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.…

PhD defence

On 7 and 8 October, a two-day workshop will be hosted by the Van Vollenhoven Institute in collaboration with the University of Oxford’s Border Criminologies network and the Social Citizenship & Migration assisted area. The theme of the workshop will be ‘Border policing, boundary creation and emotion…

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.

Autistic children have indeed potential: most of their emotional abilities improve with age, concludes developmental psychologist Boya Li in her research on the emotional development of autistic children. Promotion on 10 November 2021.

At this year's conclusion of the PRE-Class Psychology, the central hall of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences became a hub of knowledge exchange revolving around a central theme: emotions.

Here I propose to study the relationship between autonomic pupil-synchronisation and trust, at the behavioural and neural level, and examine a targeted set of possible contextual moderators.

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.

Just imagine new AI technology is able to read human emotions flawlessly. How would that affect us as humans? That is the question PhD candidate Alexandra Prégent is exploring.

A smile, tears in your eyes or a blush on your cheeks: we understand one another better by mirroring one another’s emotions. In her PhD dissertation, Julia Folz concludes that people with autism or social anxiety can be helped by interventions focused on the body.

Researchers from Leiden University are working with Ouwehands Zoo to improve our understanding of emotions and intelligence in orangutans. Visitors to the zoo can now watch orangutans as they play with computer touch screens.

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,…

The roles of shame, guilt and social access in adolescent aggression

Deaf and hard-of-hearing children can find it challenging to blend in during recess on the playground. Yet, in recent studies, two PhD researchers studying children in China and Portugal showed that the emotional development of these children is largely on par with their hearing classmates.

This summer, Leiden University will be setting up camp at Lowlands with two research projects. Participants are invited to explore their fears and feelings, and in doing so, contribute to scientific research.

Effects of maternal smoking, premature birth, intra-uterine growth retardation and asphyxia on child development.

What is emotion in human and nonhuman animals? How do emotions get to expression and how do they impact on our interactions, our decisions to trust, distrust or cooperate? Why do we mimic and synchronise affective processes?

On Thursday evening, three local councillors from the ONS.Vlaardingen party walked out of a council meeting during a vote on a no-confidence motion. One councillor even went home after the vote out of dissatisfaction with the proceedings. The no-confidence motion against Vlaardingen's municipal executive…

In a recent study, Dr. Moji Aghajani and colleagues show that adolescents with a severe form of Conduct Disorder (CD) -with limited prosocial emotions- require an unusually large amount of brain capacity to read emotional faces. These effects were found in comparison to CD youth without limited prosocial…

In online games conflicts between players may arise. Novin, Bos, Stevenson and Rieffe investigated factors that may explain why some adolescents react more angrily than others in this type of situation. In their realistically designed gaming environment, the (pre-programmed) fellow player suddenly started…

‘There’s a lot of evaluation in the Netherlands, but this doesn’t always lead to change,’ says Wout Broekema, Assistant Professor of Crisis Governance at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs. Learning from a crisis is complicated, but experts can help.

Research grant awarded to Armin Cuyvers for innovative research combining EU law and social psychology. In an age where identity often trumps economic rationality, the EU struggles for legitimacy. Brexit of course provides a rather spectacular example of the EU failing to counter a deeply emotional…

Children with hearing loss often fail to pick up on nuances in other people’s emotional responses. As a result, they do not always understand what is going on. Yung-Ting Tsou, a PhD student at Leiden University, found that having more knowledge of emotions and social conventions can help them in their…

Humans and bonobos show striking similarities as well as differences when they see pictures of conspecifics. Both are more interested in photos of conspecifics that show emotion. But while our human attention is more easily drawn to photos of family members and friends that express certain emotions,…

Teaching people to recognize subtle, real-world expressions will help them understand and trust others better. The aim of Mariska Kret is to develop an interactive virtual-reality training tool (E-VIRT) for a broad group of users, including patients. Kret provides a brief description of her idea for…

Thanks to Ian Cook’s ‘Who Made My Clothes?’ MOOC, thousands of students have researched where their clothes come from. How does this geographer from the University of Exeter manage to inspire such enthusiasm in his students? He and his student Zahra Ali will explain all during the Education Festival…

At the Leiden Curious Minds Centre, our research focuses on the relationship of exploratory behaviour and discovery learning to curiosity and the way children regulate their behaviour and emotions. We want to improve our understanding of how children can and do become more and more the captain of their…

Leiden psychologist Wilco van Dijk and communication scientist Jaap Ouwerkerk of VU University Amsterdam published a book about the emotion Schadenfreude. The authors describe what the emotion Schadenfreude really is, when people experience the emotion, and what role it plays in social relations.