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.

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.

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.

Leiden University and VU Amsterdam are developing a joint research project for a digital platform on which you can compose and share storylines with the use of images. Such interactivity will make a boring high school history lesson much more exciting and personalized. Furthermore, it will stimulate…

New publication by Christa Tobler and co-author Joel Günthardt on the mutual recognition of professional qualifications

Misleading social media posts are falsely claiming that the Dutch supermarket chain Jumbo uses facial recognition at self-service checkouts. Jumbo denies this, although it has launched trials with AI cameras to combat shoplifting without using facial recognition.

Marianne Maeckelbergh, an anthropologist affiliated with Leiden University’s Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Developent Sociolog, has been awarded a WCC ‘Special Recognition Award’. This awards brings Marianne Maeckelberg official recognition as ‘young outstanding researcher’.

‘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.

A better balance between teaching and research duties, greater recognition of team performances and the elimination of simplistic assessment criteria. The ‘Academia in Motion’ paper published by the Leiden University Recognition and Rewards describes the main problems with recognition and rewards in…

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,…

We have studied shape with a particular focus on the zebrafish model system. The shape is an essential appearance of the phenotype of a biological specimen and it can be used to read out a current state or response or to study gene expression.

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…

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…

Marike Knoef has won an award on the 34th Award Ceremony of the World Cultural Council (WCC).

Although there has been an increase in the research into brain function and dysfunction in relation to stress and emotions, there are still many unanswered questions.

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

OSCNL, the international network of Open Science Communities, receives recognition

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

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…

The Computer Systems, Imagery & media (CSI) research programme performs research on methods and techniques for the design, implementation and application of advanced computer systems, in particular parallel, distributed and embedded computer systems.

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…

Many handwritten and illustrated archives contain a wealth of information, but are largely underexplored because they are complex and difficult for computers to decipher. The aim of this project is to develop a digital environment that resolves this challenge and connects heterogeneous archival content…

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,…

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.

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…

Psychology Lab on Wheels makes science accessible for everyone. On Monday 24 June, we will be back with our mobile lab at the Old Observatory near the Singelpark in Leiden. Join our research to learn to better recognise emotions with a Serious game and read more about participant Maxime and game developer…

The Alumni Office is happy and proud: the 'Leiden did not forget you' days of spring 2023 have won an award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). CASE is a global non-profit organisation dedicated to the advancement of university education. This award, which is one of the…

The Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen organises a Winter school on the theme of Gender, Emotion and Monstrosity in the Middle Ages. Deadline for proposals: 1 August.

On 4 June 2018, students of the Forensic Speech Science master’s course visited the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) in The Hague. They were presented with practical examples, such as speech research with voice recordings of suspects. Forensic phonetics is a young, rapidly developing discipline…

When Petra Sijpesteijn became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, she was the only Dutch member with an appointment at a Dutch university. Two years later, she is also the only Dutch member of the Austrian Academy and officially joined the British Academy on 7 October.

In this article we share the experiences of a student who used Siggie for Students. The online coaching platform for students that is paid for students at FGGA. Find out if Siggie can be of help to you too.

In court, victims of violent crime and sexual offences are permitted to comment on the defendant’s guilt and the sentence to be imposed. But legal experts believe this allows them to influence the judge. Lecturer Joyce Schot has received a Meijers PhD grant to investigate whether the right to speak…

A festive and honourable visit to our southern neighbours for professor Marc Koper. On Thursday 23 March, he received an honorary doctorate at the University of Antwerp. Koper gets the title in recognition of his expertise in the field of electrochemistry. ‘An important recognition for our research…

Forum editors: Seda Gürkan, Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA), Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs (FGGA), Leiden University, s.gurkan@fgga.leidenuniv.nl and Özlem Terzi, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, o.terzi@vu.nl

Leiden University has received a €50,000 grant from Open Science NL to develop a roadmap for integrating open science into the strategic priorities of various institutes and translating this into human resource (HR) policies.

Ayo Adedokun, Assistant Professor at Leiden University College The Hague (LUC), was one of the four finalists for the National Teacher of the Year Prize for 2022. The National Prize is an annual event organized by the Dutch National Students Association (Interstedelijk Studenten Overleg, ISO), and the…

The German state of Saxony-Anhalt is set to make recognition of the state of Israel a requirement for becoming a German citizen. However, Peter Rodrigues, Emeritus Professor of Immigration Law, has told Dutch daily newspaper Nederlands Dagblad that introducing a similar measure in the Netherlands would…

The Institute of Psychology is committed to play a prominent role in teaching and research at the national and international level.

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…

A common notion is that autistic people feel no need for social contact, that they are socially clumsy and show little prosocial behavior. But is that image correct? According to developmental psychologist Carolien Rieffe, an important goal of Autism Awareness Week (March 28 - April 5) is to remove…

In zoos, at festivals and in a mobile lab at the market: everywhere, Mariska Kret tries to understand human and animal emotions with her distinctive behavioural research. Now she has received the Mercator Sapiens Stimulus of €1 million for her efforts.