TheBestSchools.org is an advertising-supported site. Featured programs and school search results are for schools that compensate us. This compensation does not influence our school rankings, resource guides, or other information published on this site. Got it!

Pictured: Elliot Aronson, Aaron Beck, Carol Tavris, Daniel Goleman, Philip Zimbardo, Jonathan Haidt, Carol Gilligan, and Howard Gardner

The word psychology literally means the study of the soul (from the Greek: ψῡ́χω, or psukhē). As such, it is an academic discipline that is unique in the way it straddles the sciences (natural and social) and the humanities.

On the one hand, as Sigmund Freud would have been the first to acknowledge, a wealth of psychological insight is contained in the myths and epic poetry of ancient peoples (think of Esau’s envy, Medea’s hatred, Dido’s despair), as well as in the literature of more recent times (Lady Macbeth’s ambition and Satan’s pride in Paradise Lost ; Madame Bovary’s boredom and Charles Swann’s jealousy). There is little that modern psychology can teach us about the deepest wellsprings of the human heart—-or, to put it more scientifically, of the nature and causes of human motivation and action — that has not already been far better expressed by the poets, playwrights, and novelists down through the ages.

On the other hand, we moderns hardly believe in the soul that all those writers took for granted anymore. The soul has fled from the cultural battlefield where modern science has carried the day, leaving behind, at best, an ineffable entity we call the mind —-which is itself little more than a will-o-the-wisp hovering over the three pounds of pulpy gray matter inside the skull like a ghost lingering about a graveyard long after the funeral.

For these reasons, psychology as an academic discipline is exceptionally diverse. The field comprises a spectrum which merges at one end with soft disciplines like ethnology, sociology, and the helping professions, and at the other end with hard disciplines like genetics, endocrinology, and neuroscience. Moreover, at every point along the spectrum, many of the most famous psychologists have often taken a step back to reflect upon the nature of the field as a whole—-examining the tacit presuppositions that guide psychologists’ thought and practice, and thereby assuming the role of philosopher.

With the help of AcademicInfluence.com to get a base list of influencers, we have created the list below. For the purposes of this article, we have excluded persons whose primary academic affiliation lies in a philosophy department, or in one of the other humanities, or in some other social science. While many on our list have a foot in more than one disciplinary camp, to be included here their main academic position had to be located within either a psychology department or a psychiatry department (within a medical school).

Why is a list like this one important?

Certainly, we hope and believe that the work of the individuals listed here will be widely appealing just for its own sake. After all, we humans cannot help being curious about ourselves—-about what makes us tick — and these 50 individuals are acknowledged experts in precisely that topic.

But we believe the article has some value even beyond the inherent fascination of the subject of psychology itself. It is important because, whether we know it or not, the ideas of psychologists hold great sway in our society, and are of the foremost practical importance for public policy, especially in areas like criminal justice and economics.

As the great economist John Maynard Keynes famously said:

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.

He might just as well have said psychologist.

The list comprises individuals in approximately equal numbers from each of the five following sub-disciplines:

Personality and clinical psychology; psychiatry

Developmental and child psychology

Social psychology

Biological, comparative, and evolutionary psychology

Cognitive psychology; psycholinguistics; behavioral economics

Ranking Methodology

The overall list is in alphabetical order.

The 50 Most Influential Psychologists in the World

1. John R. Anderson | Cognitive Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Anderson was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1947. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of British Columbia in 1968, and his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1972. Today, he is Professor of Psychology (with a joint appointment in Computer Science) at Carnegie Mellon University. Anderson is a pioneer in the use of computers to model the architecture of the human mind, an approach known as rational analysis. He is perhaps best known for his ACT-R (Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational) proposal regarding the hypothetical computational structures underlying human general intelligence. Anderson also engaged in careful experimental studies, using fMRI technology, in an effort to provide empirical support for his theoretical models. Out this work came a number of insights now considered basic to cognitive science, such as, notably, the stage theory of problem-solving (encoding, planning, solving, and response stages), and the decomposition theory of learning (breaking down a problem into more-manageable components, also known as chunking). In his path-breaking early work, Anderson collaborated with Herbert Simon and other giants in the history of cognitive science. In more recent years, he has been involved in the development of intelligent tutoring systems. The author or co-author of over 320 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and the author, co-author, or editor of six highly influential books, Anderson has received numerous awards, grants, fellowships, lectureships, and honorary degrees. In 2016, the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) bestowed upon him its prestigious Atkinson Prize. Academic Website Selected Books Language, Memory, and Thought (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1976)

(Lawrence Erlbaum, 1976) The Architecture of Cognition (Harvard University Press, 1983)

(Harvard University Press, 1983) The Adaptive Character of Thought (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990)

(Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990) Learning and Memory: An Integrated Approach (John Wiley and Sons, 2000)

(John Wiley and Sons, 2000) How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe? (Oxford University Press, 2007)

(Oxford University Press, 2007) Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications (8th ed., Worth Publishers, 2014)

2. Dan Ariely | Behavioral Economics







Copy link to this entry… Ariely was born in New York City in 1967 to an Israeli family living there temporarily. He returned to Israel with his family when he was three years old, and grew up in the town of Ramat HaSharon. He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1971 from Tel Aviv University, and his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology in 1991 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ariely went on to earn a second doctorate in business administration in 1998 from Duke University. He is currently the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Ariely’s work draws on insights from biological and cognitive psychology, on the one hand, and economics, on the other—-in a burgeoning new field that has come to be known as behavioral economics. Behavioral economics examines the same subject matter as economics — choice and decision-making under conditions of scarcity — but relaxes the central assumption of mainstream economics, which is that human beings are rational agents who may be counted on to act in their own best interests. Ariely and other behavioral economists (see Daniel Kahneman, below) replace this vastly over-simplified presupposition with a more realistic analysis of human motivation that takes into account many more factors that go into making real-world decisions. In particular, he analyzes the many ways in which human beings are prone to cognitive illusions, and how such mistakes affect our lives. In a nutshell, he believes that, just as we build the material world of buildings, tools, vehicles, etc. with our physical limitations in mind, so too ought we to design our social world of educational, financial, legal, and political institutions with our cognitive limitations in mind. Ariely, who is the founder of a number of private for-profit ventures, has become well known beyond the academic world for his best-selling popular books (see below), his TED talks, and his widely read Wall Street Journal advice column. Dan Ariely Interview—A Primer on Behavioral Economics Personal Website Selected Books Predictably Irrational (HarperCollins, 2008)

(HarperCollins, 2008) The Upside of Irrationality (HarperCollins, 2010)

(HarperCollins, 2010) The Honest Truth about Dishonesty (HarperCollins, 2012)

(HarperCollins, 2012) Irrationally Yours (HarperCollins, 2015)

(HarperCollins, 2015) Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations (Simon & Schuster/TED, 2016)

3. Elliot Aronson | Social Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Aronson was born in the Boston suburb of Chelsea in 1932. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University in 1954, and his master’s degree from Wesleyan University—-where he worked with David McClelland — in 1956. He received his Ph.D. in 1959 from Stanford University, where his dissertation advisor was Leon Festinger. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Aronson’s work has focused on the social dimension of human motivational systems, such as the structural reasons for prejudice and aggression, as well as more cognitively oriented dimensions, such as cognitive dissonance (the discomfort we feel when some of our beliefs contradict others). Aronson’s is one of the most famous names in the discipline of social psychology, due in no small part to his best-selling survey of the entire field, entitled The Social Animal , first published in 1972. Convinced that seemingly irrational behavior usually has a rational explanation, Aronson is also known for what he calls his First Law—-namely, People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy. He is famous, too, for his contributions to the understanding and mitigation of interpersonal and interethnic conflict, including the idea of the jigsaw classroom, which is a technique for defusing tensions arising from interpersonal and interethnic competition in the classroom by means of organizing students into diverse teams, each member of which is responsible for one piece of the overall assignment (hence the term jigsaw ). The technique has proved effective at fostering as sense of mutual reliance and team spirit in troubled school settings. In addition to The Social Animal , Aronson has authored, co-authored, or edited some two dozen books aimed at popular and academic audiences, as well as an autobiography and a work of fiction for children. He has received awards too numerous to mention, including the William James Fellow Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Scientific Psychology. Academic Website Selected Books The Social Animal (Macmillan, 1972; 11th ed., 2011)

(Macmillan, 1972; 11th ed., 2011) Nobody Left to Hate (Henry Holt, 2000)

(Henry Holt, 2000) Age of Propaganda (Henry Holt, 2001)

(Henry Holt, 2001) The Adventures of Ruthie and a Little Boy Named Grandpa (iUniverse, 2005)

(iUniverse, 2005) Not by Chance Alone: My Life as a Social Psychologist (Basic Books, 2010)

(Basic Books, 2010) Cooperation in the Classroom: The Jigsaw Method (3rd ed., Pinter & Martin, 2011)

(3rd ed., Pinter & Martin, 2011) Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (Harcourt, 2007; 2nd ed., 2015)

