John Cacioppo & Robert Kaplan
Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor
Director, Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience
The University of Chicago
June 2, 2011
3:00pm
Natcher Building, Balcony A
National Institutes of Health
John Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago, the Director of the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, and the Past Director of the Arete Initiative of the Office of the Vice President for Research and National Laboratories at the University of Chicago.
Cacioppo's research is focused on understanding the causes and effects of social isolation. Social species, by definition, form organizations that extend beyond the individual. These structures evolved hand in hand with behavioral, neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too reproduced, thereby ensuring their genetic legacy. Social isolation represents a lens through which to investigate these behavioral, neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms. Evidence from human and nonhuman animal studies indicates that isolation heightens sensitivity to social threats (predator evasion) and motivates the renewal of social connections. The effects of perceived isolation in humans share much in common with the effects of experimental manipulations of isolation in nonhuman social species: increased tonic sympathetic tonus and HPA activation, and decreased inflammatory control, immunity, sleep salubrity, and expression of genes regulating glucocorticoid responses. Together, these effects contribute to higher rates of morbidity and mortality in older adults.
John T. Cacioppo Among the awards he has received are an NIH MERIT award, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association , the Campbell Award (for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Personality and Social Psychology) from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychophysiology from the Society for Psychophysiological Research, the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Scientific Impact Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, the Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association, the Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Award for Distinguished Service on Behalf of Personality and Social Psychology from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, the Distinguished Member Award from Psi Chi, an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree from Bard College, the Patricia R. Barchas Award from the American Psychosomatic Society, and the “ISI Highly Cited Researchers” in Psychiatry/Psychology. He is an elected Fellow in 16 scientific organizations; a Past-President of several of these, including the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology; and the current Chair of the Psychology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and President of the Society for Social Neuroscience. At NIH, he has served as a member of the National Advisory Council on Aging, and he currently is serving as a member of the Council for the Center for Scientific Review.
For additional information, see http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/index.shtml
Abstract
Social species, by definition, form organizations that extend beyond the individual. These structures evolved hand in hand with behavioral, neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too reproduced, thereby ensuring their genetic legacy. Social isolation represents a lens through which to investigate these behavioral, neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms. Evidence from human and nonhuman animal studies indicates that isolation heightens sensitivity to social threats (predator evasion) and motivates the renewal of social connections. The effects of perceived isolation in humans share much in common with the effects of experimental manipulations of isolation in nonhuman social species: increased tonic sympathetic tonus and HPA activation, and decreased inflammatory control, immunity, sleep salubrity, and expression of genes regulating glucocorticoid responses. Together, these effects contribute to higher rates of morbidity and mortality in older adults.
Watch Dr. Cacioppo's Lecture
Slide Presentations
Cacioppo Riley Lecture (PDF, file size 15.5 MB)
 Ronald Abeles & Laura Carstensen
Director, Stanford Center on Longevity
Professor of Psychology
and the Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. Professor in Public Policy
Stanford University
June 18, 2010
3:00 – 4:30 PM
Natcher Conference Center, Balcony B
National Institutes of Health
Professor Carstensen is a member of the Psychology Department at Stanford University, where she is also Founding Director of the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. Professor in Public Policy. For more than twenty years her research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging, and in 2005 she was honored with a MERIT award. Carstensen is best known for socioemotional selectivity theory, a life-span theory of motivation. With her students and colleagues, she has published well over 100 articles on life-span development. Her most current empirical research focuses on ways in which motivational changes influence cognitive processing.
Dr. Carstensen is a fellow in a number of professional organizations including the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Gerontological Society of America. She serves on the Board of Science Advisors to the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany and has chaired two studies for the National Academy of Sciences, resulting in The Aging Mind and When I'm 64. She is a member of the MacArthur Foundation's Research Network on an Aging Society.
 Laura Carstensen The recipient of numerous professional awards and honors, she has been selected as a Guggenheim Fellow, received the Richard Kalish Award for Innovative Research and the Distinguished Career Award from the Gerontological Society of America, as well as Stanford University's Deans Award for Distinguished Teaching. Professor Carstensen received her B.S. from the University of Rochester and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from West Virginia University.
