The Nature & Nurture Podcast

Dr. Gary Laderman is the Goodrich C. White Professor of American Religious History and Cultures at Emory University, and the author of numerous books on death, spirituality, and culture, including Don’t Think About Death. In this episode we talk about Gary’s research on cultural perspectives on death throughout American history, including throughout the Civil War and after the development of the funeral industry. We discuss the role spirituality and religion play in conceptions of death, cross-culturally, and how conceptions of what is sacred extend beyond the traditionally religious. We also talk about how psychedelics and other drugs influence our perceptions on life and death, which will be the subject of Gary’s next book Sacred Drugs.

Dr. Fiery Cushman is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Moral Psychology Research Lab at Harvard University. In this episode, we talk about the distinction and overlap between moral psychology and experimental moral philosophy research, universalist vs. relativist moral values, the evolution of cooperation, whether individuals look to themselves or the state to punish moral transgressors, aggression as it relates to moral virtue, and virtue signaling. We also discuss topics of Fiery's own research including motivation for punishment of moral transgressions, the phenomenon of moral luck, and punishment of bad luck outcomes as used to teach moral lessons.

Dr. Erik Nook is a clinical psychologist, neuroscientist, and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Princeton University.  In this episode we discuss the philosophy and early history behind the study of emotions, and outline several schools of thought including constructivism. Erik and I talk about individual differences in emotion processing, how language influences the way we represent and regulate our emotions, emotional development in children and adolescents, and how Erik's personal experiences as a clinician have shaped his research on the interaction between emotion and language. 

Dr. Christian Nawroth is an applied ethologist and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Behavioral Physiology in the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology.   In this episode, we discuss Christian's research on farm animals, including goats and pigs, and what this research tells us about their intelligence, social cognition, memory, and decision making. We also talk more broadly about the aims of such farm animal research, and contrast basic science research with the goal of better understanding animals to improve their welfare, with animal research conducted with the goal of improving efficiency in food production. Lastly, we discuss the ethics of animal welfare, and future lines of research that might allow us to better understand animal consciousness, including virtual reality approaches.    Learn more about Christian's work at: https://christiannawroth.wordpress.com/

Dr. Sami Yousif is a cognitive psychologist and MindCORE postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. In this episode we dive deep into two topics among Sami's wide range of research experiences: spatial cognition and teleological belief.  We discuss spatial cognition, imagistic vs. propositional vs. coordinate representations of space and navigation, the development of spatial reasoning in children, and how spatial cognition differs between humans and animals.    We also discuss teleology, or the explanation for the purpose of things, and how teleological beliefs differ across individuals and across framing of questions. In particular, "why" questions may be broken down into either descriptive "how" questions or teleological "purpose" questions.   Learn more about Sami's work at: https://www.samiyousif.org/

Dr. Adam Green is a cognitive neuroscientist and the Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, where he directs the Lab for Relational Cognition. He is the Founder and President of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity, and Editor-In-Chief of the Creativity Research Journal.  In this episode we discuss Adam's expertise in creativity research, the extent to which creativity is innate or can be learned, whether creativity is a unidimensional or multidimensional construct, and how creativity manifests in the brain. We additionally discuss some of Adam's recent and ongoing work on the neuroscience of belief, including how religious believers and non-believers create representations of God. Lastly, we touch on the subject of belief in free will, and whether the brain is truly a deterministic system. I hope to continue the conversation on free will and neurophilosophy with Adam sometime soon. In the meantime, learn more about his work at: https://cng.georgetown.edu/home

Dr. Megan Peters is a cognitive neuroscientist and an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where she directs the Cognitive & Neural Computation Lab.  In this episode we discuss Megan's background in cognitive science, and a research path which allowed her to combine interests in computation with philosophical questions about human subjective experiences. In a wide-ranging conversation we discuss how consciousness and subjective experience might arise from a collection of neurons, the phenomenology of perception, human perception and decision-making under uncertainty, unconscious perceptions, metacognition and confidence about our subjective experiences, and how metacognition differs from error-correction in artificial intelligence.  Learn more about Megan's work at: https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/cnclab/

Dr. Bill von Hippel is an evolutionarily social psychologist and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is also the author of The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy.  In this episode we discuss The Social Leap, a journey through over 6 million years of human evolution: from our moderately intelligent, moderately social chimpanzee-like ancestors, to the hyper-intelligent, hyper-social species we are today. Bill and I discuss a number of revolutions and selection pressures that led to our evolution, including environmental changes, the rise of bipedalism and tool use, long-distance hunting, mastery of fire and cooking, and most importantly, the social intelligence necessary to communicate and cooperate. 

Dr. Nilam Ram is a Professor of Psychology and Communication at Stanford University, and one of the founders of the field of screenomics: the new interdisciplinary field of research based on the time-series analysis of screens and digital behavior.  In this episode, we discuss Nilam's background in finance and quantitative psychology, the use of longitudinal research methods to examine changes in behavior and cognition throughout the lifespan, and the use of experience sampling methods in developmental science. As smartphones became more pervasive, Nilam describes the rise of mobile sensing methods in psychology, eventually leading to the birth of screenomics. We finally discuss the broad goals and potential applications of screenomics research, including interactive media which predict behavior, and the precautions taken to ensure smartphone data is analyzed with ethical and privacy concerns in mind. 

Dr. Abigail Marsh is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Georgetown University, where she directs the Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience. She is also the author of The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between. In this episode, we discuss Abby's background in social psychology, and a life-changing experience of hers that motivated inquiry into the nature of costly altruism. In a wide-ranging conversation we discuss the neural correlates of empathy (or lack thereof) in psychopaths and altruistic kidney donors, animal research on care and evolutionary theories of empathy, the role of oxytocin in governing care, how social media hijacks our systems of reward and fear, and how mindfulness and in-person interactions may improve trust and well-being.