Marianne Schmid Mast received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 2000. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University, USA, and an assistant professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Since 2006, she has been a full professor of psychology at the Department of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland. In her research, she studies how individuals in power hierarchies interact, perceive, and communicate (verbally and nonverbally), how first impressions affect interpersonal interactions and evaluations, how people form accurate impressions of others (interpersonal sensitivity), and how physician communication affects patient outcomes. Her recent work includes the study of the effects of first impressions and nonverbal behavior in job interviews. In her research, she uses immersive virtual environment technology to investigate interpersonal behavior and communication as well as computer-based automatic sensing and analyzing of nonverbal behavior in social interactions. She currently is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.
Kory Floyd’s research focuses on the communication of affection in personal relationships and its consequences for physical and mental health. His theory, Affection Exchange Theory, assumes that affectionate behavior evolved within the human species due to its contributions to viability (survival) and fertility (procreation).
Kory is a professor of health and family communication at Arizona State University, and also a research associate with the Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson AZ. He received his PhD in Interpersonal Communication from the University of Arizona, and is currently completing additional doctoral work in clinical neuropsychology. He is a prolific author, publishing 10 books and numerous articles in the areas of communication, clinical psychology, social psychology, physiological/health psychology and evolutionary psychology.
Autumn Hostetter completed her undergraduate degree at Berry College, in Rome, Georgia, where she worked with Dr. Bill Hopkins at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center investigating gestural communication in chimpanzees. She received her PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the direction of Dr. Martha Alibali.
She is currently an assistant professor of Psychology at Kalamazoo College. Autumn’s research focuses on how gestures reflect mental processes, and how they contribute to both speech production and comprehension.
Ann Kring is Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the Institute for Personality and Social Research. She received a B.S. in psychology from Ball State University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Ann’s current research focus is on emotion and psychopathology, with a specific interest in the emotional features of schizophrenia, assessing negative symptoms in schizophrenia, and the linkage between cognition and emotion in schizophrenia. She has received numerous awards, including a Young Investigator award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, the Joseph Zubin Memorial Fund Award, and a Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Berkeley. She is currently president-elect for the Society for Research in Psychopathology. Ann has served as Associate Editor for the Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Cognition and Emotion, and as a member of the editorial board for numerous journals. She is the author /editor of two books and the author of several scholarly papers in the top journals in the field.
Lisa Parr received her PhD in Psychology at Emory University in 2000. Since then, her work at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center has involved examining social cognition in monkeys and apes. Her research focuses broadly on how nonhuman primates negotiate their social environment, including how monkeys and apes recognize the faces of conspecifics. Some of her recent studies have focused on the nature of configural processing for faces, kin recognition, and facial expression categorization using standardized stimuli. Lisa has also been involved in a collaboration with UK scientists to develop a coding system for measuring facial movement in nonhuman primates. This system is based on the well-known human FACS system developed by Paul Ekman. Lisa has received several awards in her career, including the Frank A. Beach Comparative Psychology Award from the American Psychological Association and research support from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Alliance for Autism Research, and the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience.
