A master's degree in Psychology at Leiden University combines theoretical knowledge with academic and professional skills, making you an attractive candidate for many employers.

The Institute of Psychology is committed to play a prominent role in teaching and research at the national and international level.

A team of researchers from Young Academy and the Huygens ING/NL Lab has brought a three-century-old fragrance to life based on a recipe by Constantijn Huygens. The fragrance makes the past more tangible and can help people experience history differently.

Gender beliefs father make bigger difference

Young children are not just cheeky monkeys — it turns out they actually laugh like chimpanzees, too. 'That’s because both babies and chimps chuckle while inhaling and exhaling, unlike adult humans who laugh mainly during exhalation', says cognitive psychologist Mariska Kret on Techregister.

This is a list of scientific publications by students and staff of the Media Technology MSc programme.

You can find some tips here on how to maintain your mental health.

The proportion of children who are overweight has increased enormously over the past 20 years. The number has currently stabilised but even so there are still too many overweight and obese children. Could there be some connection with the way they are brought up? Roxanna Camfferman's PhD research shows…

Sleep disorders have a significant influence on our physical and emotional health. Sleep should therefore receive more attention within lifestyle medicine, says Professor Gert Jan Lammers. He will give his inaugural lecture on Friday 20 May entitled: ‘Getting to sleep’.

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…

Eveline Crone surmises that adolescence also has a positive effect on social development. She believes, for example, that it is in adolescence that young people learn the skills of cooperation, sharing and helpfulness. She will be researching this hypothesis in the coming period with an ERC Consolidator…

Girls with autism have relatively good social skills, which means that their autism is often not recognised. Autism manifests itself in girls differently from in boys. Psychologist Carolien Rieffe and colleagues from the Autism Centre and INTER-PSY (Groningen) report their findings in the Dutch Scientific…

Young children who are less empathetic than their peers are more likely to be aggressive when older. This is what Malou Noten concludes in her dissertation. PhD defence on 25 November.

Parents appear to be extremely sensitive to feedback they receive about their child. Just how sensitive depends on the (‘rose-tinted’) glasses through which they look at their child. All this can be seen in the brain. Neuroscientist Lisanne van Houtum and her Leiden colleagues published on this issue…

The Leiden University psychologist Carolien Rieffe will investigate how to create an social climate at high schools, to make young people with autism feel more comfortable and able to engage with their social surroundings and thus develop essential social and emotional skills. Rieffe and collaborators…

PhD student Janine Westendorp and her colleagues conducted literature research on what patients with cancer and their loved ones perceive as harmful communication from healthcare providers. The results were published in the journal Psycho-Oncology and are released as a poster to distribute to healthcare…

It may seem as though adolescents do as they please, but they are more sensitive to their parents’ opinions than they would appear. The adolescent brain reacts strongly to parental criticism or praise. These are the results of a study by an interdisciplinary research group of psychologists and neuroscientists…

Boys with autism are more prone to develop physical complaints, depression and aggressive behaviour. Psychologists at Leiden University have discovered that this is mainly related to rumination. Publication in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

We have decided to cancel the Summer School for Historical Acting due to the ongoing global public health crisis.

A Preventive Intervention Team that investigates children with behavioural problems and trains their social skills in order to prevent school dropout and other, more serious problems. This is a strategy that Leiden University and the municipality of Amsterdam have been using for several years already,…

In the new ‘Educatips’ column, Psychology lecturers share their most important lessons about teaching. This month: Elise Seip wants to help students get out of their head and into their body. She starts every work group with mindfulness.

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

In this ‘Educatips’ column, Psychology lecturers share their most important lessons about teaching. This month: Sepideh Saadat guides a support group for students who struggle with the Israel-Hamas war. ‘Some of them feel guilty about enjoying life while their family is suffering.’

The brain structure of young people with conduct disorder differs significantly from that of their typically developing peers. This is the conclusion of an international study that analysed more than two thousand MRI scans, recently published in The Lancet Psychiatry. Dr Moji Aghajani, one of the principal…

My first fieldwork in Nigeria began up in the air, as we were approaching the runway of Lagos’ Murtala Muhammed Airport.

