RESEARCH
HIGHLIGHTS
Dr. Katalin E. Balint
I am passionate about narratives, the stories we create, receive and share with others. My research focus is on various aspects of narratives. I study the form and structure of audio-visual narratives, how people engage with stories, as well as the impact of narrative engagement on our well-being and worldview.
I founded the VU StoryLab, which is a collaborative hub for researchers from diverse disciplines who are passionate about understanding how stories work. We provide an interdisciplinary space where scholars explore narratives across various mediated formats, fostering connections between the social sciences, psychological approaches, and the humanities.
Katalin and her VU StoryLab are currently supported through the lab’s research champion programme.

Dr. Mariken van der Velden
My research interest comprise the areas of political communication, political behavior, and computational social science. I am motivated by key societal challenges that face democracies today, such as the crisis of representative democracy and increasing political fragmentation. Specifically, I apply advanced computational approaches to study the communication and rhetoric of politicians, and how this affects political decision making and its electoral consequences in multi-party systems.
Dr. Philipp K. Masur
My research focuses on different aspects of digital communication and the impact of social media on our daily lives. It is characterized by interdisciplinary perspectives and a variety of methodological approaches, including survey, experimental, and computational methods. More specifically, I study social influence and persuasion processes on social media, privacy and self-disclosure in networked publics, media and digital literacy, and social media use effects on individual well-being. In my current work, I investigate behavioral contagion and social norm processes on social media.
Prof. Dr. Wouter van Atteveldt
My main research agenda is developing and applying the computational methods and tools needed to study media effects in a fragmented digital media landscape. As people consume news from an increasing number of traditional and social media sources, the field urgently needs to develop better ways to measure news consumption in order to study the effects of each person’s individual media diet. My research directly contributes to this development by furthering our pioneering work on data donation, where (fully informed and consenting) respondents donate a cleaned and minimized version of their social, mobile and digital news browsing history.
Prof. Dr. Elly Konijn
My research program focuses on three main lines:
- How people relate to media figures, virtual humans, and social robots.
- Emotions and media-based reality perceptions (e.g., social reality perceptions shaped through media use, including moral standards).
- Media use among adolescents (e.g., cyberbullying, violent video game effects, thin-body ideal, self-presentation).
My research on how people become attached to a robot is also featured in the documentary that shows part of “Ik ben Alice“.