The Nature & Nurture Podcast

Dr. Robert Chavez is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Oregon, where he directs the Computational Social Neuroscience Lab. https://csnl.uoregon.edu/ In this episode, Rob and I discuss our shared background in cognitive science and statistics, our mutual interests in neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, social cognition, personality, behavioral genetics, a...

Dr. Adriene Beltz is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Methods, Sex Differences, and Development Lab.

Dr. Larry Young is the William P. Timmie Professor of Psychiatry at Emory School of Medicine, where he directs the Center for Translational Social Neuroscience and the Silvio O. Conte Center for Oxytocin and Social Cognition at Emory University. He is the author of The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction explores the latest discoveries of how brain chemistry influences a...

Steve Rathjay is a Psychologist and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Social Identity and Morality Lab of New York University. He is an expert in the psychology of social media use and one of the leaders of the Global Social Media Experiment, an international collaboration examining the causal impact of social media usage in 76 countries around the world. Dr. Rathje received his PhD from the Uni...

Dr. Rob Henderson is a Psychologist, Air Force Veteran, and author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Expanding on our past episode, in which we discuss luxury beliefs, social status, and classism at length, this time our discussion is much more personal. In this episode, Rob and I discuss formative experiences written in his memoir, the impacts of childhood poverty on...

Dr. Sergio Pellis is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge and one of the world’s leading experts in the neurobiology of play.  In this episode, we discuss how play behavior across mammals relies on the same neural reward circuitry, the evolutionary origins and benefits of play, and how hormones contribute to sex differences in aggression, sexual, and play behavior. We also d...

Angel Millar is a hypnotist, martial artist, and author of The Path of the Warrior-Mystic: Being a Man in an Age of Chaos. In this episode we discuss the balance between masculine and feminine traits, discipline and creativity, mind and body, and tradition and modernity. The warrior-mystic, Angel explains, represents the ideal balance between these traits, and we discuss historical examples includ...

Daniel Quintana is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo. He leads a lab investigating biological systems that link psychological and social factors to health, with a focus on neuroendocrine systems (e.g., oxytocin) and the autonomic nervous system. His lab uses various research approaches, including intranasal oxytocin studies, large-scale genetics studies, ne...

Dr. Lee Cronin is a Professor and the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, where he leads research on the chemical origins of life, computerized chemistry, and assembly theory. In this episode, we explore how assembly theory, analogues between chemistry and computation, the origins of life, the concepts of entropy and time, quantum mechanics, consciousness, simulation theories o...

Dr. Alex Byrne is a Professor of Philosophy at MIT and author of Trouble with Gender. In this episode, we talk about the problematic concept of gender, which is often used interchangeably to mean sex, gender identity, gender role, gender norm, or gender stereotypes. Alex and I discuss each of these, and their precise definitions in philosophy, biology, or sociology in detail. We also discuss the p...

Dr. Wolfram Schultz is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and one of the world’s leading experts on dopamine. In this episode, we discuss the dopamine system's role in reward processing, evolutionary fitness, the functioning of dopamine neurons, the interplay between reward vs punishment, and the complexity of neurons. Dr. Schultz overviews core mechanisms of value-guid...

Dr. Camilla Nord is a neuroscientist, leader of the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge, and the author of The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health. In this episode we talk about The Balanced Brain, prediction error as the source of positive and negative emotion, how dopamine controls motion, motivation, and pleasure, how serotonin regulates mood and response to t...

Dr. Rachel Marsh is the Irving Philips Professor of Medical Psychology in Child Psychology at Columbia University Medical Center, where she runs the Cognitive Development and Neuroimaging Lab. Dr. Marsh studies the neurodevelopment of self-regulatory control and its pathology in disorders such as OCD, eating disorders, and Tourette’s syndrome. More recently, she studies how maternal stress contrib...

Dr. Walter Veit is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Reading and author of A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness. He is an expert in philosophy of mind, cognitive and biological sciences, applied ethics, and animal welfare. In this episode, we talk about philosophy of mind and the evolution of consciousness in animals. Walter outlines his theory of the evolution of pheno...

Dr. Ellen Langer is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and one of the pioneers of the positive psychology movement, known as the Mother of Mindfulness. Dr. Langer has won numerous awards including 3 Distinguished Scientist Award, the Staats Award for Unifying Psychology, and the Liberty Science Genius Award. She is the author of 13 books on mindfulness, including 5 on mindfulness, mos...

Dr. Henning Tiemeier is a Professor of Social and Behavioral Science and the Sumner and Esther Feldberg Chair of Maternal and Child Health at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Tiemeier is an expert in pediatric epidemiology, focusing on prenatal exposures and the environmental determinants that influence brain development in children. In this episode, we talk about pros and cons of dif...

Dr. Willem Frankenhuis, he's an Associate Professor of Evolutionary and Population Biology at the University of Amsterdam, a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law, and Director of the Research Network on Communicating Strength-Based Approaches to Child Development and Learning in Adverse Conditions. He studies how cognition and behavior develop...

Dr. Lars Chittka is a Professor of Sensory and Behavioral Ecology and the founder of the Research Center for Psychology at Queen Mary University of London. He directs the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab, and is the author of The Mind of a Bee. In this episode, we discuss the results of decades of research on intelligence in bees and other insects. This includes findings of numerical and spa...

Dr. Jack Schultz is a Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University and an expert in the cultural anthropology of religion and sociology of knowledge.

Dr. Kevin Mitchell is an Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. He's the author of Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are, and Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. In this episode, we talk about Free Agents and the question of free will. We discuss what we mean by freedom, how living organisms have inherent biological constraints wh...

Dr. Edward Hagen is a Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Washington State University, where he directs the Bioanthropology Lab.  In this episode, Ed and I discuss the recent controversy of the American Anthropological Association’s decision to censor a conference panel on sex differences, the reality and importance of understanding sex differences in evolutionary anthropology and biology re...

Dr. Jennifer Silvers is an Associate Professor of Psychology and the Bernice Wenzel and Wendell Jeffrey Term Endowed Chair in Developmental Neuroscience at UCLA, where she runs the Social Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab. She is an expert in adolescent brain, cognitive, and emotional development, particularly in the development of emotion regulation strategies.  In this episode, we talk...

Dr. Cory Clark is a social psychologist and Director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania.  In this episode we talk about adversarial collaboration and open science, meta-psychology research on common biases in psychology carried by psychologists themselves, and its moralization. We also discuss gender differences in moral beliefs, how social media and culture...

Dr. James Roney is a Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he runs the Human Behavioral Endocrinology Lab. In this episode we talk about the proximate and ultimate evolutionary explanations of different sex hormones’ roles in coordinating motivated behavior, such as testosterone’s influence on aggression and sex drive, and ovarian hor...

Dr. Joseph Henrich is an anthropologist and Chair of the Human Evolutionary Biology Department at Harvard University, where he runs the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab. Joe is also the author of the WEIRDest People in the World and The Secret of Our Success. Timestamps:0:00:46 Environmental factors leading to cultural evolution0:03:19 Cultural adaptations, rituals, and technological advanc...