(Harcourt, 2007; 2nd ed., 2015) Social Psychology (9th ed., Pearson, 2015)

4. Alan D. Baddeley | Cognitive Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Baddeley was born in Leeds, in the UK, in 1934. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1956 from University College London, and his master’s degree in psychology in 1957 from Princeton University. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1962. He is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of York in the UK. Baddeley’s work has focused on memory—-its structure (working memory, episodic memory, long-term memory) and the neural correlates of these components. He is perhaps best known for his multiple components model of working memory (the Baddeley Model), in which working (or short-term) memory is further analyzed into a central executive component and certain slave systems under its control, for example, the so-called phonological loop, which allows us to rehearse complex linguistic information to maintain its availability for working memory, and the visuo-spatial scratchpad, which stores information about the physical environment for use in the construction of mental maps. The author or co-author of several hundred peer-reviewed research articles, Baddeley is the co-author of a prominent textbook, Memory , and has authored, co-authored, or edited numerous other influential volumes in the field. He has also been heavily involved in the field of psychological measurement, having helped design a number of widely used tests, including the Children’s Test of Nonword Repetition (CN REP), the Speed and Capacity of Language Processing Test (SCOLP), and the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test (RBMT). The author or co-author of some 475 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, Baddeley is also the author, co-author, or editor of some half dozen books. He has received numerous awards, grants, fellowships, lectureships, honorary degrees, and other honors, culminating in his 1991 appointment as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and his 1993 appointment as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). Academic Website Selected Books The Psychology of Memory (Basic Books, 1976)

(Basic Books, 1976) Your Memory: A User’s Guide (2nd ed., Rupa & Co., 1996)

(2nd ed., Rupa & Co., 1996) Working Memory, Thought, and Action (Oxford University Press, 2007)

(Oxford University Press, 2007) Memory (Psychology Press, 2009; 2nd ed., 2014)

(Psychology Press, 2009; 2nd ed., 2014) Essentials of Human Memory (Psychology Press, 2013)

5. Albert Bandura | Social Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Bandura was born in Mundare, Alberta, Canada, in 1925. His father was an immigrant to Canada from Poland, while his mother hailed from Ukraine. He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1949 from the University of British Columbia, and his master’s degree in theoretical psychology in 1951 from the University of Iowa. He obtained his Ph.D. the following year from the same university, where he worked under the supervision of Arthur L. Benton. He is currently the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University. Though Bandura’s work has been primarily oriented toward social psychology, he has had no hesitation in borrowing ideas from other fields—-and repaying ideas to them with interest. Thus, he has situated himself at a point of intersection among the social, cognitive, personality, and clinical sub-fields of psychology. He was among the pioneering cohort of psychologists who rejected the then-reigning theory of behaviorism, which programmatically ignored the mental mediation of behavior. Moreover, he is considered to be the founder of social learning theory (later known as social cognitive theory ), and has been much concerned with its application to education. Bandura first came to prominence for his work on aggression, particularly in children and adolescents. In 1961, he designed the famous (and controversial) Bobo Doll experiment, to demonstrate how aggressive behavior in young children may learned from adults. With time, however, Bandura increasingly abandoned external-force theories of learning and behavior in favor of an internal, self-organizing model which viewed the human being as possessed of genuine agency. He has sought to extend this approach to education with his theory of self-regulated learning, and to clinical psychology with his theory of self-efficacy, or self-control. Bandura’s self-efficacy model is often considered to be a forerunner of today’s popular cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Bandura is the author or co-author of around 350 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as well as the author, co-author, or editor of some dozen books. The recipient of grants, fellowships, and other honors too numerous to mention, in 2016, Bandura was awarded the US National Medal of Science. Personal Website Selected Books Adolescent Aggression (Ronald Press, 1959)

(Ronald Press, 1959) Principles of Behavior Modification (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969)

(Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969) Social Learning and Personality Development (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975)

(Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975) Social Learning Theory (Prentice-Hall, 1977)

(Prentice-Hall, 1977) Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory (Prentice-Hall, 1986)

(Prentice-Hall, 1986) Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (W.H. Freeman, 1997)

(W.H. Freeman, 1997) Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves (Worth Publishers, 2015)

6. Lisa Feldman Barrett | Biological Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Barrett (née Feldman) was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 1963. She received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Toronto, and her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario. She is currently University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, where she heads up the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory (IASL). Her professional work has always focused on the emotions, primarily from a biological and cognitive point of view. However, like several other psychologists on this list, Barrett has come to see the value of interdisciplinary efforts to study the mind. The IASL positions itself at the crossroads of the sub-fields of social psychology, psychophysiology, cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience, while also drawing inspiration from such humanistic fields as ethnology and philosophy. She has also been deeply involved in developing new methods for studying the emotions, notably the experience sampling method, which is an effort to quantify and measure the quality of everyday life. The IASL also employs the latest in high-tech brain-imaging techniques. With well over 200 peer-reviewed papers and a half dozen books (as sole author or co-editor) to her credit, Barrett has received wide recognition in the form of honors and awards too numerous to mention, notably election as Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 2005 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2008. Academic Website Selected Books The Wisdom in Feeling: Psychological Processes in Emotional Intelligence (2nd ed., Guilford Press, 2002)

(2nd ed., Guilford Press, 2002) Emotion and Consciousness (Guilford Press, 2007)

(Guilford Press, 2007) The Psychological Construction of Emotion (Guilford Press, 2014)

(Guilford Press, 2014) Handbook of Emotions (4th ed., Guilford Press, 2016)

(4th ed., Guilford Press, 2016) How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)

7. Aaron T. Beck | Psychiatry, Personality Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Beck was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1921. His parents were Jewish immigrants to the US from Russia. He took his bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in 1942 from Brown University, and received his MD in 1946 from Yale Medical School. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, as well as President Emeritus of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Beck’s work has centered on the diagnosis and treatment of depression, anxiety, and phobia disorders. He is undoubtedly best known as the person primarily responsible for the cognitive approach to therapy for depression, which in its modern form of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has become the gold standard for the clinical treatment of depression, with a much higher success rate than other types of psychotherapy. It is hard for us today to appreciate what a radical break Beck’s cognitive approach represented in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in a field still dominated by Freud’s idea that the root cause of most neurosis is sexual repression. In working with his patients, Beck came to believe that it was their distorted view of reality—-their inability to understand the objective causes and effects operating in the concrete situations facing them — that lay at the root of their psychological suffering. Beck is also widely known as the author of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), a self-reporting questionnaire designed to measure the severity of depression, which has been revised twice and is still widely used, but which also spawned a whole industry of similar inventories. Beck was also an important contributor to the theory of learned helplessness. The indefatigable author or co-author of over 600 peer-reviewed articles and the author, co-author, or editor of some two dozen technical books, Beck is one of the most highly esteemed and influential psychiatrists of the twentieth century. Academic Website Selected Books The Diagnosis and Management of Depression (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1967)

(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1967) Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders (International Universities Press, 1975)

(International Universities Press, 1975) Cognitive Therapy of Depression (Guilford Press, 1979)

(Guilford Press, 1979) Prisoners of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence (HarperCollins, 1999)

(HarperCollins, 1999) Scientific Foundations of Cognitive Theory and Therapy of Depression (John Wiley and Sons, 1999)

(John Wiley and Sons, 1999) Anxiety Disorders and Phobias: A Cognitive Perspective (Basic Books, 2005)

(Basic Books, 2005) Group Cognitive Therapy for Addictions (Guilford Press, 2012)

8. Kent C. Berridge | Biological Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Berridge was born in 1957. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1979 from the University of California, Davis, and his master’s in 1980 from the University of Pennsylvania. He also received his Ph.D. from Penn, in 1983. He is currently Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan, as well as Director of the Affective Neuroscience and Biopsychology Lab there. Berridge’s work is situated in close proximity to neuroscience, and concentrates on the neural correlates of human conscious affective states—-pleasure, pain, joy, sorrow, elation, depression, and so forth — as well as learning, decision-making, addictive behavior, and allied topics. The master question that his lab raises and attempts to answer is the way in which affective states are generated in the brain, including pleasure, desire and appetite, emotion, and affective valence (the subjective scale from positive to negative value according to which most affective states present themselves to us). In addition, Berridge’s works addresses still more complex issues, such as the neural basis of learning, the causes of addiction, the neurobiological relation between desire and fear, and the neurobiological relation between consciousness and emotion (can there be unconscious emotions?). Berridge is the author or co-author of approximately 200 peer-reviewed research papers and chapters of edited volumes, and is the co-editor (with Morten L. Kringelbach) of Pleasures of the Brain (Oxford University Press, 2009). With a citation h-index that puts him in the 95th percentile of all scientists working in the biomedical field, Berridge has won many honors, including (in 2011) election as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and (in 2016) receipt of the Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award bestowed by the American Psychological Association (APA). Academic Website

