David Abadi is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Psychology, University of Amsterdam and a member of the H2020-funded project DEMOS (Democratic Efficacy and the Varieties of Populism in Europe). His research examines the psychological and emotional mechanisms linked to populist and extremist sentiments (and their corresponding appraisals) as well as hate speech and abusive language across media. For this purpose, he deploys a combination of (computational) methods, such as big data analytics, machine learning algorithms, survey research, experimental design, and natural language processing (NLP). He has co-developed a deep learning NLP model based on RoBERTa (Robustly optimized BERT approach), in order to detect metaphor, emotion and political rhetoric in big data. Lately, he co-developed a multi-task learning (MTL) model to detect social identity, populist attitudes, news bias and emotion in social media data.

Michael Boiger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the meanings and functions of emotion from a cultural and relational perspective. Currently, he investigates interpersonal emotional dynamics during intercultural encounters, with a particular interest in two areas: (1) how intercultural couples navigate challenges related to emotional understanding and attunement, and (2) how therapists can effectively engage with emotions in intercultural therapeutic settings. In addition to his academic work, Michael practices as an emotion-focused therapist in private practice.

Anastassia is doing a PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. Together with her supervisors Gerben van Kleef and Suzanne Oosterwijk, she works on a project focused on the motives and outcomes of engaging with the suffering of strangers. This is something humans constantly do; by talking about other people's stories, on social media, through movies, reading the news, and many more. The research question lays in the intersection of psychological processes as motivated empathy, social curiosity, interpersonal emotion regulation and meaning making.  Anastassia's PhD is funded by the Chilean scholarship Becas Chile.

YongQi finished the Research Master Psychology programme at the University of Amsterdam, specializing in Social Psychology and Developmental Psychology. She started her PhD in November 2015 under the supervision of dr. Disa Sauter and prof. dr. Agneta Fischer. YongQi is interested in emotion, culture, language and their relationships with each other. She has worked on the categorical perception of emotions in pre-verbal infants and the communication and experience of positive emotions across cultures. YongQi’s PhD project investigates why there is an in-group advantage in emotion communication – the phenomena whereby people are better at recognizing emotion signals when they are displayed by someone from their own culture and do worse when emotions are displayed by someone with a different cultural background. The project examines different samples including immigrants, expats, adopted individuals in addition to native residents from China and the Netherlands. YongQi’s PhD project is funded by a Research Talent grant from the NWO (The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research).  

Dr. Corine Dijk is an assistant professor of at the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. My research centres on interpersonal processes in psychopathology, mainly in social anxiety disorder. For example, I try to study if socially anxious individuals differ in their emotional responses from non-anxious individuals during social interactions (e.g., blush more or are less inclined to mimic other’s emotions);  and if this influences how they are judged by others. Also, I try to examine which cognitive mechanisms drive the differences in social and emotional behaviour. For example, do negative interpretations or strict beliefs about what is appropriate behaviour cause socially anxious individuals to behave differently?

I completed my undergraduate (B.Hons) and master degree in Department of Psychology, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia. Now, I am working on my Ph.D project under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Bertjan Doosje and Dr. Disa Sauter about resilience of refugees.

Allard R. Feddes is interested in the role of emotions in intergroup contexts. Specifically, Allard has investigated the role of emotions in intergroup conflicts (i.e., the role of emotions in radicalisation processes leading to terrorism), formation of attitudes (i.e., how does humour interact with threat in regard to attitudes towards outgroups) and helping behaviour (i.e., to what extent do emotions play a role in volunteering to help refugees). Currently, Allard is involved in a research project focused on the extent to which reporting experiences with LGBTI-related discrimination and aggression to the police influences (emotional) well- being on the long term.  

Prof.dr. Agneta Fischer is currently Professor in Emotions and Affective Processes in the Social Psychology Group of the University of Amsterdam, and director of the Psychology Research Institute. She has been president of the International Society of Research on Emotion (ISRE, 2004-2009), and she is currently the coordinator of CERE (Consortium of Emotion Researchers in Europe) and the chair of the Dutch Association of Social Psychology (ASPO). She is co-editor of Cognition and Emotion, and consulting editor in a number of other international journals. Her broad research interest is emotions in social contexts, and she has published in the domain of facial expressions of emotion, emotional mimicry, culture and gender differences in emotions, embodiment, and the social functions of emotions, in particular anger and contempt.

