Catherine Reed: Claremont-McKenna College Department of PsychologySocial psychologists have embraced the tenants of embodied cognition to explain how we understand the emotions of others. They claim that the reinstantiation of previous sensorimotor experience during emotional and social information processing is an essential process for understanding others’ emotions (e.g., Neidenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2005). […]

Adriana Galvan: UCLA Department of PsychologyAdolescence is a developmental period marked by heightened sensitivity to reward and increased proclivity towards risk-taking behavior. These behavioral changes are paralleled by significant developmental changes in neural circuitry related to reward processing and cognitive control. In this talk, I will describe recent data on adolescent brain development, propose a […]

Lynn Fairbanks: UCLA Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral SciencesThe ability to form and maintain social relationships is an important attribute that has broad implications for health and fitness in humans and nonhuman primates. In this presentation, I will describe the development of a quantitative measure of sociability in the Vervet Research Colony, a multigenerational pedigreed […]

Tim Waring: UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and PolicyNumerous scholars have shown that increasing ethnic diversity is correlated with reduced cooperation and fewer public goods. This result has significant implications for development policy, lowering expectations for success in public infrastructure investment with ethnically diverse populations. I present evidence that ethnic hierarchy may be driving […]

Nameera Akhtar: UCSC Department of PsychologyParents and researchers in Western middle-class societies emphasize dyadic interactions and teaching children new skills directly. This emphasis obscures the fact that young children can learn much through observation of others’ interactions. I will describe the results of several recent studies of young children’s learning from third-party interactions. Some of […]

Eric Vilain: Professor of Human Genetics, Pediatrics and Urology Director, Center for Gender-Based Biology, Chief, Medical Genetics - Department of Pediatrics, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLAHuman sexual orientation, one’s preference for male or female sexual partners, is a largely stable behavioral trait with a significant genetic component. It is a highly sexually dimorphic […]

Karen Bales: UC Davis Department of PsychologyIn socially monogamous mammals like humans, many individuals such as mothers, fathers, and alloparents often display parenting behaviors. While the hormonal and neural basis of maternal care has been well-studied, both fathering and alloparenting remain more mysterious. Studies from prairie voles and titi monkeys, both monogamous mammals, implicate oxytocin, […]

Peter Kim: USC Department of Management and Organization, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern CaliforniaThroughout history, people have faced the question of how best to respond to a wide range of alleged and/or actual transgressions. A fundamental uncertainty, in this regard, is whether our reactions to such transgressions would differ depending on whether we […]

Russell Gray: University of Auckland Department of PsychologyCurrent debates about “Darwinizing culture” have typically focused on the validity of memetics. In this talk I will argue that meme-like inheritance is not a necessary requirement for descent with modification and suggest that an alternative, and more productive, way of Darwinizing culture can be found in the […]

Peter Fashing: CSU Fullerton Department of AnthropologyGiven that animal societies represent a collection of genetically selfish individuals that have come together to live and reproduce as part of a group, conflicts over the allocation of resources essential to survival and reproduction must routinely occur. For groups to remain stable over evolutionary time, these conflicts must […]