9. Paul Bloom | Psycholinguistics, Developmental Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Bloom was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1963. He earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1985 from McGill University, and his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology in 1990 from MIT. His doctoral dissertation on the subject of language acquisition was supervised by Susan Carey. He is currently the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University. Bloom’s early work was primarily in language acquisition—-the process by which infants and toddlers come to acquire the ability to understand and produce human speech. With time, however, Bloom’s work has become increasingly ambitious, crossing over into the territory of philosophy. In his popular books, he has focused on the light that he believes psycholinguistics and developmental psychology can throw on the biological roots of morality, religion, literature, and art — all the things that, as he puts it, make us human. More specific projects that have grown out of this overriding interest include the exploration of moral judgments in babies, of the role that anger, disgust, and empathy play in the moral lives of adults, of our commonsense understanding of ourselves as possessing free will, of the nature of pleasure (especially, the pleasure we derive from fiction), of the psychology of religious belief and atheism, and of our commonsense feeling that our self, or soul, is separate from our body. To get at these hard-to-quantify beliefs and feelings, Bloom has created a laboratory — the Mind and Development Lab at Yale—-that is broadly interdisciplinary, welcoming theory and research from such disciplines and sub-disciplines as cognitive, social, and developmental psychology, behavioral economics, evolutionary theory, and philosophy. Through his popular books, his frequent op-ed pieces and essays in such venues as the New York Times , the Guardian , and the Atlantic , his blogs on Slate , and his interviews with National Public Radio (NPR) and elsewhere, Bloom has communicated his fascinating and influential ideas to a wide audience far beyond the normal confines of academia. Academic Website Selected Books Language Acquisition: Core Readings (MIT Press, 1994)

(MIT Press, 1994) Language, Logic, and Concepts (MIT Press, 1999)

(MIT Press, 1999) How Children Learn the Meanings of Words (MIT Press, 2000)

(MIT Press, 2000) Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (Basic Books, 2004)

(Basic Books, 2004) How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010)

(W.W. Norton & Co., 2010) Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (Crown Publishing, 2013)

(Crown Publishing, 2013) Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (Ecco, 2016)

10. David M. Buss | Evolutionary Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Buss was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1953. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1976 from the University of Texas at Austin, and his Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Buss works in the area known as evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology traces its roots back to sociobiology, the term proposed by Edward O. Wilson in his landmark 1975 study of the same name on the evolution of eusociality —-strongly cooperative societies in which individuals regularly sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. It proved so controversial at the time that the brand name sociobiology became tarnished; the field subsequently morphed into what is now called evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists attempt to explain widespread and deep-seated human behaviors in terms of selection pressure in the context of the human environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) — in our case, the African savannah in the Pleistocene era. Buss’s particular contribution to this discourse has been a theory of sexual competition and selection to explain well-known features of human sexuality. The basic idea is that stereotypical male and female mating strategies reflect the selection pressures of the human EEA. In a nutshell, this means that males were better off (in Darwinian terms of contributing genes to future populations) if they chose mates on the basis of appearance as markers of health and fertility, whereas females were better off in the Darwinian sense if they chose mates on the basis of social status as a marker of their ability to supply resources to the female and her offspring. Similarly, males are predisposed to promiscuity (because of the low physiological cost of their gametes) and to intense jealousy (to avoid being duped into giving resources to offspring not genetically related to them), whereas females are predisposed to give the appearance of fidelity (though not necessarily always the reality). Like other forms of Darwinian theorizing about human before, evolutionary psychology continues to be hotly debated; however, the appeal of Buss’s and similar work for the educated public is undeniable. Latterly, Buss has extended his theorizing to the human propensity for murderous violence. Buss is the author or co-author of more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, and the author, co-author, or editor of some dozen books. Academic Website Selected Books The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies Of Human Mating (Basic Books, 1995)

(Basic Books, 1995) Sex, Power, Conflict: Evolutionary and Feminist Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 1996)

(Oxford University Press, 1996) The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is Necessary in Love and Sex (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001)

(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001) The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (John Wiley and Sons, 2005)

(John Wiley and Sons, 2005) The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill (Penguin Books, 2006)

(Penguin Books, 2006) Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (4th ed., Pearson, 2011)

11. Leda Cosmides | Evolutionary Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Cosmides was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1957. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1979 from Radcliffe College, and her Ph.D. in 1985 from Harvard University. At Harvard, she worked closely with famed evolutionary theorist Robert L. Trivers. She is currently Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Cosmides, who throughout her career has worked closely and published jointly with her husband, anthropologist John Tooby, is one of the founders of the sub-discipline known as evolutionary psychology (see the entry for David M. Buss, above). As Cosmides has put it: Evolutionary psychology weaves together cognitive science, human evolution, hunter gatherer studies, neuroscience, psychology and evolutionary biology, in an attempt to understand and map the human mind and brain.[1] Her work has been extraordinarily wide-ranging, analyzing from an evolutionary point of view everything from the psychology of cooperation, coalition and friendship formation, incest avoidance, and autism, to threat interpretation, predator-prey relationships, visual attention, statistical reasoning, and multiple memory systems. Cosmides has stated that one reason for casting such a wide net is to illustrate how fruitful and productive evolutionary psychology analyses can be. She is the author or co-author of some 90 peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters of edited volumes, as well as the co-editor of an influential early work in the field, The Adapted Mind , among other volumes. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including election (in 1995) as Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and appointment as the APA’s 1998 G. Stanley Hall Lecturer. Together with John Tooby, Cosmides co-founded and co-directs the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC-Santa Barbara. Academic Website Selected Books The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford University Press, 1992)

(Oxford University Press, 1992) What is Evolutionary Psychology? (Yale University Press, 2005)

12. Mihály Csikszentmihályi | Personality Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Csikszentmihályi was born in 1934 in Fiume (now Rijeka) in what was then the Kingdom of Italy and is now the Republic of Croatia. He and his family spent time in an Italian internment camp during the war, but after the war was over he was able to complete his secondary school education in Rome. He emigrated to the US in 1956, at the age of 22. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1960 and his Ph.D. in 1965, both from the University of Chicago. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University. Csikszentmihályi has worked almost exclusively in the field of positive psychology—-the investigation of the positive human affective states such as pleasure, happiness, joy, love, and creativity. In particular, he is closely associated with the concept of flow. Flow is Csikszentmihályi’s term for the positive feelings associated with the experience of being completely absorbed in a task. He argues that flow-generating tasks are ones that people experience as rewarding for their own sake, as opposed to merely instrumental to some end. He further argues that fundamentally happy people are able to tap into their capacity for flow on a regular basis. He has described this experience in the following terms: Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.[2] Csikszentmihályi popularized this idea in his 1990 best-seller, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience . In addition to personality psychology, his ideas have been influential in the fields of business management and education. Csikszentmihályi has also proposed a closely related concept he calls work orientation, which is basically the capacity to experience work as rewarding for its own sake. A high level of work orientation in students is more highly correlated with good grades in school, long-term success in one’s career, and general fulfillment in life than is family environment. Csikszentmihályi is the author or co-author of about 250 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as well as the author, co-author, or editor of some 20 books. The recipient of numerous awards, grants, fellowships, invited lectureships, visiting professorships, board membership appointments, and honorary degrees, Csikszentmihályi is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Psychological Society (APS). Academic Website Selected Books Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play (Jossey-Bass, 1975)

(Jossey-Bass, 1975) Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 1988)

(Cambridge University Press, 1988) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, 1990)

(Harper & Row, 1990) The Evolving Self (Harper Perennial, 1994)

(Harper Perennial, 1994) Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (Harper Perennial, 1996)

(Harper Perennial, 1996) Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement With Everyday Life (Basic Books, 1998)

(Basic Books, 1998) Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology (Springer, 2014)

13. William Damon | Developmental Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Damon was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1944. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1967 from Harvard College, and his Ph.D. in developmental psychology in 1973 from the University of California, Berkeley. Today, he is Professor of Education in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, as well as Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. As a developmental psychologist, Damon has focused his research efforts particularly on the intellectual and social development of children, adolescents, and young adults, but also, to a lesser degree, on psychological development of persons throughout the lifespan. His work has consisted principally of large-scale empirical studies, based on both original field research (questionnaires) and meta-studies of the developmental psychology literature. His main conclusions center around the importance of the social environment for the successful enculturation of the growing child, which in turn is crucial to the child’s success and happiness in life. More specifically, Damon has been critical of changes in the conventional wisdom regarding child-rearing in our society over the past couple of generations. Pointing to the drastic decline in all the metrics of young people’s skills and behavior during this period, he argues that parents, schools, and others who have consciously discarded the commonsense attitudes and practices that had prevailed for centuries, putting a much more permissive set of rules and structures in their place, are in large part responsible for this decline. He writes that, albeit with the best of intentions, the relentless focus on self-esteem and so-called child-centered classrooms and child-rearing practices not only reflect a theoretical misunderstanding of children’s real needs, but have been disastrous in practice. As he summarizes the point: Less is expected of the young, and in turn less is received. Several of Damon’s many books have been aimed at a general readership; among these The Path to Purpose , in particular, has struck a chord, resonating with a very wide audience and helping to disseminate Damon’s ideas far beyond the usual boundaries of academia. Damon is the author or co-author of about 125 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and the author, co-author, or editor of some 18 books in all. The recipient of many awards and honors, Damon has received grants supporting his research from such prestigious organizations as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Academic Website Selected Books The Social World of the Child (Jossey-Bass, 1977)