I started my PhD in Cognitive Psychology at Leiden University in 2019. Under the supervision of Prof. Mariska Kret and Dr. Milica Nikolic, my doctoral research focuses on the resonance of others’ emotions in our own bodies. More specifically, I’m interested in examining whether an alignment of bodily states, originating in the nonverbal communication of emotions, can promote social connections between people and foster trust. As this becomes particularly relevant for individuals who encounter difficulties in social situations, I also examine these processes in two clinical conditions, namely social anxiety and autism.

Changyu Jing is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. Under the supervision of Dr. Disa Sauter and Dr. Suzanne Oosterwijk, she is working on a project investigating the motivations behind climate change information-seeking behaviors. Her current research focuses on identifying key factors, such as emotional responses and personal relevance, that explain individuals’ engagement with environmental messages. She also explores whether people’s approach to these messages may, in turn, influence their underlying motivations.

I am an Assistant Professor at VU Amsterdam. My research focuses on the production and perception of nonverbal vocalisations, such as laughter, screams, and sighs. I employ a multidisciplinary approach, utilising computational methods like machine learning and conducting comparative studies across different cultures and between humans and other species. I completed my PhD at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), where I investigated the vocal expressions of a wide range of positive emotions, including amusement, triumph, pride, and tenderness. This research has laid the foundation for my ongoing work in this field.

Prof. dr. Gerben A. van Kleef is Chair of the Social Psychology department of the University of Amsterdam. His primary research interests revolve around emotion, power, norm violations, social influence, group processes, and conflict. In studying these topics, he investigates fundamental mechanisms underlying human behavior and explores their implications for organizations and society. In doing so, he combines social-psychological approaches with insights from various other disciplines, including behavioral economics, law, biology, and evolutionary science. His work on emotion focuses on the interpersonal effects of discrete emotional expressions across domains of life, including personal relationships, conflict and negotiation, team work, leadership, coaching, and sports.

I am a PhD researcher at the department of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour at Wageningen University (2021-2024). With a background in social neuroscience, I am interested in how our emotions shape our daily choices. In my PhD project, I explore the dynamics between emotions, situations and choices. So far, we find that emotions and situations are linked in how people understand them. Furthermore, when they can, people seek out situations that help solve the long-term problems that emotions signal. When they are limited to situations unrelated to their emotions, however, people consume products that make them feel better in the short-term. Thus, whether emotions help or hinder our choices, seems to depend on the situation. I do mostly experimental research (online and lab), and I enjoy to integrate new developments like AI (e.g. LLMs). I am driven to employ my know-how for the transition towards sustainable consumption.

Liesbeth Mann is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Amsterdam. She obtained her PhD in 2017 at the same university studying the emotion of humiliation in interpersonal, intra- and intergroup context. Alongside her PhD-research she worked on different projects on radicalization and discrimination commissioned by the Dutch government. Later she worked as a postdoc at the VU University and Tilburg University before returning to the UvA. Her research interests are varied and cover topics in the area of (cross-) cultural psychology such as migration and acculturation, intergroup relations, self and identity, political psychology (e.g., radicalization, genocide and the aftermath of mass conflict and crime) and emotions, in particular emotions in intergroup relations.

Positive emotions lie at the core of my research interests. Broadly speaking, I examine how ‘feel good’ emotions relate to social and psychological phenomena. These include expressive behaviours, cultural norms, and prosocial outcomes. 

I am currently employed as a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), where I am jointly supervised by Agneta Fischer and Disa Sauter. For my PhD project, we investigate how multiple positive emotions are expressed (through a mix of facial and bodily actions), and evaluate the role of social and cultural factors in regulating these emotion displays. 

I am an assistant professor in developmental psychopathology at the Child Development and Education department. My research interests evolve around the development of social emotions and social cognition in children. I am interested in understanding how children feel in social situations and how they think about other people and how these feelings and thoughts influence  the onset of children's  social problems on one hand and their social adjustment on the other hand. I investigate how social self-conscious emotions, such as shyness, shame, and guilt develop in toddlers and young children and how the disturbances in these emotions (for example, excessive or lack of shame) influence the occurrence of psychopathological symptoms and social adjustment.

Suzanne Oosterwijk is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. Broadly, her work is organized along two different themes. From an embodied cognition perspective, she investigates how networks in the brain overlap during intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion processes. In her second line of work, she aims to understand the phenomenon of “morbid curiosity”, with a particular focus on why people choose to engage with negative material and how this behavior is represented in the brain and body.

