psychology

#589 Ashley Thomas: Naïve Sociology, and How Children Think About Hierarchies and Social Relations

Feb 18, 2022

Dr. Ashley Thomas is a postdoctoral fellow at the center for research on open and equitable scholarship at MIT. She is interested in humans as a social species. She investigates what infants, toddlers, and children think about social relationships (i.e., their naive sociology). She has studied how they think and feel about social hierarchy (i.e. situations where there is a 'winner' and a 'loser' or when someone is 'in charge.'). Currently, she is working with Elizabeth Spelke and Rebecca Saxe, and they are investigating how infants interpret social interactions that involve their own caregivers as well as how infants, toddlers, and children think about social intimacy. She has also studied people's moral judgments of parenting decisions. More»
#585 Philippe Rochat Moral Acrobatics: How We Avoid Ethical Ambiguity by Thinking in Black and White

Feb 10, 2022

Dr. Philippe Rochat is Professor of Psychology at Emory University. What is the nature and origins of human self-conscious psychology? Driven by this question, the main focus of Dr. Rochat's research in the Emory Infant and Child Lab is on the early sense of self, emerging self-concept, the development of social cognition and relatedness, and the emergence of a moral sense during the preschool years in children from all over the world growing up in different cultural environments and socio-economic circumstances. Dr. Rochat has published five books, including Moral Acrobatics: How We Avoid Ethical Ambiguity by Thinking in Black and White. More»
#583 Peter Ditto: Motivated Reasoning, Morality, and Politics

Feb 4, 2022

Dr. Peter Ditto is Professor of Psychological Science at UC Irvine School of Social Ecology. He is interested in “hot cognition” — the interface between passion and reason. His research examines the role of motivation, emotion and intuition in social, political, moral, medical, and legal judgment. Most generally, he has sought to explain the phenomenon of “motivated reasoning” — how the desire to reach a particular conclusion biases the processing of information related to that conclusion. His early work examined the role such biases play in responses to threatening medical information (e.g., denial). More recently, his work has focused on motivated moral reasoning, particularly how people selectively recruit general principles and factual beliefs to support desired moral conclusions. Another key focus of his current research is partisan political bias. This work examines the multiple ways that political ideology biases our political judgments and behavior. Finally, he is interested in a variety of psychological issues involved in end-of-life medical decision making. More»
#581 Robert Larzelere: Parenting Styles, Authoritative Parenting, and Spanking

Jan 31, 2022

Dr. Robert Larzelere is Professor and Research Methodologist in the College of Education and Human Sciences at Oklahoma State University. He is interested in collaborating with others who are concerned about the best scientific evidence on important questions about family and family-type relationships. He investigates specific disciplinary processes that account for the effectiveness of the authoritative parenting combination of warmth, communication, just-firm-enough control and increasing autonomy. He is interested in comparing the effectiveness of alternative disciplinary responses to misbehavior and searching for alternative tactics that are more effective than non-abusive spanking in situations where the latter has traditionally been used. More»
#580 Emily Kubin: Political Polarization, Dehumanization, and the Media

Jan 28, 2022

Emily Kubin is a PhD student in the Political Psychology & Communication Lab at the University of Koblenz-Landau (at Landau). She studies political communication. Specifically, she focuses on how political opponents view and interact with one another, and the role media play in opponents’ perceptions of one another. She places a special focus on studying strategies political opponents (and the media) can use to reduce affective polarization. More»
#579 Valerie Hardcastle: The Self, Consciousness, Pain, and Abnormal Psychology

Jan 27, 2022

Dr. Valerie Hardcastle is St. Elizabeth Healthcare Executive Director of the Institute for Health Innovation and Vice President for Health Innovation at Northern Kentucky University. Dr. Hardcastle specializes in philosophy of neuroscience/biology, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of psychology, and philosophical implications of psychiatry. She researches bioethics/neuroethics, behavioral neuroscience, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. She teaches metaphysics, science studies, feminist philosophy of science. She is the author of several books, including Locating Consciousness, The Myth of Pain, and Constructing the Self. More»
#578 Drew Bailey: Educational Attainment, Educational Interventions, and Sex Differences

Jan 24, 2022

Dr. Drew Bailey is Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include mathematical development, individual differences, and longitudinal methods. More»
#576 Tania Reynolds: Male Suffering, Female Same-Sex Relationships, and Moral Reactions to Covid-19

Jan 20, 2022

Dr. Tania Reynolds is Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of New Mexico. More»
#575 J. Michael Bailey: Sexual Orientation, Sexual Arousal, and Gender Identity

Jan 17, 2022

Dr. J. Michael Bailey is an American psychologist, behavioral geneticist, and professor at Northwestern University. His interests include sexual orientation, gender nonconformity, sexual arousal, behavior genetics, and evolutionary psychology. He maintains that sexual orientation is heavily influenced by biology and male homosexuality is most likely inborn. Dr. Bailey wrote The Man Who Would Be Queen, a book intended to explain the biology of male sexual orientation and gender to a general audience, focusing on gender nonconforming boys, gay men and male-to-female transsexuals. More»
#574 Andreas Jungherr: Online Political Discourse, Digital Media and Politics, and Misinformation

Jan 14, 2022

Dr. Andreas Jungherr is Professor for Political Science with a focus on the Governance of Complex and Innovative Technical Systems at Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg. He examines the impact of digital media on politics and society. He has worked on the uses of digital media and technology by publics, political actors, and organizations in international comparison. He also addresses challenges for scientific research in reaction to digital change in order to realize opportunities emerging from new data sources and analytical approaches. In this, he has focused on harnessing the potential of digital methods and computational social science while addressing methodological challenges in its integration into the social sciences. He is the author of books like Retooling Politics: How Digital Media are Shaping Democracy, and Analyzing Political Communication with Digital Trace Data: The Role of Twitter Messages in Social Science Research. More»