It is with great sadness that we learned that our colleague Leo Waaijers, guest employee at our institute, passed away on August 1 after a short illness.

Bernet Elzinga (Clinical Psychology) is one of the seven scientists from the Leiden University who has received a Vici grant of 1.5 million euros from NWO. Vici is one of the largest grants for individual scientists in the Netherlands. The funding will enable her to do research for the next five years…

Frederica Mogherini, Rector of the College of Europe, visited Campus The Hague on 23 November for the official launch of the Europe Hub. This new interdisciplinary platform for research and teaching at Leiden University focuses on the social and governance challenges facing Europe.

Emily Gdula, Liselotta Jahnke, Jason Irwin and Josephine Hercules are the newly appointed student representatives on the Programme Committee (OLC). This committee provides advice to the Executive Board and the Faculty Board of CADS on various educational issues, including the development of Course and…

How do practice and theory reinforce one another in neuroscience? Professor Birte Forstmann’s inaugural lecture on 2 October will be about building interdisciplinary bridges between cognitive neuroscience and cognitive models. Her approach may lead to brain research with fewer side-effects for patie…

Depression has traditionally been linked to increased inflammation. Innovative research by psychologist Eiko Fried refutes this popular assumption. He shows that specific depression symptoms such as sleeping problems explain this relationship. Publication in Psychological Medicine .

Can suffering be positive? Currently dominant discourses, primarily voiced through human rights activism and humanitarianism, maintain the opposite: suffering, mentally and physically, has to be avoided and where it exists, it has to be reduced.

Positive expectations about treatment increase the likelihood of success. The new Center for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies Leiden is therefore promoting research on the placebo effect and offering expertise and training for care providers. At the opening, the founders demonstrated their VR communications…

People with intermittent arterial claudication often experience severe pain when walking. Psychologist Anne Cuperus used virtual reality to trick 20 patients, and discovered that they could suddenly walk much further. PhD defence on 10 December.

From social inequalities in prehistory to placebo effects in medical treatments. Four researchers from Leiden University have been awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant worth EUR 2.5 million to develop their research.

How do you compare the living environment of Dutch dairy cows with that of Masai cattle in East Africa? And how can we reverse biodiversity loss? These questions are central to CurveBend, an international research consortium in which ecologist Michiel Veldhuis plays a key role.

The life of a researcher is not easy, as many a scientist will confirm; but doing fieldwork in an environment of conflict and violence is extremely compex, attests the account of Dr Roland Ziébé, veterinarian in Cameroon and researcher at both the Leiden Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) and…

Last week, the EARLI SIG 24 Workshop 2024 took place from 25 to 27 September at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) in Leiden, the Netherlands. 25 researchers from 10 different countries came together to work on fostering researcher independence.

Tim van de Meerendonk explores how farmers, insurance advisors and local politicians in India try to make sense of insurance figures through their moral convictions.

From 12 to 16 April the joint Career Services of the faculties present on Campus The Hague organised the Online Campus The Hague Career Event. Around 600 students signed up! Every day of the week, they could join presentations, webinars and workshops presented by alumni, professionals and Career advisors,…

What is the effect of training children to exercise self-control? Niko Steinbeis has been awarded a major European subsidy to find the answer to this question. The innovative aspects of this research are the target group, an individual approach to the training and examining the child brain the scann…

In a new Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Universities white paper, researchers and practitioners start the conversation that society desperately needs to have. ‘We’ve outsourced the visionary thinking to tech companies.’

Undesirable associations with sex can be unlearned, but return if the circumstances change. They must therefore be unlearned in different situations. The drug D-cycloserine may help here. These are the findings of psychologist Mirte Brom.

There is a lot of measuring going on in mental healthcare, but not enough use is being made of the information from these measurements. This is what Edwin de Beurs concludes in his inaugural lecture ‘Measuring, knowing and then what?' on 27 November. The professor by special appointment of ROM and Benchmarking…

On 21 February 2025, Sarah Coombs successfully defended her PhD thesis at Leiden University in which she analysed the impact of research conducted by Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS).

How do you gain access to insurance? With whom are you willing to share the risk? And when does an insurance policy pay out? These and other moral questions are what Erik Bähre, an anthropologist at Leiden University, and his research group study.

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.

On behalf of its students and staff, the Executive Board of Leiden University would like to express our condolences to all those affected by last Friday’s earthquake in Morocco. We would also like to offer support to all students and staff who have family or friends in the area. In the meantime, several…

Jan Aart Scholte is the first professor on the new Leiden interdisciplinary programme, Global Transformations and Governance Challenges. He researches how to tackle global challenges such as climate change and inequality. Inaugural lecture on 4 February.

How do practice and theory reinforce one another in neuroscience? Professor Birte Forstmann’s inaugural lecture on 2 October will be about building interdisciplinary bridges between cognitive neuroscience and cognitive models. Her approach may lead to brain research with fewer side-effects for patie…

The Future of Dying: End-of-Life Care in a Time of De-medicalized Death explores how patients, their relatives, and healthcare providers make decisions about end-of-life care when such treatments are readily available.

