TALK CANCELED DUE TO CORONAVIRUS PRECAUTIONS

Talk Title: TBD

Jessi Smith

Professor

Bio: Dr. Smith is a Professor of Psychology and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Utah and spent much of her academic career at Montana State University where she served as the primary investigator of the NSF funded ADVANCE Project TRACS, which aimed to broaden the participation of women faculty in STEM and behavioral science fields in ways that foster excellence for the entire campus community. Dr. Smith’s primary research interest is on how societal norms and stereotypes undermine or support an individual’s motivational experience; Her research specializes in social psychological aspects of gender and culture that advance the success of people at risk in education, business, and health.

Dustin Thoman

Associate Professor

Bio: Dr. Thoman is a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at San Diego State University. His training is in social psychology, with expertise in quantitative analysis. Dr. Thoman’s research is both theoretical and applied, focusing on the development of student interest and the influence of stereotypes and social identities in shaping the development of students’ educational and career interests. Through consulting and program development, he also works to improve educational programs, particularly those designed to broaden participation and promote diversity in science and math education, through theoretically and empirically-grounded approaches.

TALK CANCELED DUE TO CORONAVIRUS PRECAUTIONS

Associate Professor

Talk Title: TBD

Dr. Keith Maddox is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Tufts University Social Cognition Lab. He received his A.B. (1991) in psychology from the University of Michigan, and his M.A. (1994) and Ph.D. (1998) in social psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His lab is focused on research programs examining social cognitive aspects of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination – seeking to understand topics such as: cognitive representations and stereotypes of African Americans based on variation in skin tone and other phenotypic characteristics; how stereotypes and prejudice influence perceptions of those who claim to be the targets of discrimination; stereotype threat among members of socially marginalized groups; and the role of social categories in spatial representation.

TALK CANCELED DUE TO CORONAVIRUS PRECAUTIONS

Associate Professor

Talk Title: TBD

Bio: Dr. London is an Associate Professor in the Stony Brook University Department of Psychology. Her research aims to identify and explore the individual, psychosocial and institutional mechanisms associated with social identity threat on the academic, intergroup and psychosocial well-being of historically marginalized groups (on the basis of gender, race, sexual orientation). Utilizing social-cognitive models of status-based rejection sensitivity (gender, race, sexual orientation), lay theories of personality and competence, and perceived identity compatibility, Dr. London’s work explores the social and developmental mechanisms of how people anticipate, perceive, and cope with cues of identity and competence threat.

TALK CANCELED DUE TO CORONAVIRUS PRECAUTIONS

Associate Professor

Talk title: Reducing stress and the mental pain of everyday life​

Bio: Dr. Cohen is a research affiliate in the Steinhardt school, and, along with Joshua Aronson, he directs the Mindful Education Lab. Recently, he retired as a clinical associate professor, and had been director of NYU's GSAS M.A. program in psychology for more than a decade. He has taught statistics and research design at the graduate level for more than 25 years, and is the author of three statistics text books currently in print. He received a B.S. in physics from Stony Brook University, an M.A. in general psychology from Queens College, and a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from NYU. He completed two years of post-doctoral research under the guidance of Richard Davidson at Purchase College in New York. His current research is focused in two main areas: the subjective and neural correlates of inner speech; and the cognitive, affective, and physiological changes produced by the regular practice of meditation and related mental exercises.

TALK CANCELED DUE TO CORONAVIRUS PRECAUTIONS

Associate Professor

Talk Title: TBD

Bio: Dr. Purdie Greenaway is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. Her lab lab promotes the development of research regarding people with threatened identities, and examines the consequences of their experiences for intergroup relations. The ultimate goal of her research is to deepen our understanding of culture and intergroup relations in society and to eventually inform educational and public policy.

Associate Professor

Talk Title: Historicist narratives and the mitigation of blame: Evidence for racial bias and its amelioration

Bio: Dr. Gill is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Lehigh University. His research investigates the psychology of blame and punishment, with a particular focus on how to temper people's tendency to respond to wrongdoing in overly harsh, counterproductive ways.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Talk Title: God, sex, and money: Mating preferences in the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community

An examination of mating preferences in the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community confirms many predictions from an evolutionary perspective and departs only in that women do not show a preference for mates with good financial prospects, but rather,  women display a preference for men of strong religious devotion. Implications and broader consequences will be discussed. 

Bio: Nechumi Yaffe, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow affiliated with Princeton’s Department of Sociology and the University Center for Human Values. Nechumi’s research examines, from a social psychology perspective, how identity, social norms, and authority play a role in creating and preserving poverty. Her work focuses on the ultra-orthodox (Haredi) community in Israel, a population currently understudied. Current and future publications consider the perceptions and heuristics that shape community members’ decisions in the face of scarcity. This project aims to inform and improve policymakers’ decisions and to expand the understanding of the intricacy of poverty. Nechumi earned a PhD in political science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is the first women from Israel’s ultra-orthodox community to achieve a postdoctoral position.

