Abigail Marsh

Abigail Marsh (born 1976) is a psychologist and neuroscientist who works as a professor at Georgetown University's Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program, where she is the director of the Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience.[1]

Early life and education

Marsh was born in 1976[2][3] and is from Tacoma, Washington.[4]

Marsh graduated from Dartmouth College in 1999 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology.[5] Marsh received her PhD in Social Psychology from Harvard University in 2004, where she previously earned a M.A. in the same discipline in 2001.[6][7]

Career

After graduating from Harvard, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health until 2008.[8][9] She then began to work at Georgetown, and in October 2013 was tenured.[10]

Marsh is the director of the Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience at Georgetown which conducts research on empathy, altruism, and other related topics through various methods, such as brain imaging and pharmacological methods.[9] Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation.[6][11] She was appointed to the advisory board for Donor to Donor, an organization that promotes living kidney donation.[12][13]

Marsh has written articles for Slate,[14] Psychology Today,[15] Business Insider,[16] The Guardian,[17] NPR,[18] The Wall Street Journal,[2] The Chronicle of Higher Education,[19] and other publications. In September 2016, Marsh presented her story and work in a TED talk in Banff, Canada.[20][21]

Research

Much of Marsh's work pertains to the study of altruism and why people may help others at their own cost.[22] More generally, she researches in the field of social and affective neuroscience and psychology.[20]

On the topic of altruism, Marsh's research has yielded more information about the amygdala, showing that in altruists, the amygdalae tend to be larger, and in psychopaths it tends to be smaller. The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for processing emotions and fear.[3] In 2014, Marsh published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that concluded a spectrum existed with extreme altruists on one end and psychopaths at the other.[23] She has also published multiple studies that show, when altruists watch someone else feel pain, they have levels of activity in similar regions of their brain as when they were feeling the pain themselves, and concluded that altruists are better at recognizing the fear of others.[24] Marsh leads work at Georgetown with altruistic donors, particularly those who donated kidneys to strangers.[25]

Her work with children and adolescents has been used to show how different neural workings can lead to behavioral problems.[3] She has studied the brains of children and adults who have psychopathic traits and found that it is strongly inherited, one factor of which is a fearless maternal influence. Children who display risky behavior, she concluded, are more prone to becoming psychopathic, and that such psychopaths are hard to detect as they may believe they are no different than those around them.[26] In 2017 Marsh wrote Good for Nothing about the topic of altruists and psychopaths.[26]

In 2019, Marsh researched altruism in kidney donors and stem cell donors using behavioral investigations and brain imaging, as well as using those methods to study the causes of conduct problems in children and adolescents.[27] In the same year, she led a study that found, among other conclusions, that Americans are surprisingly successful at distinguishing other Americans from Australians by visual cues, like walking, waving one's hand, or smiling.[28]

Awards and recognition

Marsh is a recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health's 2007 Richard J Wyatt Memorial Award for translational research.[6] In 2014, Marsh was awarded the Cozzarelli Prize for research on altruism she had published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research she coauthored studied "extraordinary altruists", using people who donated kidneys to strangers.[29] In 2016, Marsh was named a fellow in the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.[3] In 2017, the S&R Foundation awarded Marsh their Kuno Award for Applied Science for the Social Good.[8] In 2018, Marsh was awarded the Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology for her book The Fear Factor.[1]

The Fear Factor

Marsh published The Fear Factor in 2017, a book about her research on aggression, altruism, and empathy in the context of neuroscience.[30] The full title is The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between.[31]

See also

References
  1. "Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science | SPSP". spsp.org.
  2. "Author Abigail Marsh on the Black Eyed Peas". wsj.com. January 3, 2018.
  3. Dec 2017, Teresa Wiltz ’83 | Nov-. "What Makes Nice People Nice?". Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.
  4. "How Fear Makes You Do Good Or Evil". National Geographic News. January 3, 2018.
  5. "Georgetown University Faculty Directory". gufaculty360.georgetown.edu.
  6. "The S&R Kuno Award Winners | S&R Foundation". sandrfoundation.org.
  7. "Researchers | Prospective Psychology". www.prospectivepsych.org.
  8. "The Altruistic Brain: Making the Choice to Help". Boston College Events.
  9. "Abigail Marsh – Roots of Empathy".
  10. "11 Faculty Receive Tenure". October 18, 2013.
  11. "NSF Award Search: Award#1729406 - Neural and cognitive bases of costly altruism toward strangers". www.nsf.gov.
  12. "Abigail Marsh". Donor to Donor.
  13. Strub, Chris. "Donor-To-Donor Kidney Chains Personify American Selflessness, Save Lives". Forbes.
  14. Marsh, Abigail (March 14, 2019). "Less Guilty by Reason of Neurological Defect" – via Slate.
  15. "Does Taking Pleasure in Giving to Others Make Us Selfish?". Psychology Today.
  16. Marsh, Abigail. "I studied children with psychopathic traits, and they all have trouble recognizing an emotion that we all feel". Business Insider.
  17. Marsh, Abigail (October 22, 2017). "Brain unpicked: what makes a child psychopathic? | Abigail Marsh" – via www.theguardian.com.
  18. "Could A More Individualistic World Also Be A More Altruistic One?". NPR.org.
  19. Marsh, Abigail (October 1, 2017). "Choosing Fear" – via The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  20. Marsh, Abigail. "Abigail Marsh | Speaker | TED". www.ted.com.
  21. Marsh, Abigail. "Why some people are more altruistic than others" – via www.ted.com.
  22. "Impulses, intent, and the science of evil". Science | AAAS. July 31, 2019.
  23. "Right on!" – via The Economist.
  24. Luong, Lia Kantrowitz,Shayla Love,Tony (May 7, 2019). "This Doctor's Rare Condition Might Help Us Understand the Roots of Empathy".
  25. "For the first time, a neural link between altruism and empathy toward strangers". ScienceDaily.
  26. Carter, Claire (October 24, 2017). "Inside minds of child psychopaths - and surprising trait they inherit from mums". mirror.
  27. "Abigail Marsh". Center for Computation & Technology.
  28. Moffett, Mark W. (May 10, 2019). "The Social Secret That Humans Share With Ants" – via www.wsj.com.
  29. "Marsh Receives Cozzarelli Prize for Outstanding Research on Altruism". Association for Psychological Science - APS.
  30. "Abigail Marsh".
  31. Murphy, Heather (April 24, 2018). "Why It Seems as if Everyone Is Always Angry With You" – via NYTimes.com.
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