Social Information Processing in Children with and without Hearing Loss

How do different emotional expressions influence the behavior of other people in negotiations?

Dissertation

How does having limited access to the social world affect Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH) children’s emotional development? And in turn, how do impairments in emotional functioning affect social development and the development of psychopathology?

Cultural and individual differences

Children with autism spectrum disorder experience serious challenges in social functioning, which threatens their development in many areas of functioning.

We examine the effect of social learning on emotional competence in children and adolescents with a typical or atypical development.

What is the role of stress and stress-related hormones in emotion regulation?

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All living creatures have to cope with environmental demands and threats that challenge their physical or emotional homeostasis.

Autistic children have indeed potential: most of their emotional abilities improve with age, concludes developmental psychologist Boya Li in her research on the emotional development of autistic children. Promotion on 10 November 2021.

Understanding others’ emotional behavior is essential for navigating daily social life. But how is such an understanding achieved? The eye-tracking study by Yung-Ting Tsou and colleagues shows that children with hearing loss adopt a unique visual strategy that makes uses of explicit visual information…

Why does social anxiety increase in adolescence and how does it grow out of control in some adolescents?

1. How does the social context influence emotion perception? 2. How do attentional control processes influence the unfolding of affective responses?

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CERQ is a questionnaire measuring cognitive coping strategies developed by Dr. Nadia Garnefski and Dr. Vivian Kraaij.

Efficiently responding to others’ emotions has great survival value, especially for social species, such as primates, who establish close, long-term bonds with group members. The closest living relatives to humans are the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Studying these species, and comparing them on the exact…

Does an Emotional Working Memory Training show a beneficial transfer effect on emotion regulation (reappraisal) capacities in patients with Borderline Personality Disorder?

What is the role of emotion regulation in coping with interpersonal feedback?

Which educational and child welfare interventions offer optimal opportunities for positive development to children with severe behavioral and emotional disorders.

What is the relation between the experience and the act of exclusion?

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

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, and made it to the cover.

Sasse, van Breen, Spears & Gordijn demonstrated an anger gap in response to sexism which was larger for women than for men and found evidence that expressed anger was associated with instrumental concerns.

The aim of this thesis was to study the link between hearing loss, language skills, and social functioning in deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children. Sufficient language skills are an essential prerequisite to develop appropriate communication skills, in order to join in conversations with others.…

People who have taken antibiotics in the past three months pay more attention to negative facial expressions, according to research by postdoc Katerina Johnson and assistant professor Laura Steenbergen. This may explain how antibiotics increase the risk of developing depression.

This study investigates the perception and production of emotional prosody by native and non-native listeners and speakers, i.e. Chinese and Dutch listeners and speakers, including Dutch L2 learners of Chinese.

Carl Li defended his thesis on 30 June 2015

How is structural and functional brain development related to behavioral change in cognitive-control, impulse regulation, and socio-emotional functioning?

Why do children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have difficulties with acquiring emotion regulation skills; and how is this related to their social impairments and comorbid psychopathology?

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Reading emotions from others’ faces strengthens social relationships. But how is that for children with hearing loss? Can they learn to read faces just as easily as hearing children? The study by Yung-Ting Tsou and colleagues shows that daily

What is the role of neuronal emotional reactivity in the intergenerational transmission of abuse?

In the programme group Parenting, Child Care and Development we examine in what way parents (mothers and fathers) and allo-parents (e.g., professional caregivers) influence children’s development, wellbeing and health. The main focus is on children’s social-emotional development and the prevention of…

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

... examines how different motives stemming from people’s interdependencies and social identities influence decision making in social contexts.

Why do some children confront social challenges with confidence, whereas others experience difficulties? What is the role of child temperament and child emotional dispositions? What is the role of parenting? This project aims to shed light on the mechanisms explaining shyness and confidence in response…

Development and validation of instruments that can measure different aspects of emotional competence in children with normal and atypical development, and in different cultures

In a longitudinal study, Eichengreen and colleagues explored how the certain aspects of emotional intelligence impact the development of adolescents’ mental health, thus identifying potential warning signs and targets for intervention programs. Despite a higher risk for mental health issues and lesser…

What are the developmental pathways to social anxiety (disorder), the causal processes and maintaining factors? How do these factors interact in the development of social anxiety disorder? How can this knowledge be used to design and implement effective preventive intervention programs for youth?

How do dissociative states affect the ability to suppress emotional distraction (in the context of a working memory task) in patients with Borderline Personality Disorder?

To study relationships between emotion regulation after negative and traumatic life events and psychopathology. Within this context, another goal is to develop and validate emotion regulation questionnaires.