psychology

#278 Jerome Kagan: Temperament, Feelings, Emotions, and Personality

Jan 6, 2020

Dr. Jerome Kagan is Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Harvard University. Professor Kagan's research, on the cognitive and emotional development of a child during the first decade of life, focuses on the origins of temperament. He has tracked the development of inhibited and uninhibited children from infancy to adolescence. Dr. Kagan’s research indicates that shyness and other temperamental differences in adults and children have both environmental and genetic influences. A shy adult is more likely to have been high-reactive (fearful) in infancy and childhood than their bold and sociable counterparts, who were most likely low-reactive. He has served on the National Institute of Mental Health and on the National Research Council. His books include Galen’s Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature and Three Seductive Ideas. More»

#275 Marco Del Giudice: Evolutionary Psychopathology, Attachment, And Life History

Dec 30, 2019

Dr. Marco Del Giudice is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of New Mexico. In his work he explores a wide range of topics at the intersection of human behavior, evolution, and development. His approach is interdisciplinary and driven by the quest for theoretical synthesis. Over the years he has developed some broad, integrative models: the Adaptive Calibration Model of individual differences in stress responsivity (with Bruce Ellis and Birdie Shirtcliff); an evolutionary-developmental model of sex differences in attachment styles; and a unifying life history framework for evolutionary psychopathology. Most of his current empirical work is devoted to testing, advancing, and refining these models with a variety of research methods. He’s the author of Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach. More»

#274 Kevin Mitchell - Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are

Dec 27, 2019

Dr. Kevin Mitchell is Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. He is interested in the development of connectivity in the brain, specifically in how this process is controlled by genes and how mutations in such genes affect the connectivity of neuronal circuits, influence behavior and perception and contribute to disease. His research group uses genetic approaches in the mouse to address these questions, and they are also involved in collaborative research looking at the genetics and phenotypic manifestations of synaesthesia and schizophrenia in humans. He’s the author of a book that came out last year, Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are. More»

#273 David Puts: Sexual Dimorphism, Sexual Orientation, And Female Orgasm

Dec 26, 2019

Dr. David Puts is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Puts studies the neuroendocrine and evolutionary bases of human sexuality and sex differences, with special focus on behavior and psychology. His research topics include the influence of sex hormones on psychology, behavior, and anatomy; hormonal and genetic influences on sexual differentiation; sexual selection and the evolution of sex differences in voices, faces, bodies, brains, and behavior; the development and evolution of variation in sexual orientation; and the evolution of female orgasm. More»

#271 Alice Eagly: The Psychology Of Gender, and Gender Equality

Dec 20, 2019

Dr. Alice H. Eagly is Emerita Professor of Psychology and of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University. She currently holds the James Padilla Chair for Arts and Sciences and a Faculty Fellowship for the Institute of Policy Research at Northwestern University. Her primary research contributions have been in the area of social psychology, as well as personality psychology and Industrial Organizational Psychology. Her research interests include the psychology of gender, especially sex differences and similarities in leadership, prosocial behavior, aggression, partner preferences, and sociopolitical attitudes. She’s also interested in the content of stereotypes; social role theory as a theory of sex differences and similarities and of the origins of sex differences in social behavior; and attitude theory and research, especially attitudinal selectivity in information processing. More»

#265 Reinout de Vries: Personality, The HEXACO, and Communication Styles

Dec 6, 2019

Dr. Reinout E. de Vries is Associate Professor at the VU University Amsterdam and Full Professor at the University of Twente. Together with researchers like Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee, he has worked on the HEXACO model of personality, showing that it provides a more optimal description of personality than the Big Five model and showing that it is, through its addition of Honesty-Humility, better able to predict a number of counterproductive behaviors than the Big Five model. His main research interests are in the areas of personality, communication styles, and leadership. Recent work has focused on the construction of a six-dimensional Communication Styles Inventory (CSI), a Brief HEXACO personality Inventory (BHI), the relation between Impression Management and Overclaiming and HEXACO personality, and on the relation between self- and other-rated HEXACO personality on the one hand and leadership, proactivity, impression management, and overclaiming on the other. He is currently working on lexical studies on sport personality and leadership and followership styles. More»

#262 Indre Viskontas: The Psychology of Music

Nov 29, 2019

Dr. Indre Viskontas is a Professor of Psychology at the University of San Francisco, and serves on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She is also the Creative Director of Pasadena Opera. Dr. Viskontas is a neuroscientist and operatic soprano. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience and a M.M. in opera. She’s the author of How Music Can Make You Better. More»

#261 Noam Chomsky: Cognitive Revolution, Piaget, Foucault, And Evolutionary Psychology

Nov 28, 2019

Dr. Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, political activist, and social critic. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Dr. Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He holds a joint appointment as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and laureate professor at the University of Arizona, and is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. More»

#259 Tyler Volk: From Quarks to Culture

Nov 22, 2019

I’M SORRY ABOUT THE MISSING BITS OF AUDIO HERE AND THERE, BUT THE CONNECTION WAS A BIT WEAK. More»

#257 Tania Reynolds: Intrasexual Competition, Moral Typecasting, And Victim Sanctification

Nov 18, 2019

Dr. Tania Reynolds is a Social Psychology postdoctoral researcher at the Kinsey Institute. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from Florida State University under Dr. Roy Baumeister and Dr. Jon Maner. Her research examines how pressure to compete for social and romantic partners asymmetrically affects the competitive behaviors and well-being of men and women. Through a joint appointment with the Gender Studies department, Dr. Reynolds offers courses on human sexuality and sex/gender differences. As a collaborative research team with Justin Garcia and Amanda Gesselman, she hopes to examine the dispositional predictors and physiological correlates of individuals’ romantic relationship experiences, as well as how these associations may differ across gender and sexual orientation. More»