Research interests

My research seeks to explain how emotions and social cognition organise social life across development. I investigate 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 social functioning.

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 of different complexity to probe social understanding. 

My research spans infancy, early and late childhood, adolescence, and adulthood,  encompassing typical and atypical development. I investigate developmental pathways that lead to resilient social functioning as well as those that increase vulnerability for social difficulties, including social anxiety disorder and autism. 

Methodologically, I design 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 and neurophysiological measures with questionnaires and tests to capture emotions and social cognition.  

Through this integrative, multi-method approach, 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 behaviours across the lifespan.

Short biography 

I received my Ph.D. in 2017 from the University of Amsterdam under the supervision of Professor Susan Bögels. My doctoral research examined whether heightened self-conscious emotions and disturbances in social cognition contribute to the development of children's social anxiety disorder symptoms. This work laid the foundation for my broader research program on the role of emotions and social cognition in typical social development and social functioning difficulties.

During my post-doctoral training, I collaborated 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 expanding my work to include emotion perception and emotional mimicry.

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 the 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.