All Episodes

#868 James Cresswell: Theories in Psychology

Dec 1, 2023

Dr. James Cresswell is Professor of Psychology at Ambrose University, Adjunct Professor at the University of Calgary, Research Associate at the Canadian Poverty Institute, and Research Associate at the Newcomer Research Network. Dr. Cresswell has a deep commitment to education and to enhancing the student experience. His courses cover topics such as culture, immigration, and identities in an increasingly globalized world, as well as social psychology and interpersonal communication. Other teaching areas are child psychology and human development. His research interests draw on many sources, ranging from cultural psychology to cognitive science and literary theory. More»
#867 Jeroen Hopster, Julia Hermann & Ibo van de Poel: Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies

Nov 30, 2023

Dr. Jeroen Hopster is an Assistant Professor of ethics at Utrecht University. His research centers on climate ethics and on investigating the nature of socially disruptive technologies. More»
#866 Vibeke Ottesen: The Evolution of Human Violence, Juvenile Crime, and Abortion

Nov 27, 2023

Dr. Vibeke Ottesen is a Norwegian criminologist with an interest in how nature and nurture combined create human behavior. She has a popular science blog – Biosocial - where she comments on news, scientific findings and literature relevant to her subject – more often than not with an evolutionary-informed approach to understanding the subject matter. She has held numerous lectures on the benefits of an evolutionary-informed approach to understanding the cross-cultural sex and age differences in anti-social and criminal behavior. More»
#864 Colin DeYoung: Personality and Psychopathology

Nov 23, 2023

Dr. Colin DeYoung is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. In his research in personality psychology, he has examined the theoretical structure of personality and the biological basis of personality. More»
#863 Diane O'Leary: Philosophy, Medicine, Mind-Body Dualism, and Psychiatry

Nov 20, 2023

Dr. Diane O’Leary is a Public Voices Fellow for Advancing the Rights of Women and Girls with Equality Now and the op-ed project. She has a PhD in philosophy from University of Sydney, and an MA in philosophy from Syracuse University. In both cases her focus was metaphysics, though for the PhD she gave her attention to Plato, and the application of his metaphysical views to his choices as writer. In her work she focuses on philosophy of mind, clinical medicine, and gender equity. More»
#862 Lisa Bortolotti: Why Delusions Matter

Nov 17, 2023

Dr. Lisa Bortolotti is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, affiliated with the Philosophy Department in the School of Philosophy, Theology, and Religion; and with the Institute for Mental Health in the School of Psychology. Her research is in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences. She is the author of The Epistemic Innocence of Irrational Beliefs, and more recently, Why Delusions Matter. More»
#861 Léo Fitouchi: Moral Emotions, Punishment, and Puritanical Morality

Nov 16, 2023

Léo Fitouchi is a PhD candidate in evolutionary and cognitive social sciences at École Normale Supérieure in Paris (Department of Cognitive Science). He is part of the Evolution and Social Cognition team of the Institut Jean-Nicod. He is mostly interested in understanding how human social behavior and cultural traditions are shaped by evolved cognitive mechanisms and cultural evolutionary processes –– with a particular focus on moral intuitions, supernatural beliefs, and social norms and institutions. More»
#860 Carrie Mongle: Hominin Phylogeny, and Micro and Macroevolution

Nov 13, 2023

Dr. Carrie Mongle is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University and the Turkana Basin Institute. She also heads the Mongle Lab. Her research aims to reconstruct the major trends and transitions that characterize hominin diversity and evolution. Her ongoing work towards that goal involves (1) the discovery and description of new hominin fossils from the Turkana Basin in Kenya; (2) quantification of morphological variation; and (3) comprehensive phylogenetic analyses founded on the careful character assessment of both craniodental and postcranial characters. In addition, Dr. Mongle is interested in evaluating the relationship between variation, evolvability, and macroevolution in the primate dentition. More»
#859 Anna Riedl: Historical Map of the Cognitive Sciences, and the Great Rationality Debate

Nov 10, 2023

Anna Riedl is a cognitive scientist, specialized in rational decision-making. She is an active public speaker and science communicator. She was a researcher at the Viennese Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support. Anna is also a member of the Global Shapers Community organized by the World Economic Forum and served as curator for the Vienna Hub. More»
#858 Jessica Nowicki: The Evolution of Prosocial Behavior, Pair Bonding, and Empathy

Nov 9, 2023

Dr. Jessica Nowicki is a Research Scientist at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. She is interested in the mechanistic basis of prosocial behavior in early vertebrates. She uses poison frogs, which display considerable variation in sociality among closely related species, for comparatively identifying neural correlates of pair bonding within the clade. In order to verify the functional involvement of these correlates, she then couples this with functional tests on the strongly pair bonding species, Ranitomeya imitator. More»