On Thursday 28 September, the Committee on Social Minimum, of which Koen Caminada is a member, presented its second report to outgoing minister for poverty policy in the Netherlands, Carola Schouten. The Committee was established by the minister at the request of the House of Representatives.

It’s been a turbulent, bizarre and extraordinary year, 2020. Coronavirus turned the lives of everyone at our University upside down. Out teaching, research and all the events that are held in a year: nothing was the same as before. That this affected all of us is clear from the highlights and many reactions…

Put two single people in one place and what do you get? Science! Psychologists at Leiden University will be conducting research on human attraction at the Lowlands festival on the 19th of August.

Nowadays children grow up with social media. This may influence the development of brain regions involved in social interaction. In their review article in Nature Communications, Crone and Konijn illustrate how neuroscience can contribute to a better understanding of how media and peers influence adolescents'…

Africa is online. Leiden Africa expert Mirjam de Bruijn is fascinated by the fast development of mobile telephony and social media in Africa. She maintains a website on the topic, focusing on isolated, marginalised and conflict-ridden areas in Middle Africa.

On 4 and 5 September, Leiden Law School hosted a special conference that brought together around sixty participants from the Netherlands and abroad to discuss the future of economic, social, and cultural rights – rights that touch upon everyone’s daily life: housing, education, healthcare, food, and…

In June the Final Festival took place, the closing event of the 'Social Science Lab'. New participants of Honours College Science and Society presented their solution for a current social problem.

Compare human social behaviour at a country level and you will find differences. Japan has the highest score whereas the Netherlands is just above average. This is what psychologist Niels van Doesem discovered in research with an international team of 64 colleagues in 31 industrialised countries. Their…

A 5 million euros grant from the Dutch Research Agenda allows Anouk de Koning and co-applicants Femke Kaulingfreks and Maartje van der Woude to study social interventions in eight Dutch cities in an innovative and interdisciplinary way.

What interests and motives shape how people cooperate, clash and place their trust in one another? For more than 36 years, Van Dijk explored these questions using experimental games in the laboratory. 'Games strip complex issues back to their core.'

During the event 'Fout?' by De Jonge Akademie, Ellen de Bruijn held a lecture about the social context of making mistakes and the psychological elements of learning from it.

Could policies aimed at preventing radicalisation undermine the very trust and social cohesion they aim to strengthen?

Monday 26 September, 2016 saw the first confrontation between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Expectations were high – not only about the content of the debate, but also about how the two presidential candidates would behave, and how this might influence their campaigns. We asked three researchers…

Organised jointly by the Europa Institute, Leiden University and the Lisbon Centre for Research in Public Law, University of Lisbon on 31 May 2021.

Double Bind. Public service professionals coping with contrasting demands. How do public service professionals align their PSM with contrasting demands set by the organizational and social contexts in which they work?

The Social Resilience & Security interdisciplinary programme broadens its scope by embedding two research projects lead by Dr. Joanne Mouthaan. The projects adress suicide prevention skills and mental health of Ukraine refugees. Both projects will be integrated in the programme with the aim to improve…

How do people living in a remote part of Northern Mongolia experience the post-socialist transition that occurred twenty years ago? Based on extensive fieldwork, cultural anthropologist Richard Fraser argues that this is not at all clear. In his PhD dissertation, he developed a new framework based on…

Veel Nederlanders hebben fysieke, psychische en sociale problemen tegelijk. Zij hebben hulp nodig van meerdere professionals uit verschillende organisaties. Fia van Heteren onderzoekt hoe deze professionals met elkaar én met cliënten samenwerken, en welke factoren deze samenwerking versterken of bel…

Nina Baranowska and Gianclaudio Malgieri have published a new blog post on Verfassungsblog: 'Towards a Legal Concept of Digital Well-being: Insights from the EU Commission’s Preliminary Findings on TikTok’s Addictive Design'.

Understandably, coronavirus is often viewed from a medical perspective. However, researchers in the social sciences and humanities possess a great deal of expertise that could improve our understanding of the virus outbreak and its impact on society. A new portal is consolidating this knowledge.

Vietnam’s record of expanding access to education, and especially its performance on international assessments such as PISA, has raised questions about what Vietnam got right, how, and why and what insights Vietnam’s experiences might offer for efforts at improving the performance of education systems…

Slavoj Žižek is one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the left. His central claim holds that “today, it is more crucial than ever to continue to question the very foundations of capitalism as a global system”.

This book reconstructs the life of Lie Alma, a Dutch teacher and antifascist activist, and her role in international women’s peace politics and the struggle against fascism, poverty and social inequality.

Archaeologist Prof Bleda Düring has been awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant for his research on the emergence of social inequalities in the transition from the Copper Age to the Bronze Age in Cyprus. Using excavations, isotope analysis and cultural interpretations, he investigates how and why…

On Friday 17 November at 15.30h Prof. Simon Deakin will give the first seminar of the Reform of Social Legislation Speaker Series

The Developmental and Educational Psychology unit nominated Jiemiao Chen's paper

Members of our research team give different types of presentations and lectures.

In a new essay for Ethics & International Affairs, Dr Henning Lahmann, Assistant Professor of International Law & Technology at eLaw, addresses the question whether states should resort to social media to warn a civilian population ahead of military operations.

From the 19th century, Dutch colonisers on Curaçao relied heavily on the Catholic church. Missionaries provided not only teaching and spiritual care for the Catholic Afro-Caribbeans, they also ensured social order and peace. However, these benefits came at a price. The gap to good education and participation…

The Netherlands has also announced special measures to fight SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. These measures have at times caused questionable behaviour, such as stockpiling or charging exorbitant sums for masks. But the intentions behind this seemingly antisocial behaviour are not necessarily bad, says Professor…

Nature, nurture and neural mechanisms of social emotion regulation in childhood

Contemporary Maya Calendars

Empathic or anxious mistakes? A neurocognitive investigation of the development of social performance monitoring in youth growing up in stressful versus non-stressful environments

It’s not a regular occurrence at Leiden University: two professors giving their inaugural lecture on the same day. Berna Güroğlu and Ellen de Bruijn specialise in related disciplines: they both research the influence of social context on processes in the brain – Güroğlu in adolescents and De Bruijn…

Tahir Abbas, associate professor at ISGA, has been appointed as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. The Academy of Social Sciences is the UK’s national academy of academics, learned societies and practitioners in the social sciences. Its purpose is to promote social science in the United Kingdom…