Carolien Rieffe is appointed an Honorary Professor at the prestigious UCL Institute of Education, University of London. Rieffe already holds a professorship, Social and Emotional Development, at Developmental Psychology, Leiden University. This new appointment strengthens the existing bond between Leiden…

Three novelists have won the first Leiden University Peter van Straaten Psychology Prizes: Esther Gerritsen, Yvonne Keuls, and Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. This is a prize for Dutch writers whose novels shed light on psychological problems and disorders. The prizes will be awarded on January 16.

Together with Leiden University’s central HRM department, the department of Health-, Medical- and Neuropsychology has started a new HR pilot. For all colleagues a simplified and improved ‘Annual Interview’ is being introduced.

‘The care of an au pair' is chosen as the best Fieldwork NL report and 'The unruly reality of a new government' as the best master's thesis. Lila van Grieken, Annika Kruger, Benjamín Maldonado Fernández and Holly Zijderveld and Mony Klaus receive the Speckmann Award 2024.

Jos F. Brosschot has been appointed as a professor by special appointment on the chair ‘psychophysiological mechanisms of stress in daily life’. This chair has been created by the Foundation for Research into Psychosocial Stress.

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.

To relieve a patient's pain, it can be effective to induce expectations. This finding is promising for optimising the effectiveness of treatments, conclude Kaya Peerdeman and colleagues in their article in PAIN.

Psychology teacher of the year is Evelien Broekhof. The Master Thesis Awards are for Yanna Naeije and Arian Memarpouri. Mirjam Wever wins the PhD Paper Prize; Jip Aarts wins the PhD Wild Card: Academic Citizenship. Congratulations!

With an ERC grant, anthropologist Jasmijn Rana will explore how outdoor groups address the lack of diversity and how ethno-racial inequalities are experienced and resisted in Europe's outdoor spaces.

Women are more often diagnosed with depression, whereas ADHD is much more frequently detected in men. And there are other more striking differences. What role does the brain play in mental health and what is the influence of the environment? For answers to these questions, listen to the ‘(Un)gendered…

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.

Annemarie Samuels and Andrew Littlejohn, Assistant Professors at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, have both been awarded a Leiden University Fund research grant. Samuels will use the grant to kickstart a multi-sited ethnographic study of care at the end of life.…

When focussing attention, the neurotransmitters noradrenaline and acetylcholine play an important role. This new finding made by psychologist Stephen Brown provides clues for further research on how focussed attention comes about. Dissertation defence on 16 June.

On November 17, the Leiden Anthropology of Asia Network held its second Anthropology of Asia at Leiden Update. At Leiden University, anthropologists are not at all confined to the Institute Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (CADS).

A consortium, led by Erik de Maaker (CADS, Leiden), has under the NWA scheme (Dutch National Science agenda) been awarded 98k€ for Localizing Global Garment Biographies, a two-year project to research the different ways by which users and producers attach value to garments.

Leonie Vreeke is ready to start a new 5-year project to develop a stepwise treatment specific to very shy young children. Her proposal was granted by ZonMw with nearly € 600.000,-. A PhD student and a research assistant will be appointed to execute this project, together with societal partners such…

Leiden University is the highest scoring comprehensive university in the biannual valorisation ranking produced by Elsevier and Science Works. They calculate which Dutch universities best exploit their scientific capital, in economic terms and in terms of societal impact. .

For my Policy in Practice research project, Elise van Dansik engaged with a problem that Leiden ‘Social Domain’ policy officers saw themselves confronted with, which was why migrant organizations of Slaaghwijk (a socio-economically disadvantaged neighborhood in Leiden’s north) do not cooperate with…

Universitair docent Klinische Psychologie Laura Steenbergen ontvangt een donatie van Stichting Klei & Zand om onderzoek te doen naar de microbiota-darm-brein-as: hoe de werking van de darmflora samenhangt met emotioneel welzijn. Zo’n persoonlijke donatie biedt, in tegenstelling tot aangevraagde subsidies,…

The effects of sustainability projects on poorer, marginalised people should be considered at a much earlier stage. This is the opinion of Marja Spierenburg, Professor of Anthropology of Sustainable Development and Livelihood, who will give her inaugural lecture on 25 February.

Comparison between babies and song-birds when they are learning a non-existent language—a study of this kind has never been tried before. But this is what Claartje Levelt, Carel ten Cate (Leiden University) and Jelle Zuidema (University of Amsterdam) are attempting.

A group of postdoc and PhDs at our Focus on Emotions lab organized an escape room for staff and students to increase their awareness of diversity and accessibility matters. It was designed particularly for this year’s EUniWell FestiWell, which ran under the headline “Towards global sustainable well-being”.…

This year it is 40 years ago that LOVA was established, which we want to celebrate with a seminar around the theme “Gender Moves”. We invite you to join us on May 10, 2019, at Leiden University, to explore how gender is enacted and reproduced in movement and how gendered movement contributes to dismantling…

Foster children’s behaviour is more problematic than that of their peers in ‘normal’ family situations. However, it is difficult to determine the exact cause of behavioural problems. Anouk Goemans, a researcher in clinical child and adolescent studies, calls for more screening and monitoring. PhD defence…