Dacher Keltner
Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the science of human emotion, social connection, and well-being. His publications investigate topics such as the psychological effects of awe, cross-cultural facial expression and emotion recognition, compassion, and empathy.
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Publications
- Blocking lower facial features reduces emotion identification accuracy in static faces and full body dynamic expressions.
- Multimodal semantic knowledge of emotion concepts in frontotemporal dementia.
- Experiencing awe in daily life is linked to lower loneliness.
- (When) is it okay to be angry? Children and adults' judgments in China and the United States.
- Well-being as a primary endpoint in clinical trials: a call for consensus.
- Towards a unified understanding of aesthetic emotions.
- Possible Worlds Theory: How the Imagination Transcends and Recreates Reality.
- Emotion specificity, coherence, and cultural variation in conceptualizations of positive emotions: a study of body sensations and emotion recognition.
- The role of emotion recognition in empathy.
- Awe reduces depressive symptoms and improves well-being in a randomized-controlled clinical trial.
- Touch as emotion regulation.
- The Gap Between Us: Income Inequality Reduces Social Affiliation in Dyadic Interactions.
- Dispositional compassion shifts social preferences in systematic ways.
- Deep learning reveals what facial expressions mean to people in different cultures.
- How emotion is experienced and expressed in multiple cultures: a large-scale experiment across North America, Europe, and Japan.
- Culture and Awe: Understanding Awe as a Mixed Emotion.
- Emotional palette: a computational mapping of aesthetic experiences evoked by visual art.
- A balanced mind: Awe fosters equanimity via temporal distancing.
- Considering distinct positive emotions in psychedelic science.
- Intersectional implicit bias: Evidence for asymmetrically compounding bias and the predominance of target gender.
- Awe as a Pathway to Mental and Physical Health.
- Meta-analytic evidence that attachment insecurity is associated with less frequent experiences of discrete positive emotions.
- Deep learning reveals what vocal bursts express in different cultures.
- Awe Sparks Prosociality in Children.
- Emotional Well-Being: What It Is and Why It Matters.
- A Perfect Storm to Set the Stage for Ontological Exploration: Response to Commentaries on "Emotional Well-Being: What It Is and Why It Matters".
- The nature and neurobiology of fear and anxiety: State of the science and opportunities for accelerating discovery.
- The influences of daily experiences of awe on stress, somatic health, and well-being: a longitudinal study during COVID-19.
- Higher emotional granularity relates to greater inferior frontal cortex cortical thickness in healthy, older adults.
- Kin relationality and ecological belonging: a cultural psychology of Indigenous transcendence.
- Editorial: Community series: expanding the science of compassion, volume II.
- Theories of power: Perceived strategies for gaining and maintaining power.
- Big smile, small self: Awe walks promote prosocial positive emotions in older adults.
- Intersectionality in emotion signaling and recognition: The influence of gender, ethnicity, and social class.
- How emotions, relationships, and culture constitute each other: advances in social functionalist theory.
- Awe, ideological conviction, and perceptions of ideological opponents.
- Social Class Competence Stereotypes Are Amplified by Socially Signaled Economic Inequality.
- Is Touch in Romantic Relationships Universally Beneficial for Psychological Well-Being? The Role of Attachment Avoidance.
- Sixteen facial expressions occur in similar contexts worldwide.
- Semantic Space Theory: A Computational Approach to Emotion.
- The relationship of socioeconomic status in childhood and adulthood with compassion: A study with a prospective 32-year follow-up.
- Awe, daily stress, and elevated life satisfaction.
- The rise of affectivism.
- Neural correlates of ingroup bias for prosociality in rats.
- Editorial: Expanding the Science of Compassion.
- The dynamics of coping, positive emotions, and well-being: Evidence from Latin American immigrant farmworkers and college students during a time of political strife.
- The recognition of 18 facial-bodily expressions across nine cultures.
- What the face displays: Mapping 28 emotions conveyed by naturalistic expression.
- Power, approach, and inhibition: empirical advances of a theory.
- Are awe-prone people more curious? The relationship between dispositional awe, curiosity, and academic outcomes.
- What music makes us feel: At least 13 dimensions organize subjective experiences associated with music across different cultures.
- Effects of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication of Affection on Avoidantly Attached Partners' Emotions and Message Receptiveness.
- Reply to Bowling: How specific emotions are primary in subjective experience.
- The Neural Representation of Visually Evoked Emotion Is High-Dimensional, Categorical, and Distributed across Transmodal Brain Regions.
- Machine learning uncovers the most robust self-report predictors of relationship quality across 43 longitudinal couples studies.