(Jossey-Bass, 1977) Social and Personality Development: Essays on the Growth of the Child (W.W. Norton & Co., 1983)

(W.W. Norton & Co., 1983) The Moral Child: Nurturing Children’s Natural Moral Growth (Free Press, 1990)

(Free Press, 1990) Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools (Free Press, 1995)

(Free Press, 1995) Handbook of Child Psychology , four vols. (6th ed., John Wiley and Sons, 2006)

, four vols. (6th ed., John Wiley and Sons, 2006) The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find their Calling in Life (Free Press, 2008)

(Free Press, 2008) Failing Liberty 101: How We Are Leaving Young Americans Unprepared for Citizenship in a Free Society (Hoover Institution Press, 2011)

(Hoover Institution Press, 2011) The Power of Ideals: The Real Story of Moral Choice (Oxford University Press, 2015)

14. Richard J. Davidson | Personality Psychology, Biological Psychology, Cognitive Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Davidson was born in New York City in 1951. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1972 from New York University, and his Ph.D. in Personality, Psychopathology, and Psychophysiology in 1976 from Harvard University, where he worked with Daniel Goleman. He is currently the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also the Founder and Chair of the Center for Healthy Minds. Davidson is famous for espousing Buddhist traditions of mindfulness and meditation as important empirical phenomena worthy of scientific investigation, as well as important techniques for achieving inner peace and spiritual growth. He is perhaps best known for his EEG and fMRI studies of the brains of Tibetan monks while meditating. Davidson’s basic claim is that our modern understanding of the plasticity of the brain implies that the mind can be trained to achieve more positive affective states. In a nutshell, happiness is a skill—-like playing a sport or a musical instrument — and as such it can be learned. His further claim that Buddhist meditational practices are an invaluable aid in such mind-training is more controversial, which is the reason why Davidson undertook the studies on the Tibetan monks — to supply experimental proof of the beneficial effects of meditation. Davidson is a close friend of the 14th Dalai Lama and himself meditates regularly. Davidson has published many peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. He is also the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books. In 2000, he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award for lifetime achievement from the American Psychological Association (APA). Academic Website Selected Books Consciousness: The Brain, States of Awareness, and Alternate Realities (Irvington Publishers, 1979)

(Irvington Publishers, 1979) Psychobiology of Affective Development (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1984)

(Lawrence Erlbaum, 1984) The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions (Oxford University Press, 1994)

(Oxford University Press, 1994) Anxiety, Depression, and Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2000)

(Oxford University Press, 2000) Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature (Oxford University Press, 2001)

(Oxford University Press, 2001) Handbook of Affective Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2009)

(Oxford University Press, 2009) The Mind’s Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation (New Harbinger Publications, 2013)

(New Harbinger Publications, 2013) The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live—-and How You Can Change Them (Hudson Street Press, 2012)

(Hudson Street Press, 2012) Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (Avery, 2017)

15. Edward F. Diener | Personality Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Diener was born in Glendale, California, in 1946. He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1968 from California State University at Fresno, and his Ph.D. in 1974 from the University of Washington. He is currently Professor Psychology at the University of Virginia and at the University of Utah, as well as the Joseph R. Smiley Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana and a Senior Scientist with the Gallup Organization. The primary focus of Diener’s research has been in the area of subjective well-being, which is the degree of well-being or happiness that subjects attribute to themselves. In a nutshell, his main finding is that the objective aspect of people’s lives most strongly correlated with subjective well-being is social ties. All other life circumstances (education, marital status, financial status, etc.) being equal, the people who self-report being the happiest are the ones with the strongest interpersonal ties and social support networks. However, Diener found that, all other factors being equal, extraverts still tend to be happier than introverts, leading to the hypothesis that the extraverted personality type is inherently more rewarding, fostering happiness that leads to gregarious behavior, not the other way around. In short, people find happy people attractive. In other work, Diener has found that subjective well-being has measurable positive effects on health and longevity. Diener’s work has also thrown into question the long-standing belief that most people have predetermined set-points for subjective well-being which even highly negative life events (death of spouse, loss of job) do little to change over time. On the contrary, Diener has found that many people do not bounce back from devastating life events, and never return to their previous level of subjective well-being. The good news is that since the so-called set-point for subjective well-being appears not to be immutable, therapeutic intervention may potentially be beneficial. Finally, in recent years Diener has begun to explore some of the implications of his findings for politics and public policy, notably in a widely read paper he co-wrote with Martin Seligman (see below), Beyond Money: Toward an Economy of Well-Being. [3] Diener, who has a very high citation h-index score of 102, has published more than 300 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. He is also the author, co-author, or editor of some dozen books. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received the Distinguished Scientist Award conferred by the American Psychological Association (APA), both in 2012. Academic Website Selected Books Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (Russell Sage, 1999)

(Russell Sage, 1999) Culture and Subjective Well-Being (Bradford Books/MIT Press, 2000)

(Bradford Books/MIT Press, 2000) Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008)

(Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) The Science of Well-Being (Springer, 2009)

(Springer, 2009) The Culture of Well-Being (Springer, 2009)

(Springer, 2009) Assessing Well-Being (Springer, 2009)

(Springer, 2009) Well-Being and Public Policy (Oxford University Press, 2009)

(Oxford University Press, 2009) International Differences in Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2010)

16. Paul Ekman | Social Psychology, Biological Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Ekman was born in Washington, DC, in 1934. After leaving high school early and studying for three years at the University of Chicago, he received his bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1954 from New York University. Following a one-year internship at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, a teaching hospital which is part of the Department of Psychiatry of the University of California, San Francisco, Ekman obtained his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Adelphi University in 1958. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Psychology at University of California, Berkeley. Ekman’s field of expertise is nonverbal communication in humans, especially the communication of emotions through facial expressions. He has developed a highly detailed atlas of emotions linked to more than 10,000 distinguishable facial expressions. Ekman’s careful empirical investigations in this field laid the groundwork for the recent development of the field of affective neuroscience. His work has been widely influential, but also controversial. For instance, he has asserted that the emotional meanings of the various facial expressions are largely universal—-that is, independent of history or culture — which implies that they are rooted in our common human biology. This claim flies in the face of the deeply entrenched relativism within the field of cultural anthropology. In another example, Ekman has done extensive work on the differences between spontaneous (genuine) and simulated (deceptive) emotions which may be detected in facial expressions. This work has given rise to various screening techniques (some of which have been adopted by the Transportation Security Administration) which Ekman claims provide us with the best lie detection technology available today. However, the studies Ekman has carried out to back up these claims have come under sustained criticism. Ekman has published some 170 peer-reviewed journal articles or book chapters, and is the author, co-author, or editor of some 15 books. In 1991, he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (APA). Academic Website Selected Books Emotion in the Human Face (Pergamon Press, 1972)

(Pergamon Press, 1972) Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Clues (Prentice-Hall, 1975; 2nd ed., 2003)

(Prentice-Hall, 1975; 2nd ed., 2003) Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (W.W. Norton & Co., 1985)

(W.W. Norton & Co., 1985) What the Face Reveals (Oxford University Press, 1998)

(Oxford University Press, 1998) Handbook of Cognition and Emotion (John Wiley and Sons, 1999)

(John Wiley and Sons, 1999) Emotions Revealed: Understanding Faces and Feelings (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003; 2nd ed., 2007)

(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003; 2nd ed., 2007) Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion (Holt Paperbacks, 2009)

(Holt Paperbacks, 2009) Nonverbal Messages: Cracking the Code: My Life’s Pursuit (Paul Ekman Group, 2016)

17. Jochen Fahrenberg | Personality Psychology, Biological Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Fahrenberg was born in Berlin in 1937. Following undergraduate and graduate studies in psychology, sociology and philosophy in Freiburg, London, and Hamburg, Fahrenberg did his doctoral and post-doctoral work at the University of Freiburg, completing his Habilitationsschrift on the psychophysiological roots of personality there in 1966. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Freiburg. Fahrenberg co-founded the Psychophysiology Research Group (PRG) at the University of Freiburg in 1970, and in 1973 he became Chair of the Psychology Department, a position he held until his retirement in 2002. From this academic perch, Fahrenberg exerted a major influence on psychology throughout the German-speaking world and beyond. At the PRG, he conducted pioneering research in a number of fields, including the neural correlates of personality, the link between personality and illness, cardiovascular rehabilitation, and life satisfaction. The PRG also developed innovative forms of physiological monitoring of subjects, known as ambulatory monitoring or ambulatory assessment, to assist in research on behavior in everyday situations. Specifically, ambulatory monitoring allows researchers to study real-time physiological modifications in conjunction with the subject’s moment-to-moment activities, such as work and leisure. In addition, the PRG also developed a number of important tests and personality scales, notably, the Freiburg Personality Inventory (FPI), which is comparable to the American 16PF Questionnaire and is the most frequently used such assessment tool in German-speaking countries. In later years, Fahrenberg took an interest in the way in which subjects’ belief systems, attitudes, and assumptions about human nature interact with elements of personality, as well as, conversely, the way in which philosophical assumptions and concepts impact the theory and practice of psychology professionals. Fahrenberg has co-authored some 150 journal articles with other members of the PRG, as well as editing a number of textbooks. In his later years, Fahrenberg also published a number of articles on the history of psychology as a scientific discipline, the philosophy of science, and the conceptual interactions between psychology and philosophy. Personal Website Selected Books Nicht-invasive Methodik für die kardiovasculäre Psychophysiologie [Non-invasive Methodolgy for Cardiovascular Psychophysiology] (Peter Lang, 1989)

