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.

The aim of the research programme is to provide insight into the cognitive processes and brain mechanisms that underlie reading, arithmetic and learning in general.

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.

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…

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

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

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

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,…

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…

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.

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

To what extent have the Dutch and British militaries learned from their counterinsurgency operations in southern Afghanistan between 2006 and 2020?

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…

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

The main theme of this thesis is the theoretical study of Gaussian processes as a tool in Bayesian nonparametric statistics.

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…

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.

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.

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

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

In order to be able to develop effective medicine and treatments to prevent or cure autoimmune diseases or cancer we need to understand the mechanisms how they arise and what drives their course.Unravelling the fundamental molecular mechanisms influencing the onset and course of diseases such as allergies,…

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 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…

To what end and how does Plautus constantly underline the Helleni(sti)c provenance of his art? How does this aspect relate the author’s originality?

In het LUMC in Leiden onderzoeken ontwikkelingspsychologen hoe kinderen en jongeren omgaan met emoties. Daarvoor maken ze een mri-scan van de hersenen van de deelnemers (9 - 16 jaar). De 11-jarige Olivier in het Jeugdjournaal: ‘Ik vind het leuk om het onderzoek te helpen.’ Wil je ook de wetenschappers…

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

On November 1st, Min Liu succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Min on this great result.

This dissertation aims to establish a dialogue between ethnomusicology (more specifically indigenous organology), the anthropology of art and the culture of the Apinaye peoples, in order to understand how the musical objects of these peoples are learned and taught, and thus to understand its musical…

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

Handbook of Signal Processing Systems is organized in four parts. The first part motivates representative applications that drive and apply state-of-the art methods for design and implementation of signal processing systems; the second part discusses architectures for implementing these applications;…

Do general practitioners recognize children with or at risk of problematic anxiety and is there a pattern that might help differentiate those with and without anxiety disorders in general practice?

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.

How do European Muslim men and women become involved in a violent jihadist struggle abroad?