Is willingness to receive Covid-19 vaccine affected by social relationships? To what degree do relationships convey information, social pressure and role-models that alter individual’s willingness to be vaccinated?

INFLUEX examines the influence of experts on public policy, aiming to define, measure, and explain their role in democratic policymaking

Jelena Vićić and Richard Harknett offer an analytical construct to better understand the mechanism by which cyber-enabled influence operations work

This dissertation assesses the influence of British Celtic on the phonological development of English during and shortly after the Anglo-Saxon settlement period, ca. AD 450-700.

Researchers from the Institute of Public Administration study the mechanism of lobbying and influencing political parties and the behaviour of these parties to see how solutions are found to problems. This enables them to reach conclusions as to how best to effect changes in political focus and poli…

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.

In this project, we plan to combine two strands of research in speech processing: (a) the impact of prosody on speech processing and (b) the impact of musical training on speech processing. In our project we will test 8 year-old children with different degrees of musical training: (a) primary school…

This study, Calypso, The Trinidadian Experience, has sought to establish links between calypso music and the construction and maintenance of identities, and to locate the genre as a mechanism (or as part of a broader mechanism) that has exerted on-going social influence within Trinidadian society…

Promotor: Prof.dr. J.P. Abrahams

Psychological processes have a major effect on the course of a disease and the effects of medical treatment. Researchers in the field of Psychoneurobiology examine the interactions between body and mind. They investigate the effects of stress as well as the effect of placebos and nocebos, which can…

This project investigates the influence that Arabic (esp. dialectal Arabic) has had on the Berber languages of Northern Africa.

This thesis reports on the influence of induction programs on beginning teachers’ well-being and professional development, and the essential characteristics of an induction program. These topics were explored by means of an interview study and large scale survey study.

Sophie Vériter explores a small state’s impact on EU security governance, a hard challenge means against big states in this policy area.

This collection, edited by Sophie Vériter, Monica Kaminska, Dennis Broeders and Joachim Koops, includes six papers exploring and investigating European responses to COVID-related disinformation, specifically the responses of France, Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, Serbia, and Hungary.

It is one of the most personal and simultaneously most universal experiences of human life: caring for a young child. Professor Sarah Cramsey has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to investigate how factors such as nationality, political systems, and religion influence the first thousand days after…

On the 24th of June, Martijn Wackers successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Martijn on this achievement!

I will give a general introduction to the field of molecular electronics, its history, methods and challenges. I will also introduce the subject of my investigation and provide a brief outlook to the remainder of our thesis.

PhD defence

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Kohei Suzuki is Assistant Professor at Institute of Public Administration. This study carries several important implications for understanding the policy impacts of a graying population and for studies of the welfare state, in general.

Public leadership received increasing attention, but we still do not understand how the context of public leaders affects leadership. This research project delves into public leaders’ perceptions of the leadership situations they find themselves in, which are characterised by multiplicity – one could…

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?

In this article, Maria-Elena Kisyova, Yannick Veilleux-Lepage and Vanessa Newby shed some light on how a small but highly visible group of influencers are actively working to promote a dangerous far-right ideology.

We examine how soil-derived legacy effects of plants structure natural ecosystems, determine aboveground plant insect interactions, and how we can use soil legacy effects to restore degraded ecosystems.

The central subject of this dissertation is the influence of Fichte’s theory of self-consciousness on Søren Kierkegaard's philosophical notion of the self in the way Kierkegaard describes the self in his philosophy in the writing 'The Sickness unto Death' (1849). The main question this dissertation…

On 23 June 2020, Santy Kouwagam defended her PhD-thesis 'How lawyers win land conflicts for corporations: Legal Strategy and its influence on the Rule of Law in Indonesia'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. A.W. Bedner and Prof. C.E. von Benda-Beckmann.

On 11 January 2019, Maastricht University and the University of Groningen hosted a workshop on the regulation of social media influencers.