Associate Professor

Talk Title: How to make children smarter, happier, and nicer with social psychology

Can schools make poor children happier, smarter, and nicer to one another? Some schools do this exquisitely and much of their success is best understood with social psychology. I show that the answer can be yes, and one of the keys to doing so is a bag of social psychological tricks.

Bio: Dr. Aronson is an associate professor of developmental, social, and educational psychology at New York University. Along with Barry Cohen, PhD, Joshua directs the Mindful Education Lab, a group of psychologists and neuroscientists dedicated to using research to improve the psychological functioning and learning of children confronted with stress.

Professor

Talk Title: The role of perceived environmental competitiveness in motivation and behavior

Competitiveness is a fundamental motivation and is ubiquitous in daily life. Competitiveness may be manifest in three ways – as a dispositional tendency, as a perception of the environment, and as a manipulated state. In my talk, I will focus on the role of perceived environmental competitiveness (PEC) as a key variable in several different motivation-relevant phenomena. Specifically, I will present data from several different series of empirical studies showing a) the relation between PEC and achievement (both meta-analytically and in a new study), b) the projection of trait competitiveness onto PEC, c) the mediational role of PEC in the link between objective income inequality and downstream outcomes, d) the mediational role of PEC in the link between objective racial income inequality and downstream outcomes, and e) the causal role of PEC in predicting downstream outcomes. I will also briefly note ongoing work on daily diary reports of PEC and wellbeing among adolescents, and the projection of competition-based achievement goals onto one’s classmates among undergraduates. I will close with applied comments on the positive vs. negative nature of PEC.

Bio: Andrew J. Elliot, PhD, is Professor of Psychology at the University of Rochester where he has taught and conducted research for 25 years. He has held one-year Visiting Professor positions at the University of Munich (2003-2004), the University of Cambridge (2008-2009), and the University of Oxford (2013-2014). His research focuses on achievement motivation, especially in educational settings; he has published well over 200 papers and given research lectures/addresses in 23 countries. He has won several research and teaching awards, and has been named a Fellow in five different professional organizations. He has served as Associate Editor at five different journals and is currently editor of Advances in Motivation Science. Dr. Elliot has served or is serving on several not-for-profit boards, including the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Calvin University, and Verbree International. He started and oversees a school library building program for H.O.P.E., a NGO in rural Haiti. He and his wife Juli have three children ages 30, 28, and 26.

Professor

Talk Title: How culture shapes the mind: A cultural neuroscience perspective

Culture is to humans as water is to fish. This epithet illustrates how important culture is to human adaptation. At the same time, however, it also raises a fundamental question of how culture might achieve this vital function. In the present talk, I argue that culture is composed of various scripted behaviors designed to address core values, such as independence and interdependence. These behavioral scripts are called cultural tasks. As people grow up, they develop their identities by adopting some subset of the tasks available in their culture. They will then repeatedly engage in the selected tasks. This process will eventually yield neural pathways that are optimally attuned to carry out these tasks, with their brains plastically rewired accordingly. These culturally mediated neural changes will enable people to perform their cultural tasks automatically, without conscious monitoring. For them, to act naturally is already to act by their culture’s norms and values. This process of neural rewiring may provide an important basis for both social and biological adaptation. Recent evidence for the plastic change of brain structure through culture will be discussed.

Bio: Dr. Kitayama is Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He examines the mutual constitution between culture and mental processes, such as self, cognition, and emotion. His research draws on diverse methods in psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and epigenetics. Currently, he is the editor-in-chief of the flagship journal of his field, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition. He is president-elect of the Association for Psychological Science and a recent recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship and the Humboldt Research Award. This year, he is spending a year at the Russell Sage Foundation as a residential fellow.

Postdoctoral Associate

Talk Title: Resistance to persuasion and approaches to effective communication

How do people defend their deeply held beliefs? Part one of this talk examines the methods people use to resist persuasion, and how these methods shift depending on how difficult it is to defend the belief. What does belief defense tell us about how to communicate effectively? Part two of the talk uses lessons from part one to examine how to best communicate about controversial issues, including appeals to morality, identity, and social norms.

Bio: Matthew is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. He is an expert in the social psychological subfields of attitudes and persuasion, motivated reasoning, and ideology. His research has focused on defensiveness and the methods by which people defend their beliefs. He has investigated several factors that influence belief defense such as argument quality, perceptions of public opinion, social network agreement, and language complexity. Matthew holds a BA in Psychology from Hofstra University and received his PhD in Psychology in the Basic and Applied Social Psychology program at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.