[Non-invasive Methodolgy for Cardiovascular Psychophysiology] (Peter Lang, 1989) Ambulatory Assessment: Computer-Assisted Psychological and Psychophysiological Methods in Monitoring and Field Studies (Hogrefe and Huber, 1996)

(Hogrefe and Huber, 1996) Alltagsnahe Psychologie [Psychology Close to Everyday Life] (Verlag Hans Huber, 2002)

[Psychology Close to Everyday Life] (Verlag Hans Huber, 2002) Annahmen über den Menschen [Assumptions about Human Beings] (Roland Asanger Verlag, 2003)

[Assumptions about Human Beings] (Roland Asanger Verlag, 2003) Psychophysiologie in Labor, Klinik und Alltag: 40 Jahre Projektarbeit der Freiburger Forschungsgruppe Psychophysiologie [Psychophysiology in the Lab, the Clinic, and Everyday Life: 40 Years of Work by the Freiburg Psychophysiology Research Group] (Peter Lang, 2005)

18. Howard Gardner | Developmental Psychology, Educational Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Gardner was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1943. He received his bachelor’s degree in social relations in 1965 at Harvard College, where he came into contact with Erik Erikson. After a stint at the London School of Economics, he returned to Harvard, where he obtained his Ph.D. in developmental psychology in 1971, working under the supervision of famed developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner and philosopher Nelson Goodman. He is currently the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Gardner is a developmental psychologist who has primarily focused on child development and the psychology of education. He is without a doubt best known for his theory of multiple intelligences —-the highly influential idea that the sort of intelligence measured by standardized IQ tests is only one among a variety of types of intelligence deployed by human beings in their interactions with the world around them (especially the social world). According to the theory, many common IQ tests themselves fail to distinguish adequately between linguistic intelligence (verbal fluency), logico-mathematical intelligence (numeracy), and spatial intelligence (the ability to manipulate 2- and 3-D shapes), while several other types of intelligence are not measured at all by standard tests, including kinesthetic intelligence (athletic ability), interpersonal intelligence (social/emotional skill), intrapersonal intelligence (self-knowledge), and aesthetic intelligence (artistic/musical ability). While Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences has been broadly influential at a professional level, as well as wildly popular at a commercial level, it has not been without its critics. A number of observers have pointed out that there is very little empirical support for the theory. It must be said, too, that while many educators pay lip service to the theory, they have been slow putting it into practice in an everyday classroom setting. In later years, Gardner began exploring the implications of the theory of multiple intelligences for other areas, such as business school training. Gardner has close to 500 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters to his credit, not to mention several hundred op-ed pieces, essays, blog posts, and other articles aimed at a popular audience. He is also the author-, co-author, or editor of some 50 books. Among the most widely known and celebrated of living psychologists, he has won far too many awards, prizes, grants, fellowships, and honorary degrees to mention here. Academic Website Selected Books Art, Mind, and Brain: A Cognitive Approach to Creativity (Basic Books, 1982)

(Basic Books, 1982) Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Basic Books, 1983)

(Basic Books, 1983) The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach (Basic Books, 1991)

(Basic Books, 1991) Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice, a Reader (Basic Books, 1993)

(Basic Books, 1993) Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinksy, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi (Basic Books, 1993)

(Basic Books, 1993) Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (Basic Books, 1995)

(Basic Books, 1995) Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century (Basic Books, 1999)

(Basic Books, 1999) The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Facts and Standardized Tests, the K—12 Education that Every Child Deserves (Penguin Books, 2000)

(Penguin Books, 2000) Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds (Harvard Business Review Press, 2004)

19. Kenneth J. Gergen | Social Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Gergen was born in Rochester, New York, in 1934. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1957 from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in 1962 from Duke University. He is currently a Senior Research Professor at Swarthmore College, as well as an Adjunct Professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Chairman of the Board of the Taos Institute. Gergen began his career in an unconventional way—- researching such questions as the disunity of the self and the negative impact of altruistic acts on their recipients — then veered ever deeper into terrain usually associated more closely with philosophy than with psychology. In a nutshell, Gergen imported into social psychology the doctrine of social constructivism, which originated in such fields as linguistics (Edward Sapir, Benjamin Whorf), sociology (Alfred Schütz, Peter Berger), anthropology (Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, Clifford Geertz), and philosophy (Thomas Kuhn, Nelson Goodman, Michel Foucault). The idea behind social constructivism is that for human beings reality is neither given by the physical world nor conjured up by the individual mind, but rather constructed collectively by a given society or culture. In Gergen’s relational view of the self, for example, our sense of self is wholly dependent upon the scope for social action afforded us by our place in society. Moreover, he rejects the ideal of rationality usually associated with the social sciences, pointing out that such ideals themselves derive from particular historically and culturally bound structures. Among the many concepts Gergen has introduced into the social psychology vocabulary are the cycle of progressive infirmity (by which psychological diagnoses impact subjects’ self-understanding for the worse) and generative theory (the idea that the social sciences do not objectively describe the social world so much as theorize it in ways that open up new possibilities for collective action). Gergen has published more than 500 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as well as popular articles, op-eds pieces, and the like. He is also the author, co-author, or editor of almost 40 books. He has received numerous honorary degrees and has occupied visiting professorships at a multitude of universities all around the world. Academic Website Selected Books Toward Transformation in Social Knowledge (Springer, 1982)

(Springer, 1982) The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (Basic Books, 1991)

(Basic Books, 1991) Realities and Relationships: Soundings in Social Construction (Harvard University Press, 1995)

(Harvard University Press, 1995) An Invitation to Social Construction (Sage, 1999)

(Sage, 1999) Social Construction in Context (Sage, 2001)

(Sage, 2001) Therapeutic Realities: Collaboration, Oppression and Relational Flow (Taos Institute Publications, 2006)

(Taos Institute Publications, 2006) Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community (Oxford University Press, 2009)

(Oxford University Press, 2009) Paths to Positive Aging: Dog Days with a Bone and Other Essays (Taos Institute Publications, 2017)

20. Daniel T. Gilbert | Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Gilbert was born in 1957. He received his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in psychology in 1981 from the University of Colorado Denver, and his Ph.D. in social psychology in 1985 from Princeton University. He is currently the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Gilbert works at the intersection of social psychology and cognitive psychology, with a focus on the way in which cognitive biases regarding the projected impact of individual choices on happiness ( affective forecasting ) may have wide-ranging societal and political implications. Simply put, affective forecasting is the calculation we all make all the time, consciously or subconsciously, when faced with any decision—-generally speaking, we choose the option or the course of action that we believe will lead to the greatest increase in our overall happiness. The problem is that we are not very good at affective forecasting, which is beset by the kind of cognitive fallacies and illusions studied by several other psychologists on this list (Dan Ariely, Daniel Kahneman). For example, most subjects exaggerate the satisfaction they believe they will derive from possessing objects in comparison with having experiences (vacations, entertainment) and cultivating social ties with family and friends. In particular, Gilbert’s empirical studies reliably show that the acquisition of wealth beyond a certain minimum makes no additional contribution to happiness. He therefore urges us to redirect our energies towards ordinary, everyday experiences with family and friends, if we would be happy. Through his many students, honorary lectures, prizes, and fellowships, Gilbert’s ideas have won widespread recognition from his peers, while his bestseller, Stumbling on Happiness , as well as his many popular essays, television appearances, and TED talks, have carried his message effectively to a very broad popular audience. Academic Website Selected Books The Handbook of Social Psychology (4th ed., McGraw-Hill, 1998; 5th ed., 2010)

(4th ed., McGraw-Hill, 1998; 5th ed., 2010) Stumbling on Happiness (Knopf, 2006)

(Knopf, 2006) Psychology (Worth Publishers, 2009; 4th ed., 2016)

(Worth Publishers, 2009; 4th ed., 2016) Introducing Psychology (Worth Publishers, 2010; 4th ed., 2017)

