Research interests

My research examines how emotions and social cognition organise social life across development. I study when, why, and how distinct emotions emerge, how they change over time, how they both inform and are informed by social understanding, and how individual differences in these processes shape resilient social functioning or contribute to social difficulties, including social anxiety and autism.

At the core of my work is the premise that emotions are not merely reactions to social situations, but organising mechanisms that structure individuals' social cognition and guide social behaviours. To this end, I study social interactions and behaviour through the lens of affective science, using emotional responses in social situations to probe social understanding. 

I use naturalistic tasks that balance between ecological validity and experimental control to capture emotional and socio-cognitive processes as they unfold in real time. Children and adults engage in social situations such as receiving compliments, committing minor transgressions, performing in front of others, or collaborating, allowing us to observe emotional responses, social understanding, and interpersonal dynamics. I combine fine-grained behavioural micro-coding, neurophysiological measures, questionnaires, and tests to capture emotions and social cognition.  

My long-term goal is to advance a developmental theory of emotions that explains how distinct emotions emerge and interact with socio-cognitive processes to scaffold increasingly complex social behaviour from infancy to adulthood.

Short biography 

I received my Ph.D. in 2017 from the University of Amsterdam, supervised by Professor Susan Bögels. My doctoral research examined the role of self-conscious emotions and social cognition in the development of childhood social anxiety. 

During my post-doctoral training, I worked with Dr Disa Sauter, Dr Christian Keysers, and Dr Valeria Gazzola supported by the Amsterdam Brain and Cognition Talent grant as well as with Dr Mariska Kret at the Comparative Psychology and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Leiden University, extending my research to emotion processing and affective synchrony.

Since 2021, I have been appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Developmental Psychopathology group at the Research Institute of Child Development and Education at the University of Amsterdam, where I continue to examine emotion and cognition in social contexts across human development, supported by grants from the Dutch Research Council (Veni, Open Competition, Replication) and the European Research Council. I am currently Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project EMODEV, which focuses on the emergence of distinct emotions in early development.

PhD candidates' supervision:

Dr Iliana Samara (co-promoter): How do we form romantic bonds? Investigating the effect of attraction on social cognition

Dr Julia Folz (co-promoter): Resonating Emotions: An Embodied Perspective on Alterations in Facial Emotion Processing in Autism and Social Anxiety

Dr Chris Riddell (co-promoter): Emotions in the Social World: Recognition, Expression, and Alignment across the Lifespan

Ruya Akdag (co-promoter): Investigating and targeting affective and cognitive disturbances in social anxiety in adolescence

Academic service

I am a PhD Development and Education Coordinator and a member of the Diversity and Inclusion workgroup at the Research Institute of Child Development and Education. I co-manage the faculty Research Priority Area on Real Emotion with Disa Sauter. I also serve on the Board of the International Society for Research on Emotion.