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…

What holds people together and what makes them willing to fit within larger political structures? Our project examines this question in the practices of dynastic rulership in Eurasia ca. 1300-1800.

Are you interested in one of our vacancies? To get to know each other well, we follow a number of steps in the application process.

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…

Promotor: Prof.dr. B.R. Katzy, Co-promotor: R. Ortt

How the global distribution of vegetation stands dominated by arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal plants relate to principle aspects of belowground carbon accumulation processes?

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…

This thesis investigates the processing of words written in Japanese kanji and Chinese hànzì, i.e. logographic scripts.

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

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

Young babies laugh like adult apes do: producing sounds while inhaling and exhaling. Adult humans produce sounds on the exhale only. Cognitive psychologist Mariska Kret and colleagues have published an article about the development of human laughter in the journal Biology Letters.

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…

How can teachers be motivated by their students’ data in making stepwise changes to their teaching practices?

This Thesis describes the design, synthesis and evaluation as glycoprocessing enzyme inhibitors of focused libraries of iminosugars.

PhD defence

How can we improve quality of life and study success in young, high-functioning adults with autism?

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.

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

The ‘empathic mind’ in children with Specific Language Impairments (SLI); what can children with SLI understand of other people’s minds and emotions?

On April 4th, Zohreh Shiamizadeh succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Zohreh on this great result.

In this dissertation, electrophysiological (EEG) and behavioural measures are used to investigate how allophonic tonal variants and sub-phonemic features are processed during Mandarin and Dutch speech production, visual processing of written words and reading aloud.

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.

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…

Can process-oriented dynamic testing be applied to everyday educational practice?

This project aims to investigate the underlying (neurocognitive) linguistic processes of ellipsis resolution, particularly gapping.

Koper

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

Assessment of teaching is currently becoming more and more common practice. As such assessment is generally based on complex, qualitative data from multiple sources (e.g., lesson plans, video-taped lessons, written reflections of the teacher on his or her performance), the overall quality of the assessment…

Agricultural foods naturally vary in their detailed internal structure. To facilitate early detection of health hazards due to contamination or disease, predict maturity and minimize wastage, it is critical to take into account the internal characteristics of each individual product, as these enable…

Microneedles represent promising tools for delivery of drugs to the skin. However, before these microneedles can be used in clinical practice, it is essential to understand the process of skin penetration by these microneedles.

The 9th Network Europe Conference in Edinburgh was held at June 2017 in Edinburgh and organized by the Europa Institut Zurich. The contributions of the conference are now published.

In this study, we evaluated the influence of supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) spray drying conditions, in the absence of organic solvent, on the ability to produce dry protein/trehalose formulations at 1:10 and 1:4 (w/w) ratios.

How do humans control their thoughts and actions, and what can high-field brain scanning reveal about the underlying processes?

Soil biodiversity is of great importance for the maintenance of multifunctionality in terrestrial ecosystems.

With increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and their detrimental effect on the global climate, modern society needs to push for more renewable energy sources. Storing widely accessible and abundant solar energy in chemical bonds in the form of molecular fuel via artificial photosynthesis…

On May 30th, Yang Yang succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Yang on this great result.