Xin Zhang, PhD at ICLON, researched the relationship between teachers’ learning motivation and the quality of their teaching. Defence on 6 July.

Young people spend a lot of their time online. Even so, we still know very little about how this intensive use of social media influences their development. Brain researcher and Spinoza Prize winner Eveline Crone from Leiden University and media psychologist Elly Konijn (VU) describes what the research…

China makes no secret of its ambitions to become the world’s leading nation. What can we expect now that the EU and the rest of the world are in recession? And why did President Donald Trump suspend US funding to the World Health Organization? Rob de Wijk, Professor of International Relations and Security…

A new volume, co-edited by Nadine Akkerman of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, shows how ladies-in-waiting, by 'creatively manipulating their gender', often played a major role in shaping the political climate of Europe in the early modern period.

A global biological study has provided the most direct evidence to date that humans, and specifically cities, are the drivers of evolutionary change on Earth. Leiden University, Naturalis and the Municipality of Leiden worked on and helped fund the study.

What is the impact of humans on nature? In Science an article appeared in which researchers try to give an answer to that question. Biogeographer and postdoc at LUCL Sietze Norder is one of its authors.

A large delegation composed of 11 delegates from institutes from the Faculty of Science has made an extensive visit to China and enhanced Leiden’s influence in the Chinese academia, industry and local government.

Just as some people today dislike English influences on the Dutch language, in early modern times people also criticised the Frenchification of Dutch. But to what extent did French actually leave its mark in our language? PhD student Brenda Assendelft made a surprising discovery. PhD defence 24 May.

North Korean detention camps are no different from Nazi prison camps. But as long as the country remains economically isolated, international criticism will be ineffective, writes North Korea expert Remco Breuker in the opinion section of Dutch newspaper NRC on 21 February. Breuker advocates using the…

How many of our laws in the Netherlands are actually determined by the European Union? In many areas, the influence of the EU has increased. But 80 per cent – a figure referred to in 1989 by then European Commission President Jacques Delors – is a very wide estimate. Research from around 15 years ago…

China’s internet giants like Alibaba and Tencent go global. However, Alibaba shares its data with the Chinese state. The state links the Chinese social credit system to consumer’s profiles. What if Alibaba takes over the market?

News articles have only a limited influence on the course of legislative processes. This is the finding of political science expert Lotte Melenhorst in her PhD dissertation. Defence 21 March.

The asylum seekers’ centres in Hengelo, Almelo and Schalkhaar caused little or no nuisance in recent years. There have been hardly any incidents, according to information received by Dutch regional TV channel RTV Oost. However, Maarten Offinga, Mayor of Hardenberg, sounded the alarm with the state secretary…

Duaal promovendus Duaal promoveren Werken en promoveren Deeltijd PhD

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.

The internet is a good place to rapidly collect large amounts of data. But if you don’t watch out you’ll collect very biased, one-sided data. These were the warning words of the speakers at a symposium on 5 March about transparency and responsible data science.

The United States used threats to influence the nuclear programs of Iran, Libya and South Africa. How effective was this diplomatic coercion?

The coronavirus pandemic has had us working and studying at home, and this has had a positive effect on Leiden University’s sustainability results. This is apparent from the university’s new Sustainability Report 2020. The report also shows that nearly all the targets from the Environmental Policy Plan…

Immigration and naturalisation policies are an important theme in the upcoming Dutch elections. The Netherlands should be mindful of its immigration narrative, says PhD candidate Hannah Bliersbach, as this greatly influences the relationship between ‘new’ citizens and their new home country.

In order to stop a whole range of diseases or disorders at their source, you would have to be able to switch certain genes on or off. Sebastian Pomplun wants to develop substances that can do this very precisely. For example, he wants to disrupt cancer processes and make cells produce an important missing…

Dutch influencers like Romy Boomsma and Nina Pierson have a huge following on Instagram and are increasingly sharing book tips there. Researcher Aafje de Roest wants to find out more about the reading culture they are promoting and its effect on the reading habits of their mostly young female follow…