Carlijn van den Boomen is Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Science)

The education of Carlijn focuses on interdisciplinary education: Carlijn developed and currently coordinates an interdisciplinary course and minor on behalf of Dynamics of Youth. At the department of Psychology, Carlijn is teaching coordinator at Experimental Psychology and she provides amongst others skills training in conducting research using physiological measurements such as EEG.

The research of Carlijn focuses on development of emotional face processing. Emotions in faces guide social interactions: how differently do we respond to someone looking angry or happy, even when we do not know this person. People differ in their abilities to recognize emotions, and can show severe deficits such as some persons with Autism. In her research, she aims to unravel the various influences on the development of facial emotion recognition. The influences Carlijn studies range from very basic visual perception, such as sensitivity to details, to experience with faces through parents or active training. She investigates this in children from infancy to adulthood, both in typical development and in Autism. For her studies she uses various techniques to record brain activity and behavioural responses. Disentangling the wide range of factors that affect emotion recognition, and understanding the mechanisms via which this visual skill affects the development of social interaction aids the development of therapies for persons with Autism.

Between 2020 and 2026, Carlijn has been Cluster Chair at University College Utrecht. In this role, she was responsible for the management and development of staff members in her cluster, in the fields of Psychology, Biology, Medicine and Cognitive Neuroscience. In addition, she was responsible for the development and innovation of the curriculum within and across her cluster, and in liaison with the UU faculties.