I started my PhD in 2020 at the Cognitive Psychology Unit at Leiden University, supervised by Prof. dr. Mariska Kret and Dr. Milica Nikolic. Broadly, my work focuses on children's socio-emotional development. I am interested in children's understanding of others' emotions and examine how emotional signals and cues - such as facial expressions, body language, and changes in physiology - inform the choices we make on a daily basis. I take an integrative approach to my research: combining physiological data with expert facial expression coding and behavioural economic paradigms. Recently, I have expanded my research line to examine the development of emotions in cross-cultural contexts. I am passionate about open science and ensuring the results of my work reach a wide audience.

Dr. Mark Rotteveel is an assistant professor working in the Social Psychology program at the Department of Psychology of the University of Amsterdam and he is associated editor of Cognition & Emotion. His research mainly concerns affective information processing and its behavioral consequences. Particularly, he is interested in affective information processing and its bi-directional relationship with action tendencies, attitudes, feelings, emotional expressions (e.g.,facial expressions, body posture) as well as information processing tendencies. Furthermore he is interested in cross-over phenomena of mood and affect with classic cognitive information processing (e.g., recognition performance). Recently, he started studying the perception of time in the context of emotion. In studying these processes specific latency measures, questionnaires as well as psychophysiological measures (e.g., fEMG, GSR, ERP, as fMRI) are used.

Anna Aretha Sach is a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam. Her doctoral project is focused on understanding why people engage in climate activism. She studies emotions of climate activists and people new to climate activism. She is also interested in intersectionality, repression, and care in social movements. Her methods include among others qualitative interviews and Experience Sampling Methods / Ecological Momentary Assessment. Anna is dedicated to critical participatory action research and co-creation approaches. She is supervised by Dr Cameron Brick, Dr Disa Sauter and Dr Nils Jostmann.

I am a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam, studying motivation and science learning with Maartje Raijmakers at the Department of Developmental Psychology. I did my internship with Dr. Disa Sauter and Prof. Agneta Fischer, investigating the influence of group membership on emotional mimicry and are aiming to find out what process underlies the finding of enhanced in-group mimicry of negative emotions. I am particularly interested in intergroup processes and what role emotions play in these processes, for example how they define group boundaries.

Dr. Disa Sauter is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. She currently holds an ERC Starting grant. Her work examines how factors such as culture, learning, and language, shape our emotions and the ways that they are signalled, and complementing this, which aspects of our emotions and emotional signals exhibit less plasticity. Her work examines the communication of emotions via non-verbal signals, with a particular focus on nonverbal vocalisations. She also has a particular interest in positive emotions. Disa’s research includes a range of experimental psychological approaches and cross-cultural comparative methods. 

My prime research interest is in violent interactions, and the dynamics of escalation and de-escalation. One question I am working on is how changes in the emotional states of the opponents are related to situational asymmetry. For instance by analysing how supportive groups impact the course of the interaction by increasing feelings of emotional domination in one party, or by degrading the opponent. Another question is how and to what extent the various cultural meanings expressed in violence are related to the emotional intensity of the interaction. I am principal investigator of the Group Violence research programme (ERC Consolidator Grant), which studies these questions by focusing on how group behaviour affects antagonistic and violent situations (see www.group-violence.com). My research blends theories and methods from various social sciences, such as anthropology, criminology, social psychology and sociology. My home base for research and teaching is the department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam

I started my PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 2024 under the supervision of Dr. Disa Sauter and Dr. Sam Mehr (University of Auckland / Yale University). My research focuses on non-verbal vocalisations: from sighs and grunts, to laughter and squeals, I study how, when and why we make these sounds. Using citizen science methods (such as online gamified experiments), I research how similar people around the world are with regards to these basic human behaviours. Alongside non-verbal vocalisations, I am also interested in the behavioural and emotional functions of human song.

Linli Zhou is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the concept of "warm glow"—the positive feelings that arise from doing good—and its connection to pro-environmental behaviors. Under the supervision of Dr. Disa Sauter and Dr. Cameron Brick, Linli investigates whether individuals experience warm glow feelings after engaging in pro-environmental behaviors, even when such actions cost time and effort. Furthermore, her work explores whether this warm glow can encourage people to continue adopting pro-environmental behaviors in the future. Online consequential pro-environmental behavior tasks and behaviors such as clothing repairs have been explored in her projects.

• Evin Aktar
• Irene Berra
• Jozefien De Leersnyder
• Tiarah Engels
• Xia Fang
• Jacob (Kobi) Israelashvili
• Kai Jonas
• Mariska Kret
• Jens Lange
• Amandine Lassalle
• Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard
• Lisanne Pauw
• Shahira Sharaf
• Lukas Snoek
• Rui Sun
• Svenja Wolf
• Maria Zwicker