psychology

#174 Michael Muthukrishna: Human Culture, The Cultural Brain, And Political Corruption

May 9, 2019

Dr. Michael Muthukrishna is an Assistant Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. His other affiliations include Research Associate of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, Affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD, and Technical Director of The Database of Religious History. His research focuses on the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie culture and how culture is transmitted, maintained, and modified. He’s interested in better understanding the dynamic relationship between “cultures” and individuals, where cultures emerge from the interactions of individuals over time, who are in turn shaped by the emergent cultures they constitute. He’s particularly interested in the application of research in cultural evolution to public policy. More»
#173 Belén López-Pérez: Cruel To Be Kind, Empathy, Emotion Regulation, and Happiness

May 6, 2019

Dr. Belén López-Pérez is a Lecturer in Psychology at Liverpool Hope University in the UK, where she also directs the ChildLab. She concluded her PhD in Social psychology at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in 2012, and her Postdoctoral research in Social and Developmental Psychology in the School of Psychology at Plymouth University. Her research interests include empathy and interpersonal emotion regulation across the lifespan, as well as happiness and wellbeing. Her current research projects are focused on interpersonal emotion regulation in childhood and developmental differences in emotion goals (i.e., what people would like to feel in different contexts). More»
#171 Peter Smith: Bullying, Cyberbullying and Children's Development

May 2, 2019

Dr. Peter K. Smith is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research interest is children’s social development. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Association of Psychological Sciences, and the Academy of Social Sciences. More»
#169 Bo Winegard: The Psychology of Group Differences and Political Bias

Apr 26, 2019

Dr. Bo Winegard is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Marietta College. He generally approaches psychological puzzles from an evolutionary perspective, applying Darwin's theory of natural selection to the human mind. He focuses mostly on status, group differences, individual differences, bias, methods, and political psychology. He’s also the cohost, together with Cory Clark, of the Psyphilopod podcast. More»
#168 Anthony Biglan: The Nurture Effect, Child Development, and Nurturing Societies

Apr 25, 2019

Dr. Anthony Biglan is a Senior Scientist at Oregon Research Institute and the Co-Director of the Promise Neighborhood Research Consortium. He has been conducting research on the development and prevention of child and adolescent problem behavior for the past several decades. His work has included studies of the risk and protective factors associated with tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use; high-risk sexual behavior; and antisocial behavior. He and colleagues at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences published a book summarizing the epidemiology, cost, etiology, prevention, and treatment of youth with multiple problems, called Helping Adolescents at Risk (2004). He is a former president of the Society for Prevention Research. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Prevention. He’s also the author of The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives and Our World. More»
#166 Daniel Nettle: The Evolution of Personality, Individual Variation And Behavioral Flexibility

Apr 19, 2019

Dr. Daniel Nettle is Professor of Behavioural Science at Newcastle University, where he is a member of the cross-disciplinary Centre for Behaviour and Evolution. He studies a number of different topics relating to behaviour, ageing and wellbeing. He mainly studies humans, but sometimes other animals (especially starlings) too. Dr. Nettle is the author of several books, most notably, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile (2005), Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are (2007), and Tyneside Neighbourhoods: Deprivation, Social Life and Social Behaviour in One English City (2015). More»
#164 Herbert Gintis: Sociobiology, Game Theory, Cooperation, And Social Institutions

Apr 15, 2019

Dr. Herbert Gintis is External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He and Professor Robert Boyd (Anthropology, UCLA) headed a multidisciplinary research project that models such behaviors as empathy, reciprocity, insider/outsider behavior, vengefulness, and other observed human behaviors not well handled by the traditional model of the self-regarding agent. Professor Gintis is also author of several books including Game Theory Evolving, The Bounds of Reason, A Cooperative Species, Game Theory in Action, and Individuality and Entanglement and also coeditor, with Joe Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, and Ernst Fehr, of Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-scale Societies, and with Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and Ernst Fehr of Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: On the Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life. More»
#158 Jay Belsky: Attachment, Child Development, and Child Maltreatment

Apr 1, 2019

Dr. Jay Belsky is Robert and Natalie Read Dorne Professor of Human Development in the Department of Human Ecology and Program in Human Development at the University of California, Davis. Professor Belsky is an internationally recognized expert in the field of child development and family studies. His areas of expertise include the effects of day care, parent-child relations during the infancy and early childhood years (including attachment), the transition to parenthood, the etiology of child maltreatment and the evolutionary basis of parent and child functioning. Dr. Belsky's research is marked by a focus upon fathers as well as mothers, marriages as well as parent-child relations, and naturalistic home observations of family interaction patterns. He is a founding and collaborating investigator on the NICHD Study of Child Care and Youth Development (US) and The National Evaluation of Sure Start (UK). He is the author of more than 300 scientific articles and chapters and the author/editor of several books. More»
#157 Gerard Saucier: Personality, The Big Five, The Big Six, and The Big Two

Mar 29, 2019

Dr. Gerard Saucier is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon. He won the 1999 Cattell Early Career Research Award from the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology. His research focuses on Personality Psychology, Values, Cultural Psychology, Moral Psychology, and Political Psychology. Dr. Saucier has been a leader in developing and refining dimensional models for personality (the Big Five, and upgrading from the Big Five to a more comprehensive Big Six model and a broader, more universal 'Big Two') and beliefs and values (e.g., dimensions of ‘isms’). More»
#155 Glenn Geher: Evolutionary Psych, Mating, Attachment, And The PsychTable

Mar 25, 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. More»