Keltner was born in Jalisco, Mexico, to two early members of the counterculture. Keltner's mother, a literature professor, and father, an artist and firefighter, raised both him and his brother in Laurel Canyon in the 1970s. When his mother secured her first job as a professor, they moved to a conservative town in the foothills of the California Sierra Nevada. When Keltner was in high school, their family relocated to Nottingham, England.[2]
Keltner is the co-author of two textbooks, as well as the best-selling Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, The Compassionate Instinct, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence, and most recently, the national bestseller AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. Keltner has published over 230 scientific articles and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The London Times, The Wall Street Journal, SLATE, Utne Reader. He has received numerous national prizes and grants for his research, teaching, and writing, and is a member of the american Academy of Arts and Sciences.[4]
His Science of Happiness MOOC at EdX has had over 600,000 enrollees. Wired magazine recently rated his podcasts from his course Emotion as one of the five best educational downloads, and the Utne Reader selected Keltner for one of its 50 2008 visionaries.[6]
Keltner has collaborated with directors at Pixar, including film director and animator Pete Docter in his films Inside Out[7] and Soul.[8] He has worked and continues to work with Facebook engineers and designers on projects such as Facebook stickers and Facebook reactions.[9] He has also worked on projects at Google on altruism and emotion, and was recently[when?] featured in Tom Shadyac’s movie I Am.[10]
Keltner is collaborated with the Sierra Club to get veterans and inner city adolescents outdoors. Building upon his experiences in a restorative justice program with prisoners in San Quentin Prison, Keltner wrote a brief for a case – Ashker v. Governor of California – that led to the curtailment of solitary confinement in maximum-security prisons in California.
With collaborators Paul Piff and Michael Kraus, Keltner has offered a theoretical account of how social class shapes human thought, feeling, and action.[16] In empirical demonstrations of this work, Keltner has shown that people from more privileged class backgrounds are more likely to drive through pedestrian crosswalks and cheat on tests to win a prize, feel less compassion than those who suffer, and explain their success in terms of their own superior traits.[17]
Human emotion
Keltner has been a central voice in making the case that emotions serve important social functions, enabling us to fold into relationships vital to survival, like friendships, groups, romantic partnerships, and parent-child attachments.[18] Guided by this framework, Keltner has done pioneering work on emotions like embarrassment, shame, love, compassion, amusement, and gratitude.[19]
Beginning with his post-doctoral fellowship with Paul Ekman, Keltner has long studied emotional expression from a Basic Emotion perspective.[20] He has done work documenting the universality of upwards of 20 distinct facial expressions, the richness with which people can communicate emotion in the voice, and how people communicate emotions like love, compassion, and gratitude through touch. In partnership with Alan Cowen, he has offered a new computational perspective on what emotions are.[21] With a “data-driven” approach that maps people’s emotional experiences and expressions across the widest array of emotions studied to date and across different cultures, this work is finding: that the emotion space involves upwards of 20 distinct states, that blends in emotion are common, that each emotion category has many variations within it, and that discrete emotion concepts (e.g., “awe” “sympathy”) rather than broader constructs such as valence or arousal drive the representation of emotional experience and recognition of emotion.[22]
Awe
In 2003, Keltner and collaborator Jonathan Haidt authored a paper charting what awe is and how it influences our moral, spiritual and aesthetic lives.[23] Building upon that paper, Keltner has done over 15 years of science on awe, summarized in AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and how it Can Transform Your Life. This research shows that people find experiences of awe in what he calls the eight wonders of life: the moral beauty of others, nature, moving in unison, music, visual art, spirituality, big ideas, and life and death. Awe enables individuals to integrate into strong communities by inspiring cooperative tendencies and a more collective self. In a recent paper with collaborator Maria Monroy, Keltner has made the case that experiences of awe account for why things like music, spirituality, and psychedelics benefit health and well-being.[24]
Science of happiness
In his book Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, Keltner explores the science behind well-being. The book attempts to counter the bias that we are wired to be self-interested. Keltner explores the Confucian idea of the jen ratio; the relationship between actions that bring the good of others to completion and those that bring out bad. The greater score is a direct relation to your happiness. In the book he touches on the qualities of gratitude, compassion, play, awe, embarrassment and teasing and how these qualities are innate in people but also can be developed.[25]
Keltner, Dacher. The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence. Penguin, 2016. ISBN9781594205248;[27]
Keltner, Dacher, Jason Marsh, and Jeremy Adam Smith, editors, The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010. ISBN9780393337280[28]
Keltner, Dacher. Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. W. W. Norton, 2009. ISBN9780393073577.
Keltner, Dacher, Keith Oatley, and Jennifer M. Jenkins. Understanding Emotions 3rd ed. ISBN9781118147436;[29] prev. ed. published by Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
Gilovich, Thomas, Dacher Keltner, and Richard E. Nisbett. Social Psychology. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006 ISBN
Keltner, Dacher (January 3, 2023). Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Penguin Press. p.336. ISBN978-1984879684.
Related Research Articles
Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity.
