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Speaker: Dr. Patricia Greenfield
Abstract:
What are the cultural, behavioral, and psychological effects of the coronavirus pandemic? Greenfield's theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development predicted and her research team confirmed that, when survival concerns augment and one’s social world narrows, behavior, both online and in everyday life, shifts towards activities, values, relationships, and parenting expectations typical of small-scale rural subsistence environments with low life expectancy. Cross-cultural study demonstrated the same effects across the globe - in the United States, Turkey, Indonesia, Mexico, and Japan. However, the impulse to turn towards activities and values found at a much earlier point in human history took place in a very different environment, notably an environment with sophisticated capacities for electronic communication. So Greenfield's team also explored how people were using the electronic environment and the psychological effects of increases in mediated communication. At the beginning of the pandemic, they found that increases in texting, video calls, and phone were serving as a compensation when in-person interaction was not possible; and this compensatory effort had positive effects on people’s sense of well-being and emotional state.
Bio:
Patricia Greenfield received her A.B. summa cum laude and Ph. D from Harvard University's interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations. As a postdoctoral research fellow in Psychology at the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, she developed research programs on culture, learning, and cognition; the development of grammars of action; and early language development. At the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, she laid the groundwork for a prize-winning paper, "Language, tools, and brain: The ontogeny and phylogeny of hierarchically organized sequential behavior." She is currently Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA and Visiting Scholar in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. Her work focuses on ecological change, cultural evolution, and human development. It has been recognized by election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and awards from diverse societies in cultural, cross-cultural, developmental, and social psychology. For more information, please visit greenfieldlab.psych.ucla.edu; www.cdmc.ucla.edu; and weaving-generations.psych.ucla.edu