broader than traditional social media.

Wenxin Wang defended her thesis on 26 October 2016

As part of Nexus 1492 Subproject 4: A Future for Diverse Caribbean Heritages, which seeks to shed light on how local communities interpret and engage with heritage in the present day, this doctoral study aims to gain insight into how indigenous heritage is represented in the school curriculum for social…

Lecture, LUCL Colloquium

Jifeng Liu defended his thesis on 2 February 2017

The main question I want to answer is about the mutual influence between the cultural and settlements changes that occurred between the Bronze and the Early Iron Age in Margiana and the management of water resources.

From a successful April Fool’s prank and alumni love stories to a fabulous float on 3 Octobe: these were the highlights of our year on our social media channels. Hope you’re following us?

Why are not all children equally responsive to variations in the social environment?

Receiving positive support and seeing yourself as being a quitter may help smokers quit, say Eline Meijer and colleagues. The health psychologists published their study in Social Science & Medicine.

Investigating neurobiological endophenotypes of Social Anxiety Disorder