World Meeting: Paris, France 2018

Professor Filippo Aureli is a research professor at the Insituto de Neuroetología of the Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico, and maintains a position of professor of animal behavior at Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom. He is a level-3 member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (Mexican System of Researchers). Aureli has carried out research on primate behavior for over 30 years, focusing on the regulation of social relationships, conflict management, emotions, social cognition, stress-reduction mechanisms, and fission-fusion dynamics. During the last 17 years, he has devoted himself to the study of the behavioral ecology and conservation of spider monkeys in the natural habitat in Mexico and Costa Rica. In collaboration with the Max Planck Institut, he has investigated the cognitive capacities of various primate species, and in collaboration with the University of Tokyo has studied genetic and behavioral aspects of color-vision polymorphism. He has published more than 130 peer-reviewed articles, more than 30 book chapters, and 2 edited books. His research has been cited about 10,000 times by fellow researchers (H-index of 56) and featured in the mass media, such as the BBC, NHK, KBS, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New Scientist, Financial Times, Guardian, ScienceNow, Nature News, RAI International, CBC Radio, ABC Radio, Sciences et Avenir, Spiegel, and Globo.

Mario Gollwitzer is a professor of methodology and social psychology at the department of psychology at Philipps-University Marburg, Germany. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Trier in 2004 with a dissertation on revenge. His research focuses on (a) social psychological research on retributive justice, (b) individual differences in “justice sensitivity” and their relation to moral reasoning and moral behavior, (c) effects of violent video games on cognition, emotion, and behavior, and (d) public understanding of and engagement with (social) scientific research programs and findings. He has published over 70 articles in peer-reviewed journals, 4 textbooks, and 3 edited books on social justice, violence prevention, and aggression.

Arie W. Kruglanski is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Award, the Senior Humboldt Award, the Donald Campbell Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, The University of Maryland Regents Award for Scholarship and Creativity, and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and is recipient of the Regesz Chair at the University of Amsterdam. He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society. He has served as editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition [http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/psp/], editor of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin [http://journals.sagepub.com/home/psp], and associate editor of the American Psychologist [http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/amp/]. His interests have been in the domains of human judgment and decision making, the motivation-cognition interface, group and intergroup processes, and the psychology of human goals. His work has been disseminated in over 350 articles, chapters, and books, and has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, Deutsche Forschungs Gemeineschaft, Department of Homeland Security, Office of Naval Research, and the Ford Foundation. He has recently served as panelist of the National Academy of Science panels on counterterrorism, and educational paradigms in homeland security. Kruglanski has been a founding co-PI of START (National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism) at the University of Maryland, and is now a PI on a 5-year MINERVA grant to study radicalization and deradicalization in the Middle East and in South and South-East Asia. He also is the Outgoing President of the Society for the Study of Motivation.

When it comes to understanding abnormal and antisocial behaviors, Terrie E. Moffitt takes the long view. In addition to founding the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, which began in 1994 and follows 2,200 British twins and their families, she is Associate Director of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study in New Zealand, another ongoing longitudinal study that started in 1972. Through these studies, Moffitt has been able to link adult antisocial outcomes back to their childhood origins. Her dual taxonomy of antisocial and criminal behavior divides those who exhibit these behaviors into a “life-course persistent” group, whose early-life antisocial behaviors persist throughout adulthood, and an “adolescence-limited” group, who eventually reform as they become adults. Moffitt’s work on this theory has earned a number of awards, including the 2007 Stockholm Prize in Criminology and the 2010 Jacobs Science Prize. She has other lines of research as well: her team’s groundbreaking gene-environment interaction studies were the first in mental health research to show a specific genotype (a MAOA polymorphism) could predict vulnerability to antisocial and violent behavior, but only in the presence of certain environmental conditions (maltreatment during childhood). Moffitt’s team, based at Duke University and King’s College London, is now incorporating techniques from neuroimaging, genomics, and biomarker research into observational epidemiology, aiming to increase understanding of mental disorders.