Annemijn Loermans
Annemijn Loermans completed her bachelor in liberal arts and sciences (summa cum laude) at the University College Roosevelt and her research master in Behavioral Science (cum laude) at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. There she became fascinated with experimentation in social psychology, embodiment and cognitive linguistics. She is currently combining these interests in pursuing her PhD at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam under the supervision of Lydia Krabbendam and Bjorn de Koning. Within her PhD she is investigating if and how cultural constructs, such as agency and self-construal, underlie cultural variation in the spatialization of time. She is also looking at the spatialization of the future self and exploring how a mismatch in spatializations of time affects cognition and behavior. When not thinking about whether time approaches us or whether we approach time Annemijn likes to travel, cook, and wrap gifts.
Van Vu
Human relationships are dependent on the extent to which we can detect and understand other people’s thoughts and emotions as this ability called theory-of-mind (ToM) enables empathy, compassion, and cooperation. I am interested in how we can improve ToM or make use of it more efficiently (i.e., more accurate and faster inferences of people's thoughts and emotions). In one part of my research, I test the hypothesis that collectivism, which entails other-oriented cognition and goals, would be associated with more efficient ToM than individualism, which entails self-oriented cognition and goals. Apart from comparing participants who have different cultural backgrounds, I also prime participants with collectivism and individualism and measure their internalized cultural orientations before assessing their ToM performance. In another part of my research, I test if collectivism, compared to individualism, is associated with heightened vigilance for emotions that are potentially disruptive to relationships such as anger. Finally, I also study if people use different emotional strategies in responding to positive and negative stimuli when they are faced with cultural dissimilarity, compared to cultural similarity.