Abstract
We are approaching a watershed moment in human history, when the number of people over 65 will surpass the number of children under 15. By the time our children reach old age, living to 100 will be commonplace. Life expectancy increased so quickly that culture has not had time to catch up. But rest assured, these demographic changes will change virtually all aspects of life - education, families, financial markets and politics. To the extent that people arrive at old age mentally sharp, physically fit, and financially secure, long-lived societies will thrive. But as Matilda White Riley so eloquently argued there is a structural lag between extended years and cultural supports for those added years. I argue that among the most pressing needs of the modern world is the development of “longevity science,” namely, advances and discoveries that can form the basis of a culture that uses added years to improve quality of life at all ages.
To that aim, we must increase our knowledge of human development from early to very late life. In particular, we must better understand the aging mind, its strengths and weaknesses so that we can build cultural supports to improve decisions, preferences and planning. Socioemotional selectivity theory – a life-span theory of motivation- maintains that shifts in time horizons have profound and systematic implications for the types of goals people pursue, the decisions they make, and even what they see, hear and remember. In this talk, I will discuss findings from my research program to illustrate one small slice of a longevity science that can ultimately help people anticipate and plan for longer futures.
Slide Presentations
Introduction (PDF, file size 131 KB)
Matilda White Riley (PDF, file size 613 KB)
Dr. Carstensen’s Lecture (PDF, file size ~2 MB)
 Dr. John McKinlay and Dr. Christine Bachrach
Vice President & Director
New England Research Institutes, Inc.
June 19, 2008
Wilson Hall, Shannon Building
National Institutes of Health
John McKinlay and Christine Bachrach
The NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research awarded the Third Matilda White Riley Lectureship to John. B. McKinlay, Ph.D. Dr. McKinlay is the Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist of the New England Research Institutes (Watertown, Massachusetts). He is an internationally prominent epidemiologist with interests and experience in public health, epidemiologic field studies, clinical decision-making and health policy. He was for several decades a distinguished academic and administrator (at Boston University), holding simultaneous Professorships in Medicine, Biostatistics and Epidemiology and Sociology and directing BU's Center for Health and Advanced Policy Studies and its Gerontology Institute. He has been a Member of the Division of Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital (Harvard Medical School) for 25 years.
Dr. McKinlay is the recipient of many awards and honors including an NIH MERIT Award, an American Psychological Association award for "Distinguished and Pioneering Contributions to Research on Women's Health," and the American Sociological Association's Leo G. Reeder Award for "Distinguished Contributions to Medical Sociology." He is the author, co-author, or editor of over 250 professional papers and 17 books. Several of his papers have been designated "citation classics".
Dr. McKinlay's career-lifelong commitment to social epidemiology began in his native New Zealand with studies of heart disease among native Maoris and the health consequences of migration by Polynesian Tokelau Islanders. Since 1973, Dr. McKinlay has collaborated on studies of menopause -- culminating in the highly regarded Massachusetts Women's Health Study. His own Massachusetts Male Aging Study (a longitudinal investigation of over 1700 men) continues to make pioneering contributions in such fields as endocrinology, urology, cardiovascular disease, geriatrics and behavioral medicine. Dr. McKinlay is presently leading NIH funded research on the epidemiology of erectile dysfunction (impotence). With support from the NIH he is establishing a population epidemiologic laboratory in the Boston inner-city area involving over 5000 individuals randomly sampled and followed over time. This study is designed to look at a range of urologic conditions as well as diabetes and the metabolic syndrome in men and women of diverse race and ethnicity. With colleagues at the Boston Medical Center, he is conducting the first large epidemiological study (n=1100) of osteoporosis in a racial and ethnically diverse population of aging men. He is also conducting a study (employing complex factorial experimental designs) on nonmedical influences and how they influence clinical decision-making in both the US and the UK. This last area is producing highly relevant results for the rapidly emerging managed care environment in the U.S.
 Dr. John McKinlay
View Videocast of Dr. McKinlay’s Lecture at: http://videocast.nih.gov/launch.asp?14572
 Dr. Carol Ryff and Dr. Burton Singer
University of Wisconsin
Burton H. Singer, Ph.D.
Princeton University
June 6, 2007
Wilson Hall Building 1, 3rd Floor 1 Center Drive
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Maryland
The NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research is pleased to announce that Carol D. Ryff, Ph.D. (University of Wisconsin) and Burton H. Singer, Ph.D. (Princeton University) are the joint recipients of the Second Matilda White Riley Lecture in the Behavioral and Social Sciences. Carol Ryff and Burt Singer met in 1993 in London at a meeting of researchers from several MacArthur Foundation networks. Prior to that time, she had never done any studies involving biological factors, and he had never done any studies involving psychosocial factors. The nexus between the two became the focus of their intellectual synergy, given her background in psychological well-being and his background in everything else. Their first joint publication discussed mind/body connections and emphasized the paucity of prior work connecting positive psychological factors to biological processes. These ideas were developed in more detail in The Contours of Positive Human Health in which they called for a reformulation of health as health rather than health as disease or illness. Their proposed route into it was via positive psychological and social factors and the neurophysiology that underlies these salubrious aspects of human functioning. Most of their collaborative work since that time has involved assembling empirical evidence that psychosocial well-being has a distinctive neurobiological signature.
