FSW building, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK, Leiden

The purpose of this programme is to join knowledge and insights from linguistics, literary analysis, and rhetoric, for the purpose of developing a set of methods for the stylistic investigation of any type of text in Dutch.

Social Science Matters is an online variant on London’s famous Speakers’ Corner – a platform for the researchers in the various disciplines in the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences to react to the news. This soapbox gives our social scientists an opportunity to voice their opinions on current…

Efficiently responding to others’ emotions has great survival value, especially for social species, such as primates, who establish close, long-term bonds with group members. The closest living relatives to humans are the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Studying these species, and comparing them on the exact…

Social anxiety runs in families, but the neurobiology underlying this genetic vulnerability is until now largely unknown. The unique Leiden Family Lab study on Social Anxiety Disorder (LFLSAD) aims to broaden our knowledge with respect to this genetic susceptibility.

The [A]Social Creatures Lab is an interdisciplinary research lab that focuses on understanding social interaction with and between artificial creatures. Researchers and students from the Creative Intelligence & Technology group collaborate in it.

Social anxiety disorder is one of the most common disorders in children and young people. Social anxiety is characterized by excessive fear and avoidance of social situations. The primary fear in children with social anxiety is that they will be negatively judged by others. To date, the most frequently…

Innovation plays an essential role in firms' competitiveness and long-term success. It varies from different types, ranging from run-of-the-mill innovation that brings incremental changes to existing technologies to radical innovation that breaks from existing trajectories.

There are several ways to stay up to date via social media.

Migration is the talk of the town. On the whole, however, the current situation is seen as resulting from unique political upheavals. Such a-historical interpretations ignore the fact that migration is a fundamental phenomenon in human societies from the beginning and plays a crucial role in the cultural,…

Ben de Jong, inlichtingen-deskundige en gastonderzoeker en -docent bij het ISGA aan de Universiteit Leiden, werd geciteerd in een artikel in het Algemeen Dagblad over topografische kaarten die de Russen tijdens de Koude Oorlog gebruikten. De Sovjet-Unie beschikte over een ongelofelijke hoeveelheid…

Social Citizenship & Migration (SCM) is one of the nine interdisciplinary programmes launched by Leiden University in 2020. It is led by the Faculties of Governance and Global Affairs, Law, Humanities, and Social Science.

This focus area adresses the social context of health and well-being, with a particular emphasis on social inequality.

Serious forms of anxiety concerning other people’s opinions can hinder teenagers at school in social interactions or carrying out tasks. Psychologist Anne Miers is looking for ways to reduce this so-called ‘social anxiety’.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also had dramatic consequences for Ukrainian students at Leiden University. Besides their intense concern about the fate of family and friends, they also face major financial problems. This also applies to Russian students who can no longer access their bank accounts.…

Design of a Linguistic System for Interstellar Communication Based on Logic

The [a]social creatures lab focusses on understanding social interaction with and between artificial creatures.

At Leiden University’s Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences we keep in touch with our alumni in various ways.

Current social norms are unsustainable, making behavior change crucial for addressing the climate crisis. Social norms can shift rapidly after tipping points, but these are often only recognised in hindsight. To promote change, we need better predictive power, i.e. ability to detect early warning signs…

Explore how stakeholders in Gabon's Makokou region interact with forest resources in logging, agriculture, and mining, and their impacts on social and environmental changes.

The largest international conference on English historical linguistics is coming to Leiden. From 7 June to 11 June 2021, the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) organises the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL-21). Due to Covid measures, the conference takes…

Did the Jochids leave their mark on the Grand Duchy, taking into account that the Lithuanian state was one of the main successor states of the Great Horde in the 16thCentury?

There are five institutes at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences:

The Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FSW) aims to play a leading role in gaining insights on current developments in society.

Are you thinking about studying Social and Organisational Psychology? Learn more and watch the videos.

The Hague is the archetypal multicultural city. With a different language spoken on every street corner, this makes it a paradise for linguists such as Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Her book Languages of The Hague is a collection of fascinating conversations with the city’s non-native speakers.

In this dissertation, a corpus of 595 seventeenth-century letters (mainly private ones) written between 1664 and 1672 is examined from a sociolinguistic perspective.

The main goal of this project is to answer the question: how did Dutch acquire its own, distinctive linguistic characteristics?

Studying linguistics at the Leiden University Centre of Linguistics (LUCL) is a challenging but rewarding experience. There are few places in the world where such a broad range of languages are studied from so many different perspectives.

Grammatical gender is famously the most puzzling of the grammatical categories. We have a solid typology of gender systems, yet exciting and unexpected patterns keep turning up which defy easy classification and straightforward analysis. Some of these question, stretch or threaten to cross the outer…

What are the developmental pathways to social anxiety (disorder), the causal processes and maintaining factors? How do these factors interact in the development of social anxiety disorder? How can this knowledge be used to design and implement effective preventive intervention programs for youth?

Online presentation

On January 30th, Lennart van der Velden succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Lennart on this great result.

This doctoral thesis elaborates Langacker’s reference-point model by applying it to lexical semantics.

President Putin will be officially opening the Netherlands–Russia Year on 8 April in Amsterdam. Leiden Slavist Sjeng Scheijen was responsible for putting together the cultural programme. How much freedom did he have in doing so? ‘The Dutch photography project on the demolition of Sochi districts was…

The general objective of this thesis is to determine a typology of verbal derivation in Ethiopian Afro-asiatic languages.

This book presents the first comprehensive description of Tafi, one of the fourteen Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages, spoken by approximately 4,400 people in the southeastern part of Ghana. The description consists of thirteen chapters and is based on a corpus gathered during two fieldwork periods…

Leiden University offers ambitious students the latest knowledge and the freedom to develop their own area of expertise.

This 862-page monograph is a grammar of Thangmi, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the districts of Dolakha and Sindhupalcok in central-eastern Nepal.

When and how does social anxiety develop? How can it go astray in some adolescents? How can we help troubled young people to attend school regularly and return to a normal developmental pathway?

Below you can find lists of Leiden-based and international organizations working on Central Asia, and an overview of useful resources on Central Asia.

This project aims at investigating the syntactic role of focus in ellipsis across languages.

How is social cognition shaped by our knowledge of language and stories?