During the week of 15 November, Little Amal, the larger-than-life doll visited The Hague. Naturally she received a warm welcome by Leiden University during her visit. Little Amal (art project The Walk) was invited by Amare.

Adva Eichengreen starts a fellowship focusing on enhancing social participation of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. Eichengreen has been offered a postdoc position at Leiden University as part of the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie “LEaDing Fellows” Project within the collaboration of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus…

What are the benefits for us of collaboration with Chinese partners? What sparks off Leiden researchers' interest in collaborating with colleagues in China? Leiden University shows in three short films what joint projects are like.

Mariska Kret, Professor in Cognitive psychology has been awarded the European Research Council (ERC) Public Engagement with Research Awards 2022. Kret convinces the jury with 'RecognizeYourself - Bringing science to the zoo. Involving the public into the study of great apes emotions'.

Around seven per cent of children have difficulty learning their mother tongue because they have some form of developmental language disorder (DLD). World DLD Day on 15 October called attention to this disorder. Development psychologist Neeltje van den Bedem explains why this is important.

The Leiden University Fund (LUF)/ Gratama-Foundation has awarded a 35.000 euro grant to statistics researcher Sanne Willems. This grant enables her to examine how uncertainty regarding predictions can be best visualized for the public.

The Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC) is concentrating increasingly on research into the role of the brain in language development. The institute has now set up the LIBC Language website that brings together all the information on this research.

In a series of six lectures, Jed Wentz, the Utrecht Early Music Festival’s artistic adviser, will acquaint you with subjects central to the developments in early music worldwide. First lecture starts 15 October!

On Friday 20 September, the Dutch associations for Privacy Law (VPR) and for Privacy Law Attorneys (VPR-A) announced their annual thesis award winner in a ceremony held in the Lorentz Lecture Hall at Leiden Law School. We are very proud that Kimmy Shah and Hannah Appel, recent graduates of the Advanced…

How do insurance products transform intimate and personal relations? What are the consequences of the classifications that insurance companies use and how do these affect solidarity, morality and inequality?

Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease are the most common neurodegenerative disorders. Unfortunately, no effective treatments are currently available to halt the progression of these neuroinflammatory diseases [1].

Because we cannot directly ask babies about what they know or what they are thinking about, we must find smart and baby-friendly ways to figure it out! Below you can read about the different methods that we typically use in our studies.

Every semester, LUCIS invites a scholar to Leiden to provide a lecture series on a topic of their choice. With these lectures, we aim to present state-of-the-art research in Islamic studies to the Leiden academic community and beyond, and to offer students and junior researchers the opportunity to get…

SAILS likes to occasionally organise workshops about topics that relate to our programme. On this page you can find more information about previous workshops.

Leiden University will be recording a brand-new series of podcasts in 2019: Science Shots. Our top scientists will talk about their research in less than 15 minutes. Tip: something to enjoy on the train journey between Leiden and The Hague, our two University cities!

Both good employer practices and good employee practices are open norms. These open norms can lead to uncertainty about what employers should focus on and what rights (and obligations) employees have in that respect. The objective of this study is to give substance to the norm of good employment practices…

These podcast episodes were written for the Green Office’s Spring Podcast competition and miniseries 'Beyond the Safe Space', on the theme: the Planetary Boundaries, which took place between the months of March-May 2023.

Researchers from five different discplines work together in this interdisciplinary initiative.

Being a supervisor is a demanding job. With these golden rules in mind, you'll do just fine. You can keep reading below, or you can download the PDF in which you find a visual representation on the rules.

Making predictions about emotional problems or the effects of air pollution: Marjolein Fokkema’s algorithms are getting better at this all the time. She is making her algorithms increasingly flexible, so they can predict not just characteristics at one particular moment, but also how skills, for example,…

This special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik (Brill, 2021) brings together articles that explore new digital ways of analyzing and annotating Old English vocabulary.

Within the Graduate School you can conduct your PhD research in a wide range of subjects across the Social and Behavioural Sciences, with five distinct research areas offered by its Institutes.

In the master’s specialisation in Economic and Consumer Psychology, students will study the psychological mechanisms that underlie many of our choices and decisions concerning consumption and other economic behaviours.