psychology

#980 Geoff MacDonald: The Psychology of Single People

Aug 15, 2024

Dr. Geoff MacDonald is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto. In general, his research focuses on issues of social connection and disconnection. One emerging theme of his lab’s work is the intersection of singlehood and sexuality. He is trying to understand what predicts well-being in singlehood. Some broader issues that interest Dr. MacDonald now include thinking about attachment theory in light of longitudinal findings on the relatively small role of childhood treatment in adult attachment security, the role of Big 5 personality traits in attraction and maintenance of relationships, and better understanding what people are doing psychologically when they let go of a close relationship. More»
#977 Susan Charles: How Well-Being Varies Across the Lifespan

Aug 8, 2024

Dr. Susan Charles is Professor of Psychological Science and Nursing Science in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research examines emotional processes across the adult life span. She is interested in how affective experience varies across the life course, and how differences in affective experience may be related to differences in cognitive and health-related processes. Dr. Charles is also interested in the interplay between health and emotion, including the relationship between physical health factors (both health behavior and health status) and emotional processes, and how these relationships may vary as a function of age. More»
#976 Azim Shariff: Social Robots, Free Will, Rags-To-Riches Stories, and the Moralization of Effort

Aug 5, 2024

Dr. Azim Shariff is Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a social psychologist whose research focuses on where morality intersects with religion, cultural attitudes and economics. Another rapidly expanding part of his research looks at human-technology interactions and the ethics of automation, including self-driving cars. More»
#972 Susan Goldin-Meadow: Thinking with Your Hands

Jul 26, 2024

Dr. Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Psychology and Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago. She has made pioneering contributions to the study of how language is created and learned, and how the gestures that go along with speech facilitate learning and communication. Dr. Goldin-Meadow is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She’s received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a James McKeen Cattell Fund Fellowship, and the David E. Rumelhart Prize. She is the author of several books, including Thinking with Your Hands: The Surprising Science Behind How Gestures Shape Our Thoughts. More»
#961 Mauro Silva Júnior: The Evolutionary Psychology of Interpersonal Relationships

Jul 1, 2024

Dr. Mauro Silva Júnior is Professor in the Department of Basic Psychological Processes at the Psychology Institute at the University of Brasilia. He works on interpersonal relationships, especially the traits of individuals and their social partners – such as sex differences, differences between parents and friends, and the use of technology as a mediator of social interactions. Moreover, he investigates the cognitive and memory aspects of the relationships with maternal and paternal parents, and friends; as well as levels of emotional and time investment. More»
#959 Edgar Dubourg: The Psychological Foundations and the Cultural Evolution of Fiction

Jun 27, 2024

Edgar Dubourg is a PhD candidate in cognitive science at the Département d’Études Cognitives at the École Normale supérieure (ENS-PSL). He uses insights from both the natural sciences (behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience) and the humanities (literary theory, literary history, cultural studies), and both computational and experimental methods, to explain the psychological foundations and the cultural evolution of fictions. More»
#947 Bella DePaulo - Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life

May 30, 2024

Dr. Bella DePaulo is the leading expert on single life and has been described by The Atlantic as “America’s foremost thinker and writer on the single experience.” Dr. DePaulo coined the term “single at heart.” After two decades as a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, Dr. DePaulo moved to the West Coast, where she is currently an academic affiliate in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her latest book is Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life. More»
#944 Ann Pellegrini & Avgi Saketopoulou: Gender Without Identity

May 23, 2024

Dr. Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Their previous books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997) and the 2014 Lambda Finalist in Best LGBT Non-Fiction “You Can Tell Just by Looking” and 20 Other Myths About LGBT Life and People, coauthored with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico (Beacon Press, 2013). More»
#942 Fernanda Ferreira: Linguistics, Fluency, Speech Disfluencies, and Comprehension

May 17, 2024

Dr. Fernanda Ferreira is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Fair Open Access journal Glossa Psycholinguistics. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Cognitive Science Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and the Association for Psychological Science (APS). Dr. Ferreira’s area of research is psycholinguistics. She uses basic insights from formal linguistics, especially theories in sentence phonology and syntax, to develop models of processing. The fundamental aim of her research is to uncover the mechanisms that enable humans to understand and generate language in real-time and in cooperation with other cognitive systems. More»
#941 Anthony Volk: The Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology of Bullying

May 16, 2024

Dr. Anthony Volk is Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies, and Associate Member in the Department of Psychology at Brock University. He is a developmental scientist interested in the separate, but related, areas of bullying, parenting, personality, psychopathy, and the evolution of childhood. A strong believer in multidisciplinary studies, Prof. Volk’s overall interest is to gain an evolutionary, psychological, biological, neurological, health-based, Indigenous, cross-cultural, social, historical, and (if possible) transdisciplinary understanding of why individuals do what they do. More»