Dr. Mariska Kret (PI) works as an associate professor at the Cognitive Psychology Unit of Leiden University, where she directs the CoPAN lab. After MSc degrees in Cognitive Psychology (2006) and in Clinical Psychology (2007) from Leiden University, Kret started her PhD trajectory at Tilburg University where she investigated the perception of emotions (2011). Since then, her research expanded to comparative studies in great apes and patients with mental disorders. She has demonstrated that many of the facets constituting emotion processing are evolutionary ancient, and shared with great apes, our closest living relatives. In her ERC Starting project she investigates the role of emotional expressions in the establishment of trust. In her research she typically combines different methods including fMRI, psychophysiology and behavioural observations. She uses advanced multilevel statistics and windowed cross-correlation techniques to analyse autonomic mimicry patterns during dyadic interactions. Reaching out to the general public and open science practices are of utmost importance to her.
Areas of Expertise
Comparative cognition, evolutionary psychology, emotion perception, mimicry and physiological synchrony, great apes, social anxiety, autism and depression, psychophysiology, multi-level modeling, citizen science.
For my Curriculum Vitae, click here.
Intimate moments with Alpha-female Ai in the lab at
the Kyoto University Primate Research Unit, 2014