Rate My Professor Jozefien De Leersnyder

Jozefien De Leersnyder is an Associate Professor (BOFZAP) and Research Professor at the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology within the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at KU Leuven, Belgium. She obtained her PhD from KU Leuven in 2014 on Emotional Acculturation. Prior to her current role, she held a tenured position as Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam and served as an FWO postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven. Her research investigates the interplay between culture, psyche, and well-being in diverse social environments. She has advanced the understanding of emotional acculturation, describing changes in individuals' emotional patterns arising from contact with new socio-cultural contexts, and the micro-processes that promote emotional similarity and mutual understanding in intercultural exchanges. Under her ERC Starting Grant project PsychAcc, she is developing and testing a cultural psychological framework of acculturation that includes shifts in implicit cultural affiliations such as emotion, cognition, self-construal, and motivation, linking these to well-being and educational outcomes. Complementing this, she explores inclusive education through initiatives like ECDIS on ethnic cultural diversity in schools, the SBO project ENGINE addressing ethnic gaps in higher education, and JEZ-to-Emotions on emotion socialization in multicultural classrooms.

De Leersnyder has garnered major awards, including the 2024 Young Investigator Award in Basic Science from the International Union of Psychological Science, the 2025 Research Award from the European First Year Experience association, the 2022 Early Career Award from the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences, and the 2021 APS Rising Star recognition. Her scholarship appears in premier social psychology journals and handbooks like the Handbook of Emotion and Handbook of Cultural Psychology; she is editing a Cambridge University Press book on the Cultural Shaping of Emotion (in press). She frequently keynotes at international conferences such as ICP 2024 and IACCP 2020+, co-organizes the annual SPSP Advances in Cultural Psychology preconference, sits on the APS global engagement committee, and was co-President of the Young Academy of Belgium from 2021 to 2023. At KU Leuven, she teaches first-year qualitative methods and a master's course on cultural diversity in care settings.