Research project

Focus on Emotions research group

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

Contact: Carolien Rieffe
Funding: The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)

The Focus on Emotions research group is located at the Institute of Psychology of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Leiden University; and the Unit Human Media Interaction, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science, University of Twente.

Our group is dedicated on studying emotional intelligence and social connectedness, addressing the (social) environment, thereby using new tech developments. Besides typically developing children and adolescents, we take into account the perspectives of the more vulnerable children, i.e. autistic youth, with hearing impairments, or with specific language impairments. To this end, we always aim to work in co-design, but our team also consists of researchers who identify – for example – as deaf or autistic.

We work multi-disciplinary, in close collaboration with Otorhinolaryngology (ENT department of the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC), Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Curium-LUMC, UCL London UK), Computer Science (Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) and University of Twente), Governance (Campus Den Haag), Architecture (Delft University), Sociology (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam), and Human Kinetics (Sport and Health, University of Evora, Portugal) (see www.focusonemotions.nl for a full list). Stakeholders organizations that are closely involved are NVA (Nederlandse Vereniging Autisme), INTER-PSY, and FANN (Female Autism Network Netherlands).

In our projects, we apply a multi-informant (child, care-giver, peer, teacher), multi-method (self-, parent-, teacher-reports; behavioral tests; observation tasks; eye-tracking studies; radio-frequency-identification-devices) approach.

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