Research Expertise and Interest
culture, conflict, behavior, love, psychology, emotion, social interaction, individual differences in emotion, negotiation, embarrassment, desire, juvenile delinquency, laughter, anger, social perception, negotiating morality
Research Description
Dacher Keltner is a professor in the Department of Psychology. Throughout his career he has been interested in two animating questions. How do emotions shape human social life? And what is the nature of human hierarchies, as manifest in power, class dynamics, and how inequality shapes the human psyche?
The Science of Emotion
He has been a central voice in making the case that emotions serve important social functions, enabling us to fold into relationships vital to survival, like friendships, groups, romantic partnerships, and parent-child attachments. Guided by this framework, he has studied emotions like embarrassment, shame, love, compassion, amusement, and gratitude.
Beginning with his post-doctoral fellowship with Paul Ekman, he has long studied emotional expression from a Basic Emotion perspective. He has done work documenting the universality of upwards of 20 distinct facial expressions, the richness with which people can communicate emotion in the voice, and how people communicate emotions like love, compassion, and gratitude through touch.
His work in the field of emotion has moved into new territory during the past few years. First, continuing his collaboration with former student Alan Cowen, they have made several pioneering contributions in the study of emotion with data driven approaches. With new Machine Learning approaches, they have documented universal expressions of emotion in the face and voice, they have charted the meaning of emotional expression in pre-Colombian art, and they have offered the richest characterization to date of the emotional meaning of music, all papers published in top journals. These latter papers have stirred an interest in his lab in the emotional meaning and function of the arts, a central interest of mine going forward. Hhe has recently authored an overview of this new approach to emotion in a widely read theoretical venue.
In his research on emotion, he has continued with force to map the forms and functions of awe, including recent work on children, some of the first of its kind. Building upon this basic science, and grounded in a recent review of the health benefits of awe, they have moved into the realm of awe interventions, publishing results on the benefits of awe for the elderly who take “awe walks” he designed, and for health care providers during the COVID epidemic. He summarized this work in a recent book published by Penguin Press, AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. More recently he has authored invited theoretical articles on emotional expression, awe, positive emotions, and the bidirectional relationship between emotions and culture.
Power and Social Class
In 2003 he published a theory of how power influences social life, that is known as the Approach/Inhibition Theory of Power. This theory presents an integrative account of the effects of power on human behavior, suggesting that the acquisition of power has a disinhibiting effect regarding the social consequences of exercising it.
Building upon that theorizing, with collaborators Paul Piff and Michael Kraus, he has offered a theoretical account of how social class shapes human thought, feeling, and action. In empirical demonstrations of this work, they have shown that people from more privileged class backgrounds are more likely to drive through pedestrian crosswalks and cheat on tests to win a prize, feel less compassion than those who suffer, and explain their success in terms of their own superior traits.
More recently, they have explored other issues related to hierarchical life. With Maria Monroy, they have published recent work on intersectionality – the interacting influences of race, class, and gender – on emotion recognition, a theme that he has also explored in studies of implicit bias. He has published work on how economic inequality degrades ordinary social interactions. And building upon his decades of study of social power, summarized in a theory piece from this period of review, he has also published a new account of two strategies to acquire power, coercive and collaborative.