21. Carol Gilligan | Developmental Psychology, Social Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Gilligan (née Friedman) was born in New York City in 1936. She received her bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in English literature in 1958 from Swarthmore College, her master’s degree in clinical psychology in 1961 from Radcliffe College, and her Ph.D. in social psychology in 1964 from Harvard University. She is currently Professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology in the Department of Psychology at New York University-Steinhardt, as well as University Professor in NYU’s School of Law. After teaching at the University of Chicago for several years, Gilligan returned to Harvard in 1971 as an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education. It was there that she worked closely with developmental psychologists Erik Erikson and Lawrence Kohlberg. Soon, however, she became dissatisfied with Kohlberg’s theory of the stages of moral development, which was based on research conducted primarily on male subjects. Gilligan felt that girls and women attain moral maturity by a different path; more importantly, she argued that moral decision-making by women in general takes place in a different voice than that by men. In developing her ideas, she came to characterize male morality as primarily rule-based and focused on the individual as the primary bearer of rights and duties and as the locus of judgments of moral desert; whereas women, she held, reason morally from a care perspective that is primarily concerned with empathy and compassion, and focused on needs, relationships, and group interests. Gilligan’s early work—-first published in 1982 in her landmark book, In a Different Voice —-was later developed by her, and by philosophers such as Nel Noddings, Virginia Held, Sara Ruddick, and others, into an entirely new branch of moral philosophy known as the ethics of care, which many consider to be an essential complement to, if not a substitute for, the traditional, male-oriented ethics of justice. Thus, it can be seen that Gilligan’s ideas have been hugely influential; nevertheless, they have not been immune from criticism. From her right flank, as it were, some critics have claimed that her work lacks sufficient empirical support; while from her left flank, she has been charged with essentialism and giving aid and comfort to the patriarchy. Gilligan is the author or co-author or some 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and is the author, co-author, or editor of nine academic books, as well as a novel. She is the recipient of numerous awards, prizes, and honorary degrees. Academic Website Selected Books In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Harvard University Press, 1982)

(Harvard University Press, 1982) Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women’s Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education (Harvard University Press, 1989)

(Harvard University Press, 1989) Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (Harvard University Press, 1992)

(Harvard University Press, 1992) Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationships (Harvard University Press, 1997)

(Harvard University Press, 1997) The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love (Knopf, 2002)

(Knopf, 2002) Kyra: A Novel (Random House, 2008)

(Random House, 2008) The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

(Cambridge University Press, 2009) Joining the Resistance (Polity Press, 2011)

22. Daniel Goleman | Social Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Goleman was born in Stockton, California, in 1946. He received his bachelor’s degree magna cum laude from Amherst College, and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology and personality development from Harvard University. After graduating, he taught for some time a Harvard, before moving to Yale, where he co-founded the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning at Yale University’s Child Studies Center (now located a the University of Illinois at Chicago). Later, Goleman worked primarily as a literary journalist and freelance writer. He is currently Co-Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, sponsored by Rutgers University, and Board Member Emeritus of the Mind and Life Institute. During the early part of his academic career, Goleman arranged for several extended stays in India and Sri Lanka, in pursuit of his interest in Asian traditions of meditation. The result was his first book, originally published in 1977, on the different types of meditative techniques that he found there. After leaving his teaching job for a career in journalism and writing, Goleman was a regular contributor to the New York Times ’s science pages for 12 years (between 1984 and 1996), an experience which allowed him to become steeped in the most up-to-date biological and medical literature on the brain. It was to the confluence of these dual streams of ancient meditative practice and modern neuroscience that he owed the breakthrough work that was soon to come. In 1995, he published Emotional Intelligence , which became a huge international bestseller and made the book’s title into a household phrase. In this book, Goleman studies the emotions from biological, evolutionary, psychological, philosophical, and commonsense perspectives, showing the central role they play, not just in our affective life per se, but in all aspects of human cognition and action. He then makes the more controversial claim that emotional intelligence—-the ability to understand one’s own and other people’s emotional states in any given situation — is equally if not more important than IQ as a predictor of success and happiness, not only in one’s interpersonal relations, but also in academic and professional contexts. Goleman’s work since 1995 has focused on the cultivation of emotional intelligence as a learnable and teachable skill, with important implications for the world of education, for the business community, and for the behavioral sciences more generally. Personal Website Selected Books The Varieties of Meditative Experience (Irvington Publishers, 1977; 2nd ed., 1996)

(Irvington Publishers, 1977; 2nd ed., 1996) Vital Lies, Simple Truths (Simon & Schuster, 1985)

(Simon & Schuster, 1985) Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (Bantam Books, 1995)

(Bantam Books, 1995) Working with Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books, 1998)

(Bantam Books, 1998) Primal Leadership (Harvard Business Review Press, 2002)

(Harvard Business Review Press, 2002) Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (Bantam Books, 2003)

(Bantam Books, 2003) Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (Bantam Books, 2006)

(Bantam Books, 2006) Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (HarperCollins, 2013)

23. Alison Gopnik | Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Gopnik was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1955. She received her bachelor’s degree in psychology and philosophy in 1975 from McGill University, and her doctorate in experimental psychology in 1980 from Oxford University. She is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, with an affiliate appointment in the Philosophy Department. Gopnik has worked at the intersection of developmental psychology and cognitive science. In particular, she noted early in her career that the mathematical models she was attempting to develop to represent the way infants learn to interact successfully with the world around them were formally similar to Bayesian networks, an application of graph theory to the theory of probability that had been independently developed by philosophers of science to try to understand the way science works, especially in the form of non-deductive logical inference (induction and inference to the best explanation). This was a highly significant observation for at least two reasons: first, it provided a kind of empirical confirmation that Bayesian networks really do capture something important about scientific reasoning; and, second, it powerfully demonstrated that babies are already capable of employing far more sophisticated methods of discovery than one might have imagined absent such evidence. Gopnik, who has been much concerned with philosophical issues throughout her career, realized that this discovery gave substantial backing to the rationalist (or nature ), side—-against the empiricist (or nurture ) side — of the venerable philosophical debate about the origins of human knowledge. In a nutshell, the all-nurture (or blank-slate ) theory of human reasoning ability is now untenable in light of Gopnik’s findings. The wide-ranging 2009 book in which Gopnik reported these and many other findings to a popular audience, The Philosophical Baby , was a runaway bestseller. Gopnik is the author or co-author of more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles or book chapters, as well as the author, co-author, or editor of six books. The recipient of numerous awards, grants, fellowships, lectureships, and honorary degrees, in 2013 Gopnik was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Academic Website Selected Books Words, Thoughts, and Theories (MIT Press, 1996)

(MIT Press, 1996) The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind (William Morrow, 1999)

(William Morrow, 1999) How Babies Think: The Science of Childhood (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000)

(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000) Causal Learning: Psychology, Philosophy, and Computation (Oxford University Press, 2007)

(Oxford University Press, 2007) The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009)

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016)

24. Jonathan D. Haidt | Social Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Haidt was born in New York City in 1963. He received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1985 from Yale University, and his Ph.D. in psychology in 1992 from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Haidt’s work has focused on the social effects of various aspects of moral judgment and subconscious decision-making. One of his papers, The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail [4]—which argues that we mostly make moral judgments on an intuitive basis, reserving moral reasoning for the ex post facto justification of decisions already made—-has been cited more than 6000 times. Haidt first became widely known for his work in the field of positive psychology (happiness research), especially for his 2005 book, The Happiness Hypothesis . In this book, he draws heavily on work in cultural anthropology which shows that certain character traits are recognized as embodying wisdom the world over. To be happy, Haidt argues, we must re-train our social moral intuitions, and to do that, we need to consciously cultivate the wise traits, including insight into the appropriate occasions for reciprocity, the ability to change one’s mind, humility, discrimination about the different kinds of love, turning adversity to advantage, the pursuit of virtue, and a sense of the divine, among others. Next, Haidt turned his attention to developing an empirically based typology of the moral emotions (moral foundations theory). His five categories are: caring; fairness; group loyalty; respect for authority; and purity (sanctity). In his most recent book, The Righteous Mind , Haidt argues that those on the political left tend to honor only the first two of these moral principles, while those on the political right honor all five of them. He further argues that the only way to narrow the divide between left and right is for those on both sides to be more conscious of the moral categories the other side is operating with. Very recently, Haidt has taken a lot of heat from the cultural left by suggesting that there needs to be a greater diversity of opinion in American academia. Among other things, he has co-founded the Heterodox Academy to further that end. Haidt is the author or co-author of more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. Academic Website Selected Books Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived (American Psychological Association, 2002)

(American Psychological Association, 2002) The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Basic Books, 2005)

(Basic Books, 2005) The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012)