Positive psychology is a field of psychological theory and research of optimal human functioning of people, groups, and institutions. It studies "positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions... it aims to improve quality of life."
Sadness is an emotional pain associated with, or characterized by, feelings of disadvantage, loss, despair, grief, helplessness, disappointment and sorrow. An individual experiencing sadness may become quiet or lethargic, and withdraw themselves from others. An example of severe sadness is depression, a mood which can be brought on by major depressive disorder or persistent depressive disorder. Crying can be an indication of sadness.
Compassion is a social feeling that motivates people to go out of their way to relieve the physical, mental, or emotional pains of others and themselves. Compassion is sensitivity to the emotional aspects of the suffering of others. When based on notions such as fairness, justice, and interdependence, it may be considered partially rational in nature.
Amusement is the state of experiencing humorous and entertaining events or situations while the person or animal actively maintains the experience, and is associated with enjoyment, happiness, laughter and pleasure. It is an emotion with positive valence and high physiological arousal.
Gratitude, thankfulness, or gratefulness is a feeling of appreciation by a recipient of another's kindness. This kindness can be gifts, help, favors, or another form of generosity to another person.
Richard J. Davidson is an American psychologist and professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as well as founder and chair of the Center for Healthy Minds and the affiliated non-profit Healthy Minds Innovations.
The Greater Good Science Center (GGSC) is a center located at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jonathan David Haidt is an American social psychologist and author. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business. His main areas of study are the psychology of morality and moral emotions.
Emotion classification, the means by which one may distinguish or contrast one emotion from another, is a contested issue in emotion research and in affective science. Researchers have approached the classification of emotions from one of two fundamental viewpoints:
that emotions are discrete and fundamentally different constructs
that emotions can be characterized on a dimensional basis in groupings
Well-being, or wellbeing, also known as wellness, prudential value, prosperity or quality of life, is what is intrinsically valuable relative to someone. So the well-being of a person is what is ultimately good for this person, what is in the self-interest of this person. Well-being can refer to both positive and negative well-being. In its positive sense, it is sometimes contrasted with ill-being as its opposite. The term "subjective well-being" denotes how people experience and evaluate their lives, usually measured in relation to self-reported well-being obtained through questionnaires.
Awe is an emotion comparable to wonder but less joyous. On Robert Plutchik's wheel of emotions awe is modeled as a combination of surprise and fear.
Subjective well-being (SWB) is a self-reported measure of well-being, typically obtained by questionnaire.
A functional account of emotions posits that emotions facilitate adaptive responses to environmental challenges. In other words, emotions are systems that respond to environmental input, such as a social or physical challenge, and produce adaptive output, such as a particular behavior. Under such accounts, emotions can manifest in maladaptive feelings and behaviors, but they are largely beneficial insofar as they inform and prepare individuals to respond to environmental challenges, and play a crucial role in structuring social interactions and relationships.
Ravenna Mathews Helson was an American psychologist known for her research on the psychology of women and creativity. Dacher Keltner has described her as "a pioneer in the study of women's lives".
Serena Chen is an American social psychologist known for her work on the self and interpersonal relationships. She is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and currently serves as Chair of the Psychology Department. Her research utilizes a social-cognition framework and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other news outlets.
Daniel Cordaro is an American research scientist and psychologist who specializes in emotion psychology and human wellbeing. As a former faculty member at Yale University, Cordaro is best-known for his research in human emotion and positive psychology. Formerly the director of the Universal Expression Project at the University of California, Berkeley, Cordaro has conducted various worldwide studies on human emotional expression.
June Gruber is an American psychologist. She is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Director of the Positive Emotion and Psychopathology Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is known for her research on positive affectivity and mental health. She is a licensed clinical psychologist.
Iris Mauss is a social psychologist known for her research on emotions and emotion regulation. She holds the position of Professor of Psychology at University of California, Berkeley and Director of the Emotion & Emotion Regulation Lab. Her research has been cited in various publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Psychology Today.
The psychology of social class is a branch of social psychology dedicated to understanding how social class affects individual's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. While social class has long been a subject of analysis in fields such as sociology, political science, anthropology, medicine and epidemiology, its emergence within the field of psychology is much more recent.
↑ Lehrer, Jonah (August 14, 2010). "The Power Trip". The Wall Street Journal. Contrary to the Machiavellian cliché, nice people are more likely to rise to power. Then something strange happens: Authority atrophies the very talents that got them there.
↑ Keltner, Dacher (November 30, 2017). The power paradox: how we gain and lose influence. OCLC929055993.
↑ Keltner, Dacher; Marsh, Jason; Smith, Jeremy Adam (November 30, 2017). The compassionate instinct: the science of human goodness. W. W. Norton & Co. OCLC317920038.
↑ Keltner, Dacher; Oatley, Keith; Jenkins, Jennifer M (November 30, 2017). Understanding emotions. OCLC828718067.
Video: We Are Built to Be Kind, published on December 2, 2014 - Dacher Keltner challenges popular notions of human nature and seeks to explain why mammals evolved emotions such as empathy
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