- Universal facial expressions uncovered in art of the ancient Americas: A computational approach.
- Parent-child-relationship quality predicts offspring dispositional compassion in adulthood: A prospective follow-up study over three decades.
- Mapping 24 emotions conveyed by brief human vocalization.
- Income Inequality and White-on-Black Racial Bias in the United States: Evidence From Project Implicit and Google Trends.
- Toward a consensual taxonomy of emotions.
- The primacy of categories in the recognition of 12 emotions in speech prosody across two cultures.
- Mapping the Passions: Toward a High-Dimensional Taxonomy of Emotional Experience and Expression.
- Emotional Expression: Advances in Basic Emotion Theory.
- What Basic Emotion Theory Really Says for the Twenty-First Century Study of Emotion.
- It's the motive that counts: Perceived sacrifice motives and gratitude in romantic relationships.
- Universals and cultural variations in 22 emotional expressions across five cultures.
- Awe and humility.
- Hedge Fund Managers With Psychopathic Tendencies Make for Worse Investors.
- Emotion in the wilds of nature: The coherence and contagion of fear during threatening group-based outdoors experiences.
- Clarifying the Conceptualization, Dimensionality, and Structure of Emotion: Response to Barrett and Colleagues.
- Awe in nature heals: Evidence from military veterans, at-risk youth, and college students.
- Awe as a Scientific Emotion.
- The dark side of the sublime: Distinguishing a threat-based variant of awe.
- Social affiliation in same-class and cross-class interactions.
- Awe, the diminished self, and collective engagement: Universals and cultural variations in the small self.
- Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients.
- Beyond happiness: Building a science of discrete positive emotions.
- The voice conveys emotion in ten globalized cultures and one remote village in Bhutan.
- Virtues, Vices, and Political Influence in the U.S. Senate.
- Positive affect and markers of inflammation: discrete positive emotions predict lower levels of inflammatory cytokines.
- Affective and physiological responses to the suffering of others: compassion and vagal activity.
- Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior.
- Short alleles, bigger smiles? The effect of 5-HTTLPR on positive emotional expressions.
- How sacrifice impacts the giver and the recipient: insights from approach-avoidance motivational theory.
- Speaking under pressure: low linguistic complexity is linked to high physiological and emotional stress reactivity.
- The sociocultural appraisals, values, and emotions (SAVE) framework of prosociality: core processes from gene to meme.
- Teasing, taunting, and the politics of politeness: high sociometric status is associated with expectation-consistent behavior.
- Vagal activity is quadratically related to prosocial traits, prosocial emotions, and observer perceptions of prosociality.
- What is shared, what is different? Core relational themes and expressive displays of eight positive emotions.
- Social class rank, essentialism, and punitive judgment.
- Pride displays communicate self-interest and support for meritocracy.
- The things you do for me: perceptions of a romantic partner's investments promote gratitude and commitment.
- The personal sense of power.
- Me against we: in-group transgression, collective shame, and in-group-directed hostility.
- An fMRI study of caring vs self-focus during induced compassion and pride.
- Flustered and faithful: embarrassment as a signal of prosociality.
- Class and compassion: socioeconomic factors predict responses to suffering.
- The virtues of gossip: reputational information sharing as prosocial behavior.
- Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior.
- Suppression sours sacrifice: emotional and relational costs of suppressing emotions in romantic relationships.
- Contact high: Mania proneness and positive perception of emotional touches.
- To have and to hold: gratitude promotes relationship maintenance in intimate bonds.
- The local-ladder effect: social status and subjective well-being.
- Social class, solipsism, and contextualism: how the rich are different from the poor.
- Class, chaos, and the construction of community.
- Gender and the Communication of Emotion Via Touch.
- A discrete emotions approach to positive emotion disturbance in depression.
- Social power facilitates the effect of prosocial orientation on empathic accuracy.
- Social class rank, threat vigilance, and hostile reactivity.
- Thin-slicing study of the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) gene and the evaluation and expression of the prosocial disposition.
- Compassion, pride, and social intuitions of self-other similarity.
- Compassion: an evolutionary analysis and empirical review.
- Having less, giving more: the influence of social class on prosocial behavior.
- Moving toward more perfect unions: daily and long-term consequences of approach and avoidance goals in romantic relationships.
- Social class, contextualism, and empathic accuracy.
- Tactile communication, cooperation, and performance: an ethological study of the NBA.
- When giving feels good. The intrinsic benefits of sacrifice in romantic relationships for the communally motivated.
- Disgust and the moralization of purity.
- Social class, sense of control, and social explanation.
- The voice conveys specific emotions: evidence from vocal burst displays.