25. Jerome Kagan | Developmental Psychology, Personal Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Kagan was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1929. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1950 from Rutgers University, and his Ph.D. in Psychology in 1954 from Yale University. He is currently Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology (Emeritus) at Harvard University, as well as Co-Faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. Kagan began his career working on longitudinal studies designed to reveal whether early childhood experiences have lasting effects on the development of personality. He found that character traits are relatively buffered from any lasting effects of early traumatic experiences, and indeed are quite stable across the entire life cycle. He also found that, while cognitive development is of course dependent upon many important factors in the child’s environment, it is nevertheless quite robust in the sense that early delays may be reliably compensated for later once the environment impediments to normal development are removed. Next, Kagan turned his attention to temperament—-relatively stable personality types. He defined two such basic temperaments: inhibited (shy, timid, socially withdrawn) and uninhibited (bold and socially outgoing). These analyses have been widely influential, both within the profession and among laymen; however, Kagan stressed that such knowledge is of only limited therapeutic usefulness, given that temperament arises out of a complex interaction between genes and environment, both of which are beyond our effective control. In recent years, Kagan has turned his attention to a series of problems he finds with the psychological profession itself, including: disregarding the difference in settings in which experimental studies are conducted; basing theories and practices on single measures, rather than complex, multi-dimensional measurements; defining mental illnesses on the basis of symptoms without regard for etiology; and treating disorders with drugs that are non-specific for the disorder. In his most recent work, Kagan has written several books for a popular audience with the aim of pushing back against the tidal wave of materialist reductionism (the idea that the mind is nothing but the brain) in psychology and the wider culture. Kagan is the author or co-author of some 450 peer-reviewed journal articles and books chapters, as well as the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books. The recipient of countless awards, grants, and other honors, he was elected a Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1963, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968. Academic Website Selected Books Birth to Maturity: Psychological Development (John Wiley and Sons, 1962)

(John Wiley and Sons, 1962) The Second Year: The Emergence of Self-Awareness (Harvard University Press, 1981)

(Harvard University Press, 1981) The Nature of the Child (Basic Books, 1984)

(Basic Books, 1984) Galen’s Prophecy (Basic Books, 1994)

(Basic Books, 1994) Three Seductive Ideas (Harvard University Press, 1998)

(Harvard University Press, 1998) An Argument for Mind (Yale University Press, 2006)

(Yale University Press, 2006) The Temperamental Thread: How Genes, Culture, Time and Luck make Us Who We Are (Dana Press, 2010)

(Dana Press, 2010) Psychology’s Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back (Yale University Press, 2012)

(Yale University Press, 2012) The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development (Basic Books, 2013)

(Basic Books, 2013) On Being Human: Why Mind Matters (Yale University Press, 2016)

26. Daniel Kahneman | Cognitive Psychology, Behavioral Economics







Copy link to this entry… Kahneman was born in 1934 in Tel Aviv, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and is today the State of Israel. However, he was raised in Paris, where his parents had emigrated from Lithuania. After spending the war years in hiding in Nazi-occupied France, the family emigrated to Israel permanently in 1948. Kahneman received his bachelor’s degree in psychology and mathematics in 1954 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After his military service in the Israeli Defense Forces, Kahneman went to the US, where he received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1961 from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Kahneman is chiefly known for founding (together with his long-time collaborator, Amos Tversky, who died in 1996) the academic discipline now known as behavioral economics. Traditional economic theory had always assumed that human beings are rational actors, which means they can generally be relied upon to act in ways they perceive as furthering their own best interests. This idea was called rational choice theory (or expected utility theory ). Kahneman and Tversky felt that rational choice theory was unrealistic, and they set out to develop more empirically adequate models by making the more realistic assumption of bounded rationality. Bounded rationality is the idea that, not only are human actors constrained by emotional factors such as irrational aversions and prejudices, they are simply not very good at reasoning correctly about certain kinds of situations (especially ones involving probabilities). Kahneman and Tversky made a special study of the irrational bias they called loss aversion —-the common feeling that it is better to avoid losing something than it is to gain the same thing. In later work, Kahneman began to incorporate evolutionary theory more explicitly into his work, developing a two-system, fast/slow model of human thinking. According to this theory, the fast system has been hard-wired in us by evolution to enable us to react quickly to stressful situations based on rough-and-ready, heuristic behavioral propensities. The slow system, on the other hand, allows us to reflect upon our experience in a more relaxed and thoughtful way. Kahneman has authored or co-authored some 170 peer-reviewed journal article and book chapters, and is the author, co-author, or editor of seven books. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and in 2013, he received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Dan Ariely Interview—-A Primer on Behavioral Economics Academic Website Selected Books Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge University Press, 1982)

(Cambridge University Press, 1982) Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (Russell Sage, 1999)

(Russell Sage, 1999) Choices, Values and Frames (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

(Cambridge University Press, 2000) Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

27. Robert Kurzban | Evolutionary Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Kurzban was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1969. He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1991 from Cornell University, and his Ph.D. in psychology in 1998 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he worked with Leda Cosmides (see above) and John Tooby. He is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. As a student of Cosmides, Kurzban belongs to the second generation of evolutionary psychologists (on evolutionary psychology, see the entry for David M. Buss, above). Kurzban’s own work has been very wide-ranging, drawing on insights from social psychology, cognitive psychology, and experimental economics, in addition to evolutionary theory. In a nutshell, he attempts to identify the selective advantage of particular human social behavioral traits in the context of our environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). To cite one well-known example from his work, Kurzban has argued that human beings undoubtedly possess an innate tendency to notice facial and other morphological features of people different from themselves, due to the social context of small-scale hunter-gatherer bands within which hominization occurred. However, while to our modern eyes this history may appear unfortunate, giving rise to racism, the tendency itself is not really linked to race as such (which is in any case a modern social construct). Kurzban has applied similar reasoning to other phenomena such as cooperation, morality, and mate choice (drawing out implications for modern speed dating !). Most recently, he has been a key player in the debate over the modularity of brain functions, a crucial assumption underlying evolutionary psychology. In 2003, Kurzban founded the Pennsylvania Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology (PLEEP) at the University of Pennsylvania, which he continues to serve as Director. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Evolution and Human Behavior , and is the author or co-author of around 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as well as the author, co-author, or editor of seven books. Personal Website Selected Books Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind (Princeton University Press, 2010)

(Princeton University Press, 2010) The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It (Princeton University Press, 2014)

(Princeton University Press, 2014) Evolutionary Psychology , five volumes (SAGE Publications, 2016)

28. David Lewis | Personality Psychology, Clinical Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Lewis was born in France in 1942.[5] He received his bachelor’s degree with first-class honors from the University of Westminster, and his doctorate in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex, both in the UK. He is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of Sussex. The focus of his doctoral work was on the treatment of phobias and general anxiety states. Lewis originally intended to become a doctor, but never received his medical degree. During his time in medical school, he earned his living by his pen (he published his first novel at the age of 16!). After leaving medical school, Lewis worked full-time for the next 10 years as a freelance journalist, photographer, and writer. During this period, he also worked in broadcast journalism, mainly as a presenter for the BBC on the radio and television. It was only after these experiences that he decided to pursue his higher education in psychology, as already outlined above. After graduation, Lewis taught for a while, before qualifying as a Chartered Psychologist and setting up in private practice, where, building upon his graduate school studies, he specialized in treating phobias and anxiety. During this time, he pioneered a new type of therapy called neurofeedback, whereby patients monitor their own brain states in real time in response to various positive and negative stimuli, eventually learning to improve control over their emotions. Lewis also conducted research into the interaction between breathing and emotion, which resulted in a new form of breath-control therapy (Bo-tau) for controlling anxiety, phobic responses, and panic attacks. Moreover, he has used his insights into the way the mind and body work together to develop training programs in other fields of endeavor, such as sports and business. In addition, he is considered to be the father of neuromarketing, a discipline which uses fMRI and other technology to study how prospective consumers respond to advertisements and other marketing stimuli. The author or co-author of more than 30 books, many of them bestsellers, Lewis is in high demand as a public speaker. He is also Director of Research at Mindlab International, an internationally recognized neuromarketing firm. Personal Website Selected Books Thinking Better: A Revolutionary New Program to Achieve Peak Mental Performance (Rawson Associates, 1984)

(Rawson Associates, 1984) The Alpha Plan: Making the Most of Your Mind (Arrow Books, 1986)

(Arrow Books, 1986) Mind Skills: Giving Your Child a Brighter Future (Souvenir Press, 1987)

(Souvenir Press, 1987) Helping Your Anxious Child (Methuen Publishing, 1988)

(Methuen Publishing, 1988) The Secret Language of Success (BBS Publishing, 1995)

(BBS Publishing, 1995) The Man Who Invented Hitler: The Making of the Führer (Bounty Books, 2005)

(Bounty Books, 2005) The Brain Sell: When Science Meets Shopping (Nicholas Brealey, 2013)

(Nicholas Brealey, 2013) Impulse: Why We Do What We Do without Knowing Why We Do It (Belknap Press, 2013)

(Belknap Press, 2013) Fat Planet: The Obesity Trap and How We Can Escape It (Random House, 2015)

