Who gets caught by the emotion?

Have you ever stepped in front of an audience and immediately spotted this person who didn’t seem happy with your talk? Or are you someone who is drawn to an encouraging face? What is it that makes people more likely to attend to different emotional expressions?

Julia Folz • May 01, 2023

How can other species’ emotions influence us?

Have you ever looked at your pet and detected excitement, sadness, or guilt? Such interactions indicate not only your pet expressing an emotion, but also you reacting to it. This ability is crucial for a social animal’s survival, but can it work between species?

Anna Matsulevits • October 31, 2022

Stroking, gently.

Whenever I'm at a petting farm (kinderboerderij), I try to get attention of the grazing cows. Sometimes – on my gentle call – they come to me as if they understand my good intentions. Can cows, in fact, perceive interactions with humans as something positive?

Maria Lojowska • September 19, 2022

Fighting climate change with kindness

We should eat less meat to reduce climate change. Recognition of similarities between us and other animals can help us to achieve just that. More effortlessly – out of kindness.

Maria Lojowska • June 13, 2022

Stress? It's safety, silly!

A new view of stress as a default response throws current theory upside down. Not something present (a stressor) triggers a stress response, but something missing (information on safety) unleashes it, keeping it disinhibited as long as safety is missing or unclear.

Jos Brosschot • April 25, 2022

Stress science is looking in the wrong place with the wrong theory

Stress responses, typically popularized as outdated reactions to stressors such as cave bears, are far too brief and infrequent to make us sick. Yet, science still focuses on these responses, failing to explain the chronic high stress levels that can influence health and cause disease.

Jos Brosschot • April 14, 2022

Why zebras don’t get ulcers, but cows do: the physiological effects of psychological stressors in calves

The stress response system is highly adaptive, and has kept humans, zebras, and calves alive through history. But today it leaves humans in distress, whereas zebras are fine. And calves suffer stress as humans do… but for a different reason: humans themselves.

Remond Wulff • March 25, 2022

Can video calls with friends replace real social encounters?

Meeting a friend in Covid-19 times has little to do with an intimate chat in a bar. Instead, video calls have become the new medium to share our innermost feelings. But can these moments of online face-to-face communication replace the ‘real’ offline experience?

Julia Folz • February 26, 2021

Coping with negative emotions requires more than positive rephrasing

Describing a situation that elicits negative emotions in more positive terms may provide a new perspective and thus attenuate the negative feelings. However, it is not necessarily the feelings that change with positive rephrasing.

Esther van den Bos • May 09, 2020

leidenpsychologyblog

emotions

Blogs