Children and young people who are victims of emotional abuse at the hands of their parents often report the symptoms of severe post-traumatic stress. These are generally even worse than after other forms of child abuse, such as physical abuse. These are the results of research by Leiden psychologists,…

What is the role of stress and stress-related hormones in emotion regulation?

How do different emotional expressions influence the behavior of other people in negotiations?

Several studies into the prevalence of child abuse in the Netherlands were conducted on behalf of the Ministries of Security and Justice and of Health, Welfare and Sport, the Samson Committee and the WODC.

What is the role of neuronal emotional reactivity in the intergenerational transmission of abuse?

Social Information Processing in Children with and without Hearing Loss

Cultural and individual differences

How do dissociative states affect the ability to suppress emotional distraction (in the context of a working memory task) in patients with Borderline Personality Disorder?

All living creatures have to cope with environmental demands and threats that challenge their physical or emotional homeostasis.

Children with autism spectrum disorder experience serious challenges in social functioning, which threatens their development in many areas of functioning.

We examine the effect of social learning on emotional competence in children and adolescents with a typical or atypical development.

EUMOTION explores the role of emotions expressed by political elites (at EU- and member state-level) in framing the EU’s policy options during international crises.

CERQ is a questionnaire measuring cognitive coping strategies developed by Dr. Nadia Garnefski and Dr. Vivian Kraaij.

Does an Emotional Working Memory Training show a beneficial transfer effect on emotion regulation (reappraisal) capacities in patients with Borderline Personality Disorder?

PhD defence

Sasse, van Breen, Spears & Gordijn demonstrated an anger gap in response to sexism which was larger for women than for men and found evidence that expressed anger was associated with instrumental concerns.

Stimulating the vagus nerve, which provides a direct link between the gut and brain, makes people pay less attention to sad facial expressions. This research study by psychologists Katerina Johnson and Laura Steenbergen is published in the journal Neuroscience, and made it to the cover.

On 11 June 2020, Sabine Witting defended her thesis 'Child Sexual Abuse in the Digital Era: Rethinking Legal Frameworks and Transnational Law Enforcement Collaboration'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. J.J. Sloth-Nielsen and Prof. S. van der Hof.

People who have taken antibiotics in the past three months pay more attention to negative facial expressions, according to research by postdoc Katerina Johnson and assistant professor Laura Steenbergen. This may explain how antibiotics increase the risk of developing depression.

This study investigates the perception and production of emotional prosody by native and non-native listeners and speakers, i.e. Chinese and Dutch listeners and speakers, including Dutch L2 learners of Chinese.

Carl Li defended his thesis on 30 June 2015

When abusive mothers hear crying babies, their autonomous nervous system does not react strongly enough. This is the conclusion reached by Sophie Reijman, PhD candidate in Child and Family Studies, in her research. This finding may provide leads for reducing child abuse. Defence on 16 December.

Which educational and child welfare interventions offer optimal opportunities for positive development to children with severe behavioral and emotional disorders.

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Dissertation

How does stress affect different components of behavioral impulsivity and aggression in patients with Borderline Personality Disorder compared to clinical controls (patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and healthy controls?

The number of victims of child abuse is estimated to be higher during the first lockdown compared with a period without a lockdown. This is mainly due to an increase in the number of victims of emotional neglect, including educational neglect and witnessing domestic abuse. Families with children about…

What role do parent-child interactions play in the development, maintenance and treatment of depression in young people?

To study relationships between emotion regulation after negative and traumatic life events and psychopathology. Within this context, another goal is to develop and validate emotion regulation questionnaires.

Why do children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have difficulties with acquiring emotion regulation skills; and how is this related to their social impairments and comorbid psychopathology?

In a longitudinal study, Eichengreen and colleagues explored how the certain aspects of emotional intelligence impact the development of adolescents’ mental health, thus identifying potential warning signs and targets for intervention programs. Despite a higher risk for mental health issues and lesser…

Reading emotions from others’ faces strengthens social relationships. But how is that for children with hearing loss? Can they learn to read faces just as easily as hearing children? The study by Yung-Ting Tsou and colleagues shows that daily

Children are suffering disproportionally from the coronavirus measures. They feel depressed more often compared to other age groups. But what about the legal perspective? Are children’s rights being violated?

Development and validation of instruments that can measure different aspects of emotional competence in children with normal and atypical development, and in different cultures

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How does having limited access to the social world affect Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH) children’s emotional development? And in turn, how do impairments in emotional functioning affect social development and the development of psychopathology?

There is no heritage without emotional sharing and clashing. This article explores the involvement of divergent emotions in heritage making by discussing the debate series of Imagine IC and the Reinwardt Academy and zooming in on the commemoration of slavery and imagery of ‘Black Pete’ in the Netherlands.…

How can we explain the popularity of the Spanish comedia nueva in the seventeenth-century theatre scene of the Low Countries?

Understanding others’ emotional behavior is essential for navigating daily social life. But how is such an understanding achieved? The eye-tracking study by Yung-Ting Tsou and colleagues shows that children with hearing loss adopt a unique visual strategy that makes uses of explicit visual information…

What impact does ethnic profiling and accusations of ethnic profiling have on organizations and the border police officers working at the operational level, and what structural factors on the societal and organizational level contribute to the process of ethnic profiling? Over a period of three years…

Child abuse and child neglect are often seen as one and the same problem. But it can be useful to separate the two to gain more insight into the characteristics of the two phenomena. This is what pedagogical scientist Renate Buisman shows in her dissertation. PhD defence on 28 May.

Child maltreatment is a common problem in Vietnam. All forms of child maltreatment – emotional and physical – have a negative emotional effect on the child. In some cases, the child’s physical health and memory are also affected. These are the conclusions of PhD candidate Nhu Kieu Tran. Her PhD ceremony…

What is the role of emotion regulation in coping with interpersonal feedback?

From 23-25 August the Child Abuse & Violence Congres ‘ Broken 2018’ took place. Mariëlle Bruning was one of the keynote speakers and talked about the child’s right to protection against all forms of violence and the implementation of this children’s right in domestic child protection systems.

‘We didn’t find any mechanisms in the brain for transmitting child abuse from generation to generation. What we did find is that experiences of neglect and abuse affect the brain differently,’ concludes Lisa van den Berg (Clinical Psychology). PhD defence 30 June.

Bonobos – just like humans – pay more attention to pictures that show other members of their species displaying emotional behaviour than to neutral scenes. Leiden researcher Dr Mariska Kret made this discovery while conducting research at Apenheul Primate Park.

On 20 February 2018, Simone van der Hof will give a lecture on the use of AI in combating online sexual abuse of children at the Academy of European Law (ERA) in Trier during the seminar The Life Cycle or Electronic Evidence - Handling E-Evidence in Child Sex Abuse Material.