DANIEL LAKENS
Researcher-in-training
Biography:
I studied Social Psychology at Leiden University from
1998 to 2002, and philosophy at Erasmus University from 1999 to
2001. After receiving my Master's Degree in Social Psychology, I
worked with the elderly for a year before heading into science.
I was then employed as a research assistant for Wilco van Dijk
and subsequently as a Ph. D. student for Gün Semin. I have taught an Authorware™course for research master students on how to create
experiments in Authorware™for
beginners. This manual can be accessed from the Resources
page of
this site. I worked at VU University Amsterdam from 2004
until 2007, before moving to Utrecht University at the beginning of
2008. I will be defending my Ph. D. thesis at the end of
2009.
Research
Interests:
Two research lines capture my main interest:
The first deals with rhythmic behavior and aims to
investigate when people create shared behavior rhythms and what the
consequences are when people synchronize their movements. People
have a tendency to perform movements in a shared rhythm, for
example when an audience starts to clap their hands together at the
same moment in time while applauding after a performance. Three
questions in particular regarding this behavior capture my
interest:
1)
Synchronizing movement rhythms as an automatic tendency (yes, under
cognitive load, people instructed to maintain their own rhythm
while observing another rhythm are not able to do so). 2) The
affective consequences of synchronizing behavior rhythms for those
involved (yes, people feel closer, more social and think the
interaction went more smoothly) and 3) Perceiving synchronized
individuals as entative or containing social unity (yes, and
more so if the people created this rhythm themselves, compared to
following an external rhythm).
My second
main line focuses on the relationship between positive and negative
valence, and black and white colors. This research focuses on
questions like 1) Do people use colors to represent abstract
concepts like valence (yes, people are more likely to translate
negative words with black Chinese ideograms than with white Chinese
ideograms) and 2) are black and white seen as positive and negative
independent of any context (partly: black is always negative, but
white is only positive if seen in relation to the color
black).
Send
Email
Vita: (pdf)
Publications:
Lakens, D.
Semin, G. R. & Foroni, F. (under review). But for the bad,
there would not be good. Conceptual opposition vs. Mere
Association: Metaphoric Grounding of Valence.
Jostmann,
N. B., Lakens, D., & Schubert, T. W. (in press). Weight as
an embodiment of importance. Psychological Science.
(pdf)
Lakens, D. (2003). Numerieke priming bij gelijke semantiek;
Wong en Kwong in de herkansing. In E. Van Dijk, E. Kluwer, & D.
Wigboldus (Eds.), Jaarboek Sociale Psychologie. (pp.
197-208). Delft: Eburon.
Lakens, D., & Semin, G. R. (2006) Het ontstaan van
een sociale eenheid: affectieve gevolgen van wederzijdse
aanpassing. In R. Ruiter et al., (Eds.), Jaarboek Sociale
Psychologie. 2006.
|
