My overarching research interest is the interplay between the mind and the body. I am specifically interested in how concepts and bodily states interact to produce the experience of emotion in the individual, but I am also interested in how this interaction relates to the understanding of emotion in other people.  

How the brain constructs emotion

In one line of work, I investigate how the brain constructs emotions and other mental states. In several research projects I examine how neural systems that support conceptualization and the representation and generation of bodily states, engage during a great variety of subjective experiences, including discrete emotions (e.g., fear, disgust, morbid fascination), thoughts and perceptions. Furthermore, I am examining how emotional associations arise and how they are represented in the brain.

Morbid curiosity

Recently, I received a VENI grant to start investigating morbid curiosity. Although we know from real life that people regularly approach and explore highly intense negative stimuli, we know very little about this phenomenon from the perspective of psychological science. In this research project, I will study when people experience morbid curiosity and how this experience is represented in the brain and body.    

The embodiment of emotion concepts

During my PhD project I examined the link between conceptual representations of emotion and bodily states. Based on embodied cognition theories I hypothesized that bodily mechanisms involved in emotional experience are also partially active when people read, think and talk about emotions. Several behavioral and physiological experiments supported this hypothesis. For example, I demonstrated that spontaneous changes in body posture occur when people think about disappointment. Currently, I am using neuroimaging methods to investigating the simulation of internal and external states when people understand emotions and other mental states in language. 

Biography 

In March 2011 I received my PhD from the University of Amsterdam. Following my PhD period, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett at the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory (Northeastern University) in Boston. I received my neuroimaging training at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in Boston. Currently, I am working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Amsterdam.  

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