Research interests
My research focuses on the resonance of the social environment, and particularly others’ emotions, in humans. In interactions with others, a mutual understanding is more easily achieved if we “tune in” to each other. One of my interests is to investigate to what extent an attunement in bodily states contributes to understanding others and feeling connected, as well as to identify influences on (social) behavior. In a developmental context, attunement between caregiver and infant can act as a regulatory mechanism, to balance extremely high or low activation levels in the infant. Here, I’m interested in studying the role of mother-infant attunement in the emerging abilities of infants to regulate themselves, including their emotions. By combining and integrating multiple measures in my studies (e.g., behavior, brain activity, physiology, subjective experience), I aim to capture the beautiful complexity and dynamic nature of social interactions.
Biography
I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at Heidelberg University in 2016 and my Master’s degree in Neuro-cognitive Psychology at LMU Munich in 2018. Afterwards, I joined the Comparative Psychology and Affective Neuroscience (CoPAN) lab led by Prof. Mariska Kret at Leiden University for a PhD in Cognitive Psychology. In my PhD research, I examined the bodily resonance of (facial) emotional expressions in observers and its link to emotion perception and social behaviour. I specifically focused on alterations in the embodiment of others’ emotions associated with autism and social anxiety, as potential mechanism of social interaction difficulties. In 2024, I started my position as Postdoc in the Developmental Psychopathology group at the University of Amsterdam, supported by the Research Priority Area “Real Emotions”.
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