Along the way, they also became interested in a science of human health that is fully integrative, taking into account many factors about people’s lives – their socioeconomic standing, significant life experiences, key social relationships, work, and family experiences, psychological outlooks – and how these come together to influence their health. The challenge, of course, is figuring out how to put all of this complexity together. In Life Histories and Mental Health, they generated a conceptual and methodological approach to integrate extensive amounts of longitudinal information to understand resilient women. Another integrative publication entitled “Elective Affinities and Uninvited Agonies: Mapping Emotion with Significant Others onto Health” brought literature and art into the formulation of human health. They had to publish an edited volume, Emotion, Social Relationships, and Health to get such a mélange into the literature.
They served as editors of New Horizons in Health: An Integrative Approach, a National Research Council publication that has been influential in the formation of several NIH initiatives focused on the interface between social and biological sciences. (OBSSR/NIH commissioned this report.) This integrative vision has been at the core of their MIDUS II study (supported by the National Institute on Aging), with the themes of resilience and vulnerability serving as organizing ideas. Relating combinations of biomarker conditions to psychosocial experience represents a central challenge at the heart of their current work.
 Dr. Ronald Abeles, Dr. Carol Ryff, Dr. Burton Singer and Dr. David Abrams
View Videocast of Dr. Ryff and Dr. Singer's Lecture at: http://videocast.nih.gov/launch.asp?13871
David Mechanic, Ph.D. Dr. David Mechanic
Rutgers University
May 22, 2006
3:00 - 4:00 PM
Wilson Hall, Building 1
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Maryland
The NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research is pleased to have
selected David Mechanic as the first recipient of the Matilda White Riley
NIH Lecture in the Behavioral and Social Sciences. Dr. Mechanic is the Ren Dubos
University Professor of Behavioral Sciences and director of the Institute for Health,
Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University. Formerly with the
University of Wisconsin, he came to Rutgers University in 1979, was Dean of the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and established the Rutgers Institute for Health,
Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. He directs the NIMH Center at Rutgers for
Research on the Organization and Financing of Care for the Severely Mentally Ill
and serves as the director of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator
Awards Program in Health Policy Research. A member of the National Academy of
Sciences (NAS), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute
of Medicine, he has served on numerous panels of the NAS, federal agencies and
non-profit organizations. He has received many awards, including the Distinguished
Investigator Award from the Association for Health Services Research, the First Carl
Taube Award for Distinguished Contributions to Mental Health Services Research from
the American Public Health Association, and the Distinguished Medical Sociologist
Award and Lifetime Contributions Award in Mental Health from the American Sociological
Association. He has written or edited 24 books and approximately 400 research articles,
chapters and other publications. His research and writing deal with social aspects
of health and health care. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford.
 Dr. Raynard Kington, Dr. Ronald Abeles and Dr. David Mechanic
Link to Mechanic's Lecture
Link to Mechanic's PowerPoint slides
View Videocast of Dr. Mechanic' Lecture at: http://videocast.nih.gov/launch.asp?13246
The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research
(OBSSR)
is pleased to sponsor the lecture in the behavioral and social sciences named in honor of Matilda White Riley (1911-2004).
In addition to serving as the Associate Director for Behavioral and Social Research at the
National Institute on Aging,
Dr. Riley provided leadership across the NIH in her role as chairperson of landmark committees regarding
health and behavior. She was co-chair of the joint ADAMHA and NIH Steering Committee for the Institute of
Medicine's Project on Health and Behavior (1979-1982) and chair of the trans-NIH
Working Group on Health and Behavior
(1982-1991). In these capacities she served as the senior NIH spokesperson on the behavioral and social sciences,
encouraged coordination among NIH Institutes, oversaw the production of numerous reports to the Congress on behavioral
research at the NIH, provided advice to several NIH Directors, and initiated the behavioral and social sciences seminar
series at the NIH. In effect, she laid the groundwork for and was the precursor to OBSSR.
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