Friday, September 21, 2012

Institute of Human Development & Change, Plasticity and Development Seminar: Fall 2012

9/17/2012    Ron Dahl
IHD Director
The Social Sculpting of Brain Development:  Implications for Health, Education, & Social Policy (and IHD)

9/24/2012    Alison Gopnik & Tom Griffiths 
Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley
Center for Computational Cognitive Development
10/8/2012    Susanne Kirsten 
Post-doctoral researcher, UC Berkeley
Theory of mind and its precursor abilities: Findings from a longitudinal study

 
10/29/2012    Jennifer Pfeifer 
Department of Psychology, University of Oregon
Self-Development:  New Insights from a Developmental  Social Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

11/5/2012    Wouter Van den Bos
Department of Psychology, Stanford University

11/12/2012   HOLIDAY

11/19/2012    Elissa Epel 
Early Life Influences on Rates of Cellular Aging: The Role of Psychological Stress and Social Context

Elissa Epel is an associate professor in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry. She is also a faculty member in the Health Psychology Postdoctoral Program, the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Postdoctoral Scholars Program. She has longstanding interests in social and
psychobiological stress mechanisms, and impact of stress physiology on food intake, insulin resistance, obesity, and premature aging at the cellular level. Her focus is on psychoneuroendocrine mediation — how stress-induced hormonal dysregulation may mediate relationships between stressor appraisal and metabolically-related outcomes (food ingestion, insulin resistance, visceral fat distribution, cell aging). Her
primary study is on family caregivers, and attempts to understand, from a psychobiological and genetic perspective, why some people are vulnerable and others are resilient to the chronic stress of caregiving. She collaborates with Drs. Elizabeth Blackburn and Jue Lin to understand how stress can affect the telomere/telomerase maintenance system. She was awarded the Neal Miller New Investigator award and an APA Health Psychology award for demonstrating novel links between stress and stress arousal with markers of cellular aging.

 
11/26/2012    Phil and Carolyn Cowan
Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley

 
12/3/2012    Dacher Keltner 
Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley
Social class, solipsism, and contextualism: How the rich are different from the poor
In this talk he will outline recent theorizing that he and his students have been engaged in to advance understanding of the differences in how the rich and the poor approach their social worlds. After working through conceptualizations of social class, he will then detail how social class influences basic social cognitive tendencies (e.g., the rich are less empathetic than the poor), differences in the emotional realm (the poor are more prone to emotional contagion), and differences in the moral realm (the poor behave in more altruistic and ethical fashion). He will also discuss the implications of these ideas for child development.

                   
All talks will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-2:00pm