Hello.

I am a Phd Candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

In my research, I am intrigued about what our language use reveal about ourselves. I am currently focused on an emotion regulation disorder, namely alexithymia, and the related emotional language processing. My academic interests also include, but not limited to, figurative language and embodied cognition.

I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Sociology at Koc University , Istanbul. Then I moved to Netherlands to obtain a Research Master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience with a specialization in Language and Communication at Radboud University Nijmegen . In Summer 2016, I visited Pennebaker Language Lab at University of Texas at Austin to learn more about language analysis. I am currently working at the Amsterdam Emotion Regulation Lab .

About

Here, I am providing a summary of my interests and skills. You can find more detailed information in my CV .

  • Research

    I conduct behavioral experiments supplemented by neurobiological (e.g. fMRI) and linguistic methods (e.g. Natural Language Processing).

  • Supervision/Teaching

    I enjoy teaching, as well as supervising students on their thesis projects.

  • Coding

    I have a keen interest in coding. I am actively using R for statistical computing and graphics. I also like to explore other languages such as Python and HTML/CSS.

  • Society Memberships

    I am currently in the board of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature . Before that, I was involved in European Federation of Psychology Students' Associations during my student years.

Research

You can find the record of my scientific publications and presentations listed below.

Publications

Samur, D., Tops, M., & Koole, S. L. (2017). Does a single session of reading literary fiction prime enhanced mentalising performance? Four replication experiments of Kidd and Castano (2013). Cognition and Emotion, 1-15. [Link]

Samur, D., Lai, V. T., Hagoort. P. & Willems, R. (2015). Emotional Context Modulates Embodied Metaphor Comprehension. Neuropsychologia, 78, 108-114. [Link]

Samur, D., Tops, M., Schlinkert, C., Quirin, M., Cuijpers, P., & Koole, S. L. (2013). Four Decades of Alexithymia Research: Moving Towards Clinical Applications. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 861. [Link]

Tops, M., Schlinkert, C., Tjew-A-Sin, M., Samur, D., & Koole, S. L. (2015). Protective Inhibition of Self- Regulation and Motivation: Extending a Classic Pavlovian Principle to Social and Personality Functioning. In Handbook of Biobehavioral Approaches to Self-Regulation (pp. 69-85). Springer New York. [Link]

Presentations

Samur, D., Luminet, O. & Koole, S. (2016, July) Alexithymia predicts frequency and enjoyment of reading. Paper presented at CERE Emotion Conference, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Samur, D., Tops, M. & Koole, S. (2015, October) Talking about Emotions: Alexithymia predicts deliberate metaphor production in describing emotional events. Paper presented at Emotions Conference, Tilburg, The Netherlands.

Samur, D. (2015, April). The Challenge of Putting Feelings into Words. Workshop held at the 29th European Federation of Psychology Students Association, Srni, Czech Republic.

Samur, D. (2014, November) From Reading to Feeling: A Psycholinguistic Approach to Alexithymia. Invited Talk in Universite Catholique de Louvain, Louvain, Belgium.

Samur, D., Lai, V. T., Hagoort. P. & Willems, R. (2014, August) Emotional context modulates embodied metaphor comprehension: An fMRI study. Poster presented at the Society of Neurobiology of Language Annual Meeting, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Koole, S., Samur, D. and Tops, M. (2014, July) Effects of Reading Literary Fiction among Individuals Varying in Alexithymia: The Moderating Role of Narrative Engagement. Paper presented at 14th Conference of Conference of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL), Turin, Italy.

Samur, D., Lai, V. T., Hagoort, P. and Willems, R. (2013, April) The Role of Emotionality in Metaphor Comprehension. Paper presented at the Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM), Poznan, Poland.

Contact Me

You can contact me at d.samur(a)vu.nl, and you can find me at,