Jolien Zevalkink

Jolien Zevalkink is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and has taught at Radboud University Nijmegen. She specializes in developmental psychopathology, attachment disorganization, and clinical interventions. Her research emphasizes the impact of family dynamics on child behavior and the efficacy of psychoanalytic therapies.

Education background includes developmental psychology and social anthropology, with a PhD focusing on attachment patterns in Bandung, Indonesia. She has led projects such as the 'Instapje' intervention study on Surinamese mothers and children, and developed mentalizing-oriented therapies for children, published in Dutch and English.

Teaching roles include coordinating courses on developmental psychopathology, diagnostic practices, and evidence-based interventions at both bachelor’s and master’s levels. She has supervised three PhD theses, including works on psychoanalytic treatment efficacy and psychometric analysis of the BDI-II.

Key contributions include co-authoring Mentaliseren in de kindertherapie, a clinical manual, and publishing on object representation assessment during psychotherapy. She is a certified coder for attachment assessment instruments like the Attachment Story Completion Task.

Her research spans cross-cultural studies (Indonesia, Suriname) and integrates anthropological perspectives with clinical psychology. Current projects focus on emotion regulation in children with dyscalculia and process evaluations in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.