Author Archives: anoukkeizer

Betweter festival 2022

In October the project KNOOP, which promotes playfullness in academia, was presented for the first time during the Betweter festival. My Utrecht Young Academy colleagues and myself initiated this project and we collaborated with three great artists who translated our science to an interactive art experience.

paper on touch during COVID19

At the start of the COVID19 pandemic I initiated with a few colleagues and students a survey to investigate the effects of social distancing regulations on touch deprivation and touch perception.

The findings of this study are now published in Scientific Reports, the paper is open access available here.

new paper on intolerance of uncertainty and anorexia

This week Jojanneke Bijsterbosch published the first paper of her PhD project on the association between intolerance of uncertainty, worry and weight and shape concerns in eating disorder patients. She specifically focused on adolescent girls with anorexia, which makes this paper a unique contribution to the literature, which is mainly on adult anorexia patients.

NPO radio1 impression of live experiment

In the beginning of October we conducted a live experiment called “gewenste intimiteiten” at Betweter festival in Utrecht to investigate how people experience touch after a long period of relatively strict social distancing regulations. We teamed up with Circus Andersom who joined the festival with their “please touch” experience.

Mirthe van der Drift participated in our experiment and interviewed me about social touch for Focus on NPO radio1. You can listen to it here.

new paper on affective touch in psychiatry

We were invited to contribute a piece to the special issue on social and affective touch in Current Opinion In Behavioural Sciences.

Our paper in this special issue is now published and discusses whether trandiagnostic factors influence affective touch perception in psychiatric patients.

Read our paper here or browse through the entire special issue (much recommended!) here.

new paper out on anxiety and anorexia

Our paper on the link between anxiety and assessment of body attitudes and body size estimation in anorexia nervosa patients has just been published in Journal of Experimental Psychopathology. We show that in AN patients state anxiety levels increase after completing different body size estimation tasks, implying that altered performance on body size estimation taks in anorexia might not only imply misperception of body size but also reflect increased state anxiety.

Read the paper here