29. Marsha M. Linehan | Personality Psychology, Clinical Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Linehan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1943. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1968 from Loyola University Chicago, and her Ph.D. in social and experimental personality psychology in 1971 from the same university. She is currently Professor of Psychology and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington, and Director of that university’s Behavioral Research and Therapy Clinics. Linehan’s primary field of research has been borderline personality disorder (BPD). Patients suffering from BPD present with extremely volatile emotions and disturbed thinking, without crossing the line into full-blown schizophrenia—-hence the notion that they occupy a borderline between neurosis and psychosis. Co-morbidities of BPD include clinical depression, bipolar disorder, self-harm, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation. Linehan has revealed that she herself was extremely troubled as an adolescent (in retrospect, she believes she suffered from BPD) and spent two years in a mental hospital, submitting to the relatively crude treatments then available. This experience lay at the root of her determination to study her own condition scientifically. As she put it many years later: I was in hell…And I made a vow: when I get out, I’m going to come back and get others out of here.[10] Linehan was initially drawn to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), with its emphasis on helping patients to re-frame their conflicts in a more realistic way to enable them to gain sufficient detachment to bring their emotions under better voluntary control (on CBT, see the entry for Aaron T. Beck, above). Soon, however, she felt that another component was needed—-religious faith. Linehan has written that her Catholic faith played an important role in her own eventual recovery. However, it was her study of the meditative practices of Zen Buddhism — which she sees as sharing many features with Christian prayer — that led her to focus on the specific approach for which she has become world-famous, and which she came to call dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT). These elements are radical acceptance of oneself and one’s present reality, and mindfulness of each passing moment. Together, these two features constitute a way of observing one’s own emotions as they come and go, without acting on them. Another element — and the source of the term dialectical — is counterbalancing distorted thoughts and harmful emotions by diametrically opposite ways of thinking and acting. As an evidence-based therapy, DBT is considered by many experts to be the most effective treatment available for BPD and allied illnesses. Linehan is the author or co-author of around 240 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and is the author or co-author of seven books and manuals, several of which have been translated into many foreign languages. The recipient of innumerable grants, awards, fellowships, lectureships, and honorary degrees, in 2001 Linehan received the Distinguished Scientist Award bestowed by the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology, an affiliate of the American Psychological Association (APA). Academic Website Selected Books Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder (Guilford Press, 1993)

(Guilford Press, 1993) Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder (Guilford Press, 1993; 2nd ed. 2014)

(Guilford Press, 1993; 2nd ed. 2014) Dialectical Behavior Therapy with Suicidal Adolescents (Guilford Press, 2006)

(Guilford Press, 2006) Doing Dialectical Behavior Therapy: A Practical Guide (Guilford Press, 2011)

(Guilford Press, 2011) DBT® Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition (Guilford Press, 2014)

(Guilford Press, 2014) DBT® Principles in Action: Acceptance, Change, and Dialectics (Guildford Press, 2016)

30. Elizabeth F. Loftus | Cognitive Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Loftus (née Fishman) was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1944. She received her bachelor’s degree with highest honors in mathematics and psychology in 1966 from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her master’s degree and her Ph.D., both in mathematical psychology, in 1967 and 1970, respectively, from Stanford University. She is currently Distinguished Professor of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, where she also holds appointments as Professor of Cognitive Science and Professor of Law. In addition, she is a Fellow of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and was the Founding Director of the Center for Psychology and Law, both at UC-Irvine. Loftus’s work has focused on human memory. Beginning in the 1970s, she conducted a series of experiments designed to reveal the stability of memory of recent events in the light of contradictory information given to the subject after the fact. Her conclusions showed that it is easy to convince people that their memories are incorrect, and even to cause them to change what they claim to remember—-a phenomenon she dubbed the misinformation effect. Generalizing from such laboratory studies, Loftus concluded that human memories are constantly being reconstructed, and hence are far more malleable and open to suggestion than previously thought. The implications of her research for eyewitness testimony — upon which our entire criminal justice system is based — are obvious and troubling. Loftus and her work rocketed to fame in the early 1990s when she gave expert testimony in a series of court cases involving the phenomenon of so-called repressed memory. At that time, the idea that the memory of traumatic events might be repressed and only recalled years or even decades later under questioning by experts had taken hold of the public imagination. Prominent cases involved purported mass child molestation and Satanic rituals. By explaining her findings regarding the ease with which false memories can be implanted in people’s minds — and children’s most of all — by authority figures, Loftus played a key role in securing justice for those wrongfully accused in such cases, and in bringing this troubling episode of mass hysteria to a close. Loftus is the author or co-author of close to 600 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as well as the author, co-author, or editor more than 20 books. The recipient of grants, awards, lectureships, honorary degrees, and other honors too numerous to mention, Loftus is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Academic Website Selected Books Human Memory: The Processing of Information (Erlbaum Associates, 1976)

(Erlbaum Associates, 1976) Cognitive Processes (Prentice-Hall, 1979; 2nd ed., 1986)

(Prentice-Hall, 1979; 2nd ed., 1986) Eyewitness Testimony (Harvard University Press, 1979; 2nd ed., 1996)

(Harvard University Press, 1979; 2nd ed., 1996) Memory: Surprising New Insights into How We Remember and Why We Forget (Addison-Wesley, 1980)

(Addison-Wesley, 1980) Psychology (Knopf, 1981; 5th ed., 1999)

(Knopf, 1981; 5th ed., 1999) Eyewitness Testimony—-Psychological Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1984)

(Cambridge University Press, 1984) Eyewitness Testimony: Civil and Criminal (Kluwer, 1987; 4th ed., 2008)

(Kluwer, 1987; 4th ed., 2008) Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial (St. Martin’s Press, 1991)

(St. Martin’s Press, 1991) The Myth of Repressed Memory (St. Martin’s Press, 1994)

31. Andrew N. Meltzoff | Developmental Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Meltzoff was born in 1950. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1972 from Harvard College, and his doctorate in 1976 from Oxford University. He currently holds the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Chair at the University of Washington, where he is also Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the university’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. Meltzoff began his career by studying the ability of very young infants to imitate adult facial expressions and manual gestures, culminating in a landmark paper published in 1977,[6] in which Meltzoff and co-author M. Keith Moore established conclusively that infants as young as two weeks old are capable of reliably imitating adult expressions and gestures—-one of the first results to demonstrate that neonates possess far more sophisticated cognitive abilities than anyone had hitherto suspected. Subsequent studies demonstrated similar abilities in newborns within the first hour after birth. These findings were revolutionary in several respects, not least in light of their cross-modal character (vision and proprioception), which implied the existence of a highly developed innate cognitive faculty in newborns. This advance in our understanding had profound implications, not only for developmental psychology, but also for the study of language acquisition, general learning, memory, socialization, and many other important psychic phenomena (for example, see the discussion of the nature/nurture controversy in the entry for Alison Gopnik, above). In later work, Meltzoff turned his attention to a number of other topics, such as autism, empathy, intention, the infant’s theory of mind (its ability to understand other people’s intentions), and the neural mechanisms underpinning gaze-following and imitation. As a result of his decades of research on infants, Meltzoff stresses the importance of infant imitation for laying the proper foundations for the normal development of our very humanity: They have a hand, you have a hand and they recognize the similarity and that’s the initial bridge between self and other that gives rise, when they’re older, to a feeling of empathy for others and caring for others.[7] Meltzoff is the author or co-author of more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and has co-authored or edited four books, including three in collaboration with Alison Gopnik (see above). The recipient of many awards, grants, and honorary degrees, Meltzoff sits on the editorial board of eight academic journals and the advisory board or board of trustees of four foundations. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Academic Website Selected Books Words, Thoughts, and Theories (MIT Press, 1996)

(MIT Press, 1996) The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind (William Morrow, 1999)

(William Morrow, 1999) How Babies Think: The Science of Childhood (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000)

(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000) The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution and Brain Bases (Cambridge University Press, 2002)

32. Geoffrey F. Miller | Evolutionary Psychology







Copy link to this entry… Miller was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1965.[8] He earned his bachelor’s degree in biology and psychology in 1987 from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1993 from Stanford University. His dissertation, written under the supervision of Roger N. Shepard, was titled Evolution of the Human Brain through Runaway Sexual Selection. He is currently Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of New Mexico. Miller has done research in a number of different areas of psychology, above all, in evolutionary psychology, and especially in two sub-fields within that discipline: human sexual selection and the new field of evolutionary consumer psychology. (On evolutionary psychology in general, see the discussion under the entry for David M. Buss, above.) Sexual selection, in a nutshell, is the idea that the sexes may sometimes evolve independently of each other through adaptations geared specifically to the mating preferences of the opposite sex. Thus, sexual selection is a subset of natural selection; it is a useful concept for explaining the existence of what might otherwise seem like useless or even harmful traits, such as the peacock’s tail. Miller is especially known for his work on updating famed statistician Ronald A. Fisher’s sexual selection models originally developed in the 1910s. These models showed how, in species with certain types of breeding patterns, sexual selection may spin out of control—-to the point of threatening the species’s very existence ( runaway selection ). The extravagant antlers of the extinct Irish elk are often cited as a case in point. Miller has argued that the human brain, whose rapid size in