psychology

#233 Randolph Nesse: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

Sep 23, 2019

Dr. Randolph Nesse is Foundation Professor of Life Sciences and Founding Director in The Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, and Founding President of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health. He was the initial organizer and second president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and is currently the president of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine & Public Health. He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Sciences, and an elected Fellow of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). He’s also the author of several books, including Why We Get Sick (coauthored with George C. Williams) and, more recently, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings (2019). More»
#232 Glenn Geher: Positive Evolutionary Psychology, Darwin's Guide to Living a Richer Life

Sep 20, 2019

Dr. Glenn Geher is Professor of Psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz where he has been awarded SUNY Chancellor Awards for Excellence for both Teaching and Research. In addition to teaching various courses and directing the New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab, Dr. Geher serves as founding director of the campus’ Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program. He is also credited as the founder of the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society (NEEPS). He has also published several books including Evolutionary Psychology 101, Mating Intelligence Unleashed: The Role of the Mind in Sex, Dating, and Love, and Straightforward Statistics. In Darwin's Subterranean World: Evolution, Mind, and Mating Intelligence, his Psychology Today blog, Dr. Geher addresses various topics related to the human condition. He has recently released a new book, Positive Evolutionary Psychology: Darwin's Guide to Living a Richer Life. More»
#231 Carlton Patrick: From Disgust To Legal Systems

Sep 19, 2019

Dr. Carlton Patrick is Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at the College of Community, Innovation and Education at the University of Central Florida. Dr. Patrick studies the psychology of legal decision-making, often from an evolutionary perspective. His research combines doctrinal legal analysis with the methodologies and perspectives of the behavioral sciences to examine the roots of human behavior in legally-relevant contexts. He is the coauthor, together with Debra Lieberman, of the book Objection: Disgust, Morality, and the Law. More»
#229 Steven Hayes: A Liberated Mind; Relational Frame Theory, And Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Sep 13, 2019

Dr. Steven C. Hayes is Nevada Foundation Professor in the Behavior Analysis program at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada. An author of 44 books and nearly 600 scientific articles, his career has focused on an analysis of the nature of human language and cognition and the application of this to the understanding and alleviation of human suffering. He is the developer of Relational Frame Theory, an account of human higher cognition, and has guided its extension to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a popular evidence-based form of psychotherapy that uses mindfulness, acceptance, and values-based methods. His most recent books include Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science, and A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters. More»
#227 Miguel Farias: Mindfulness, Religion, And Scientific Faith

Sep 9, 2019

Dr. Miguel Farias is an Associate Professor at Coventry University, UK. His work explores the psychological impact of beliefs and spiritual practices, including meditation and pilgrimage. He is also interested in the biological roots of our beliefs and how we can change them. He’s the author of The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You?. More»
#225 Daniel Sznycer: The Evolutionary Psychology of Emotions

Sep 5, 2019

Dr. Daniel Sznycer is Assistant Professor in Department of Psychology at the University of Montreal, Canada. He is an evolutionary social psychologist conducting research on emotion and cooperation. He has multiple lines of cross-cultural evidence on shame, pride, compassion, and envy, and their roles in altruism, cooperation, social exclusion, and conflict. He’s also working to map the system that regulates how much weight one individual places on the welfare of another. He conducts research on how these emotions and motivations regulate political and moral attitudes, and how they shape communication. The methods Dr. Sznycer uses include experimental economic games, decision-making tasks, priming methods, cross-cultural and ethnographic data collection, large-scale representative surveys, and anthropometry. More»
#224 Michele Gelfand: Rule Makers, Rule Breakers; Tight And Loose Cultures

Sep 2, 2019

Dr. Michele Gelfand is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. She uses field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture--as well as its multilevel consequences for human groups. Her work has been cited over 20,000 times and has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Voice of America, Fox News, NBC News, ABC News, The Economist, among other outlets. She is the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World (Scribner, 2018). More»
#223 Pascal Boyer: Minds Make Societies, Religion, and Conspiracy Theories

Aug 30, 2019

Dr. Pascal Boyer is the Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He’s also the author of books like Religion Explained; Memory, Mind and Culture; and Minds Make Societies. More»
#221 Peter DeScioli: The Evolution of Morality, Moral Judgment, and Common Knowledge

Aug 26, 2019

Dr. Peter DeScioli is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stony Brook University. His research investigates how the human mind uses principles of strategy to solve problems in the social world. Much of his work has focused on moral condemnation, especially the functions of morally judging other people, moralistic punishment, and moral impartiality. In another line of work, he studies how people form alliances, how they choose their loyalties to others, and how they display and conceal their loyalties. A third project looks at our sense of ownership by using a virtual environment to observe resource disputes in the laboratory. In recent years, he has been designing online games for experiments about politics, including redistribution of wealth, social safety nets, alliance formation, and political negotiation. More»
#220 Cory Clark & Bo Winegard: The Biggest Issues in Psychology

Aug 23, 2019

Dr. Cory Clark is an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at Durham University, UK. Dr. Clark does research in Moral Psychology, Political Psychology, Experimental Philosophy, and Motivated Cognition. More»