If you pay statutory tuition fees and are registered at another Dutch higher education institution, you can take one or more courses at Leiden University.

Optimization, mechanisms of action and predictors of the outcome of light therapy in depression: A multicenter randomized trial

What are the circadian disturbances underlying depression vulnerability? How are they related to mood, cognition and sleep ?

Our mission is to improve the description, prediction, understanding and the prevention and treatment of mood disorders, including unipolar and bipolar depression, as well as suicidal thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. To tackle this ambitious mission, we focus on several research streams.

The Leiden Index of Depression Sensitivity (LEIDS) measures cognitive reactivity (CR) to sadness, an aspect of cognitive vulnerability to depression, conceptually similar to rumination.

We found that, next to the effectiveness of the intervention, it’s also very likely that the intervention is cost-effective compared to attention only.

Throughout the year NVIC welcomes a number of guest researchers (advanced, post-MA). Read here what it takes to become one of NVIC’s guest researchers.

How do genetic and environmental factors make us vulnerable to depression?

To investigate the effectiveness of an online self-help programme for people with HIV and depressive symptoms.

What are the social and neural mechanisms that contribute to fluctuations in self-esteem in healthy adolescents and adolescents with depression?

My ERC Starting Grant, funded with €1.5 million for 5 years as part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, is focused on building the early warning system WARN-D to reliably forecast depression in young adults before it occurs. Why depression, and why prediction?

Opportunities to join the initiative as a guest researcher and spend time in residence with GTGC in The Hague are available. If you are interested, we welcome you to contact us. Below you can find our current and former guest researchers.

The guest rooms are located on the top floor of our institute.

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 .

Evidence that the right diet can prevent or alleviate depression is weak. In literature reviews on the subject, the authors often reach strong conclusions, nonetheless. This is what Florian Thomas-Odenthal, a master’s student in Psychology at Leiden University, discovered in his thesis research. Publication…

What is the effectiveness of (booklet or online) self-help programmes for people with somatic stressors and depressive symptoms? What works best for whom? How to improve motivation and adherence?

Some people are more sensitive to depression than others. But why is that the case? Clinical psychologist Niki Antypa studied how vulnerability to depression is influenced by cognition. She also found a first careful indication that a treatment with omega-3 fatty acids might provide a solution.

Teens with depression appear to be more sensitive to criticism from their parents than their healthy peers are.

On 26 February 2021, Clara van Dam was invited by Dr Oana Stefan to give a guest lecture for students of King’s College London in the elective course on ‘Law and New Modes of Governance in the European Union’.

I want to understand the overlap between physical health, mental health, and healthy aging and whether/how stress (behaviorally and biologically) may tie these concepts together.

PhD defence

PhD defence

Last July, after the end of my Advanced LLM in Public International Law, I wanted to find new tasks to prove myself on topics related to what I studied during my stimulating master in the Netherlands. In the impossibility to work “on the field” as I was busy for my bar exam in my own country and I was…

A splendid milestone after seven years of collaborative research on the sustainable development of the Indonesian economy. Professor of Industrial Ecology Arnold Tukker has been appointed as a guest professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business of Universitas Padjadjaran (UNPAD) in the Indonesian…

Many primary school children suffer from anxiety and their numbers are increasing. Psychologists from the Knowledge Center Anxiety & Stress (KAS) are developing and researching preventive training.

What causes depression in a child and how can they get over it? Leiden Professor of Psychology Bernet Elzinga and behavioural scientist Carine Kielstra recently hosted a webinar on the subject of depression in teenagers. The level of interest was overwhelming.

On Wednesday 23 September 2020, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte gave an online lecture together with Professor Afshin Ellian as part of the course Introduction to Law. The lecture had the title ‘The European Union in times of coronavirus’, and the Prime Minister answered questions from students. Hundreds…

Mariana Gkliati participated on 4 April in the course International Human Rights offered by the SIM, Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, at the University College Utrecht.

On Monday 15 May, 14.15-16:00, Joao Nataf gave a guest lecture to third year bachelor students in the honours course “The Impact of Global Transformations on Violence”, coordinated by GTGC’s Deputy Coordinator Valentina Carraro. Mr. Nataf is the Secretary of the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture…

With a starting grant of the European Research Council (ERC) for promising young researchers, Eiko Fried aims to develop a personalised early warning system, that will reliably forecast depression before it occurs. Fried (Clinical Psychology) talks about this WARN-D, promising to radically transform…

What role do parent-child interactions play in the development, maintenance and treatment of depression in young people?

On Wednesday 21 March 2018 Jeroen Dijsselbloem, former Minister of Finance, and former President of the Euro Group and the Board of Governors of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), gave a guest lecture at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs.

NVIC welcomes Ahmed Hassan, a PhD candidate at Indiana University as a guest researcher.

Personality is genetic in zebrafish: risk-taking parents have risk-taking children. These are the findings of research by Christian Tudorache and his team published in BMC Neuroscience.

On Tuesday 26 February 2019, Prof. Corinne Dettmeijer has given a guest lecture to students of the master programmes Child Law (Jeugdrecht) and International Children’s Rights. Prof. Dettmeijer holds the Cleveringa Chair at Leiden University.

Ineke van der Ham is a guest in the national tv show Tijd voor Max, where she discusses the nationwide experiment on navigation.

On Friday 8 November 2019, Ron Keller, former ambassador of the Netherlands to China, Turkey, Ukraine and Russia gave a guest lecture at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs.

Eye contact between parents and children improves their mood and increases feelings of connectedness on both sides; but not in the case of depressed adolescents, Mirjam Wever discovered. Where the parent-child bond has been disrupted, it can be strengthened not only with therapy for the child but also…

The aim of this project is to investigate the (cost)effectiveness of two innovative forms of trauma-focused therapy for patients with childhood abuse related PTSD. The ultimate goal is to improve quality of care and contribute to treatment innovation for this severely ill target population.