Evin Aktar is assistant professor at the Clinical Psychology in Leiden University. 

She received her BA in psychology at Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey in 2008, and her MSc cum laude in research master psychology at the University of Amsterdam in 2010 with major specialization in clinical psychology and a minor specialization in psychonomics. She received her PhD at the Developmental Psychopathology section at the Research Institute Child Development and Education at the University of Amsterdam in 2016. Her PhD studies focused on how being exposed to negative emotions from parents in everyday interactions  in infancy can contribute to parent-to-child transmission of depression and anxiety. Following her PhD, she continued her work as post-doc researcher at the Developmental Psychopathology section, where she extended her research on learning of negative emotions from parents in infancy and childhood. Evin is currently adopting a multi-method approach incorporating the study of emotional expressions, attention and physiology in parents and children for a better understanding of the mechanisms explaining the intergenerational transmission of (social) anxiety.

In June 2018 Evin received a VENI grant, which enables her to continue her line of work on verbal transmission of stranger anxiety from parents to children at Leiden University, from January 2019 onwards.

Publications