If male budgerigars can successfully open a puzzle box with food, they become more attractive to females. Biologist Carel ten Cate and Chinese colleagues publish experimental evidence for this in a paper in Science on 11 January .

Susanne Asscheman is a postdoctoral researcher in the unit Developmental and Educational Psychology of the Institute of Psychology at Leiden University.

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,…

The electrochemical reduction of a group of organic compounds on platinum is strongly dependent on the arrangement of the atoms in the platinum surface. Christoph Bondue, postdoc in Marc Koper's group, published this in Nature Catalysis on 4 March. The reduction of such compounds is an important process…

This PhD subproject concentrates on 16th-century ichthyology and takes Gessner’s Historia piscium (1558) (further HP) as its point of departure and focus.

An international group of scientists has discovered that certain cells of our immune system – the so-called T cells – communicate with each other and work together as a team. To fight an infection they stimulate each other’s growth, but at the same time, they inhibit each other when there is a surplus…

We train our researchers and students in how to use laboratory animal research. The attitude of the researcher towards the animals is crucial here.

proefdieren dierproeven universiteit leiden geneesmiddelonderzoek geneesmiddelen

We aim to keep animal testing to a minimum. We therefore assess for every study whether full account has been taken of the 3 Rs: replace, reduce, refine. The Animal Welfare Body advises researchers on this. We train our staff and provide further courses, which means we are able to continue to refine…

Professor P.F. (Paul) Wouters has been appointed dean of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences with effect from 1 January 2019. Wouters has been appointed for a period of three years and succeeds Professor Hanna Swaab, whose second term of office as dean expires this year. Swaab will remain…

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,…

Are there acoustic cues for settlement stage larvae in deep-sea soundscapes around hydrothermal vents?

Mapping the neural mechanisms underlying social motivations of adolescents and adults

Stimulating the vagus nerve, which provides a direct link between the gut and brain, makes people pay less attention to sad facial expressions. This research study by psychologists Katerina Johnson and Laura Steenbergen is published in the journal Neuroscience.

With the emergence of new methods and technologies such as improved DNA analysis and big data, archaeological research has changed radically in recent decades. The researchers from the Department of Archaeological Sciences at the Faculty of Archaeology use new scientific knowledge to answer fundamental…

The effects of anthropogenic noise on interactions between predators and their prey are still little understood.

Lecture

Health psychologist Andrea Evers has been invited by several Dutch and international media to talk about the coronavirus and the measures taken by the government with regard to public health.

Young people tend to take more risks than children or adults. This trend is related to the reward centre in the brain, which is much more active when they are rewarded, PhD candidate Barbara Braams discovered. Personality, testosterone levels and social context also play a role in risk-taking.

In science, it is of vital importance that multiple studies corroborate the same result. Researchers therefore need to know all the details of previous experiments in order to implement the procedures as exactly as possible. However, this is becoming a major problem in neuroscience, as animal studies…

How to explain variation in the extent to which parliamentary voting behaviour follows the government–opposition divide? Party Politics article by Tom Louwerse et al.

Inaugural Lecture

In the thesis the dynamics of strategies is studied from two perspectives.In the first part of the thesis strategies are considered to be opinions present in a community.

In the public debate on the coronavirus, bold assertions from academics, doctors and other medical practitioners are often heard. For example, that the coronavirus would be no more deadly than the flu. Or that measures to combat the virus like wearing face coverings are unnecessary.

Pharmaceutical companies, governments and the general public have become increasingly aware that animal models used in drug testing lack vital aspects to serve as an accurate representation of human biology. As models of the human body should become more physiologically relevant, animal models no longer…

The major aim is to develop, evaluate, and implement disease-generic cognitive-behavioral interventions through the internet in order to optimize tailored health care for patients with chronic somatic conditions.

Lecture

Governments are increasingly facilitating the roll-out of so-called “smart meters”, a technology for measuring energy consumption that are able to transmit and receive data using a form of electronic communication. However, implementation has been slow or even stalled.