Erick Janssen
Professor of Psychology
Lecturer
Prof. Dr. Erick Janssen is Professor and Director of the Institute for Family and Sexuality Studies (IFSS), Department of Neurosciences at KU Leuven, Belgium. He also serves as Program Director for the Master’s Program in Human Sexuality at KU Leuven, and holds the position of Senior Research Fellow at The Kinsey Institute, Indiana University, USA. He earned his M.A. in 1988 and his Ph.D. in 1995 from Universiteit van Amsterdam (The Netherlands).
Prof. Janssen’s research centers on human sexual psychophysiology, exploring topics such as sexual desire and arousal, sexual inhibition/excitation, risky sexual behavior, hypersexuality, sexual dysfunction, and sexual aggression — often in the context of relationships, sexuality, and health.
Together with Dr. John Bancroft, he developed the influential Dual Control Model of Sexual Response. This model, focusing on individual differences in sexual excitation and inhibition, has guided over 150 empirical studies worldwide involving more than 75,000 participants; findings from these studies link excitation/inhibition propensities to vulnerabilities such as sexual dysfunction or elevated risk-taking, hypersexuality, or sexual aggression.
He leads the psychophysiological laboratory at IFSS, and coordinates international research collaborations across the USA, Canada, UK, Sweden, Portugal, Germany, Croatia, and the Netherlands. His work has been recognized with multiple awards, including two Hugo Beigel Awards (for best publication in the Journal of Sex Research), as well as the SSTAR Award, Reiss Theory Award, and IASR Best Student Manuscript Award (with his students). He is a past-President of the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR), Chair of the Scientific Committee of the World Association for Sexual Health (WAS), and founder of international research networks such as SexLab and EuroSex.
In his academic role, Prof. Janssen teaches several courses: ‘Methods in Sex Research,’ ‘The Psychology of Sex: Empirical Approaches,’ ‘Capita Selecta: Lectures in Human Sexuality,’ and co-teaches ‘Sexuality in Perspective,’ a university-wide introductory course on human sexuality.
He has supervised or co-supervised dozens of PhD dissertations, over 100 master’s theses, post-doctoral fellows, as well as many undergraduate research projects and honors theses, both at KU Leuven and The Kinsey Institute.