Social Anxiety and School Refusal in Adolescence

PIs

Prof. Michiel Westenberg

Prof. Michiel Westenberg is the head of the laboratory. He has a long lasting interest in adolescent development and, more specifically, social anxiety in adolescence. Starting from a clinical-developmental perspective, he investigated social anxiety development from a normative as well as clinical perspective. This led to the longitudinal program social anxiety in normal development in which questionnaire research was combined with lab experiment and psychophysiological recordings: the Social Anxiety and Normal Development study (SAND). In his current program, he combines these perspectives in a unique new program, focusing on the role of genes and environment in the development of social anxiety in the broadest sense. 

Dr. David Heyne

Dr. David Heyne is associate professor and he specializes in the relation between social anxiety and school refusal. When coming to Leiden, he brought his clinical and treatment experience from Australia and set up a new treatment program for school refusal in Leiden. Currently, he is interested in the development and evaluation of interventions for young people who find it hard to attend school as a result of anxiety and depression (i.e., school refusal), including intervention with the parents of these young people, and with school staff.

 Dr. Anke Blöte

Dr. Anke Blöte is assistant professor and has an interest in both laboratory based research and field observations of social anxiety. By investigating the perspectives of others on youth with social anxiety, she provides a broader context to understanding this prevalent vulnerability in adolescence. Her recent studies focus on the social skills of socially anxious adolescents and how these are evaluated by adult observers, same-aged peers and the socially anxious adolescents themselves. The different perspectives are needed in order to determine whether socially anxious adolescents’ negative self evaluations of social performance are warranted.

Dr. Caroline Bokhorst

Dr. Caroline Bokhorst is assistant professor and has a strong interest in the interplay between genes and environment to understand social anxiety. For her PhD research she conducted a behavioral genetic twin study to estimate the relative influence of genetic and environmental factors on attachment relationships in infants, after which she developed an interest in social anxiety research in adolescents. Now, she is one of the first to combine these two research lines by studying the development of social anxiety using a family design. By testing three generations, she will be able to test effects of genes and environment on the emergence of social anxiety in families.

Dr. Esther van den Bos

Dr. Esther van den Bos is an assistant professor in the SAND team. Her current research focuses on physical and behavioral responses to social-evaluative situations (e.g. public speaking). She is interested in the normal development of behavioral, physiological and neuroendocrine responses to such situations in adolescence and specifically in their relation with puberty and socio-cognitive development. In addition, she investigates how the pattern of development may be different in adolescents with high levels of social anxiety or public speaking anxiety.

Dr. Anne Miers

Dr. Anne Miers is an assistant professor in the SAND team. She completed her PhD on cognitive aspects of social anxiety, drawing from a clinical perspective. Subsequently, she longitudinally investigated the development of social anxiety over the adolescent period, and different predictors of high social anxiety levels over time. Anne is currently interested in the structure of psychopathology, particularly using network analysis, and in discovering new ways to ameliorate social anxiety and the role the peer group plays in this process.

Dr. Melle van der Molen

Dr. Melle J.W. van der Molen is an assistant professor in clinical neurodevelopmental psychology at the Developmental Psychology Unit. His main research interests lie in discovering the fundamental psychophysiological processes that enable attention and cognition. To this end, he investigates both healthy individuals as well as those with psychopathology (e.g., anxiety disorders) or neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., fragile X syndrome). For more information, please visit his personal website.

PhD Students

Semiha Aydin, MSc

Semiha Aydin studied Clinical Psychology and Health Psychology at Leiden University. During her clinical and research internship she focused on the treatment of anxiety disorders. After obtaining her master's degree, she worked in the clinical field and as a teaching assistant at the Institute of Psychology. As a PhD candidate she is interested in the timely identification and referral of youth with a social anxiety disorder. To gain insight in the presentation of social anxiety disorder in primary healthcare, she works with routine healthcare data obtained within primary healthcare as well as secondary mental healthcare. Her project is embedded within the research profile area ‘Health, Prevention and the Human Life Cycle’ in which researchers of the department of Public Health and Primary Care of the LUMC and the Leiden University Faculty of Social Sciences collaborate with clinical institutions in the nearby area.

Janna Marie Bas - Hoogendam, MSc

Janna Marie Bas - Hoogendam (MSc) has studied Medicine and Neuroscience, with a special interest to investigate the human brain using neuroimaging. She joined the Leiden Family Lab Study on Social Anxiety in March 2013 as a PhD student. Her PhD project, supervised by professor Michiel Westenberg and dr. Nic van der Wee, aims to profile endophenotypes of Social Anxiety Disorder using structural and functional MRI.

Jiemiao Chen, MSc

Jiemiao Chen obtained her master’s degree in Education from East China Normal University in July 2017. She was awarded a scholarship by the China Scholarship Counsil and started her PhD research at Leiden University in October 2017. Her PhD project, supervised by Prof. dr. P. Michiel Westenberg and Dr. Esther van den Bos, focuses on eye gaze behavior in socially anxious adolescents by using wearable eye-trackers.

 Sara Jakobsson Mansson, MSc

Sara Jakobsson Mansson obtained her master’s degree in Child and Adolescent Psychology from Leiden University August 2016, where she completed a clinical internship and wrote her thesis on a pilot study on the effects of social anxiety on eye gaze behaviour. Following graduation, she worked as a child psychologist at a private practice in The Hague, specialized in supporting expatriate families. In June 2017, she started her PhD to research interventions for children and adolescents with social anxiety supervised by professor Michiel Westenberg, dr. Esther van den Bos, and dr. Anne C. Miers.

Simone Vogelaar, MSc

Simone did both the master Child and Adolescent Psychology and the Research Master, track Developmental Psychology, and obtained her master’s degree in December 2017. Simone wrote her master's thesis about using dynamic testing to assess the influence of strategy use on performance in children. In April 2018 Simone started her PhD project, in which she investigates the effects of educating adolescents at schools about stress, supervised by Prof. Dr. P. Michiel Westenberg, Dr. Nadira Saab, and Dr. Anne C. Miers.

Research assistants

Elise Kortink is a research master student in the Developmental Psychology track. She combines the research master with the clinically oriented master Child & Adolescent Psychology. Her Honours Research Bachelor Project was supervised by Melle van der Molen and focused on examining the low frequency neural oscillatory dynamics underlying emotion regulation by cognitive reappraisal. As a research assistant, Elise will carry on this research and investigate gender differences in emotion regulation by cognitive reappraisal.