David M. Greenberg | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation(s) | Psychologist, neuroscientist |
| Website | https://www.davidmgreenberg.com/ |
David Michael Greenberg is a psychologist, neuroscientist, and musician. He is best known for his contributions to personality psychology, social psychology, social neuroscience, music psychology, and autism.
Born in New York, Greenberg was raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He suffered from a congenital birth defect and was hospitalized when he was two weeks old. During this time, his grandfather sang to him, helping him to recover, which influenced Greenberg's career, as told by Greenberg in a TEDx talk in 2021. [1]
Greenberg began to play saxophone at the age of 10. At age 14, he began lessons with Dave LeCompte who taught him improvisational methods from Dennis Sandole, who was John Coltrane's teacher in Philadelphia. He then went on to study with Larry Mckenna, Ralph Bowen, and Joel Frahm. Greenberg went on his first European tour at age 16.
He studied psychology at Rutgers University, music performance at Mason Gross School of the Arts, and aesthetics at the University of Milan in Italy via the Euroscholars Program. [2] During his undergraduate studies, he completed two honors theses: one on the philosophy of music and the other, a psychobiography of John Coltrane under the supervision of George Atwood, for which he received the award for the best honors thesis.
He graduated first in his class with an MPhil in social and developmental psychology from the University of Cambridge. Then, funded by the International Cambridge Trusts, he obtained his PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge, where he was supervised by Peter J. Rentfrow, advised by Michael E. Lamb, and collaborated with Simon Baron-Cohen. [3] [4] [5]
Before becoming a Zuckerman Fellow in social neuroscience at the Gonda Brain Sciences Center at Bar-Ilan University, he received postdoctoral clinical training in clinical psychology from the City University of New York, and in music therapy from Anglia Ruskin University. [6] [7] [8] [9] Greenberg received additional training and worked at the New York University Child Study Center and the National Institutes of Health, where he was advised by personality psychologist Robert R. McCrae. [10] [11] He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences' Daniel Turnberg Fellowship. [12] Greenberg's work involves interdisciplinary collaborations with Cambridge University, Harvard University, Stanford University, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, and McGill University. [13] [14]
Greenberg is known for his scientific work on musical preferences and personality, the social neuroscience of music, music therapy, and autism. He has received honors from the National Institutes of Health and the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. [15] [6] [16]
From 2016 to 2020, Greenberg served as a senior scientific advisor/consultant for companies such as Spotify and National Geographic. [17] [18] [6]
In 2017, Greenberg founded Musical Universe, which became an academic and popular science platform engaging 350,000 people in 100 countries. In 2022, Greenberg transitioned the platform to become a healthtech start-up to aid millions of people worldwide through proprietary diagnostic screening technology and telehealth. Musical Universe was accepted into the Crown Ventures Accelerator program in the autumn of 2022. [19] [20]
Greenberg has worked with the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, which brings together Arab-Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis from East and West Jerusalem. [7] [21] He led an initiative called One World in Song, which is an interdisciplinary effort aimed at establishing a scientific basis for the use of music in easing social conflict/ Greenberg chaired its first international symposium in July 2021. [22]
Greenberg now serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Music Therapy and Musicae Scientiae. [23] [24] He often appears as a guest on BBC, NPR, CBS, ABC News and other media outlets. He is also a musician and songwriter who continues to perform regularly under his Hebrew name, Yeshaya David. [16] [25]
In 2016, Greenberg developed a new model for understanding music perception, called the arousal-valence-depth (AVD) model of musical attributes, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. The study co-authors included Peter J. Rentfrow at Cambridge University and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin at McGill University. [26] [27] The AVD model was replicated in 2017, [28] 2018, [29] 2019, [30] and 2021 and has since been used in studies on musical preferences and analgesia. [31]
In 2018, Greenberg published the largest study to date of autistic traits and autism, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with 634,958 typical individuals and 36,648 autistic individuals. The study showed that autistic individuals on-average have greater D-scores (drive to systemize) than typical individuals, and that D-scores account for 18 times more variance in autistic traits than do sex differences. The study was co-authored by Simon Baron-Cohen at the Autism Research Centre of Cambridge University. Greenberg and his colleagues extended these findings to cisgender individuals, transgender, and gender-diverse individuals, published in Nature Communications. Greenberg is currently leading as a Co-PI, the first nationwide randomized controlled trial (RCT) of improvisational music therapy with autistic children in the UK. The study has raised US$1.7 million and is funded by the Autism Research Trust and Rosetrees Trust. [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39]
In 2020, Greenberg formulated and tested a social psychological theory called the self-congruity effect of music, published in the Journal of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study showed that people prefer music of artists who have perceived personalities similar to themselves and that musical preferences are driven by the personality-fit between the listener and the artist, rather than pure musical preferences alone. The study included 86,570 participants and was co-authored by Sandra Matz at Columbia Business School. [40] [41] [42]
In 2021, Greenberg published one of the first articles on the "social neuroscience of music" (in contrast to the cognitive neuroscience of music). Published in the American Psychologist, he showed that the social brain networks implicated in music production (in contrast to music listening) overlap with the networks in the brain implicated in the social processes of human cognition—mentalization, empathy, and synchrony. The article was co-authored by neuroscientist Jean Decety at the University of Chicago, and Ilaniit Gordon at Bar-Ilan University. [43] [44] [45] [46]
In 2022, Greenberg published the largest cross-cultural study to date on music in the Journal of Personality and Social-Psychology, with 356,649 participants across 53 countries. The study used both audio-based and genre-based methods to show that the patterns in correlations between personality traits and Western musical preferences are invariant (i.e., universal) across countries. [47]
In 2022, Greenberg published the largest study to date on theory of mind in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with 305,726 participants across 57 countries. The study validated sex differences in theory of mind using the popular "reading the mind in the eyes test." The study showed that females, on average, score higher than males on the theory of mind across ages and countries. The study was a collaboration with Cambridge-University, Harvard University, and Bar-Ilan-University. [48]
Asperger syndrome (AS), also known as Asperger's syndrome or Asperger's, is a term formerly used to describe a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. Asperger syndrome has been merged with other disorders into autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and is no longer considered a stand-alone diagnosis. It was considered milder than other diagnoses which were merged into ASD due to relatively unimpaired spoken language and intelligence.
Empathy is generally described as the ability to take on another's perspective, to understand, feel, and possibly share and respond to their experience. There are more definitions of empathy that include but are not limited to social, cognitive, and emotional processes primarily concerned with understanding others. Often times, empathy is considered to be a broad term, and broken down into more specific concepts and types that include cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy.
In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them. A theory of mind includes the knowledge that others' beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts may be different from one's own. Possessing a functional theory of mind is crucial for success in everyday human social interactions. People utilize a theory of mind when analyzing, judging, and inferring others' behaviors. The discovery and development of theory of mind primarily came from studies done with animals and infants. Factors including drug and alcohol consumption, language development, cognitive delays, age, and culture can affect a person's capacity to display theory of mind. Having a theory of mind is similar to but not identical with having the capacity for empathy or sympathy.
Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College.
Sex differences in psychology are differences in the mental functions and behaviors of the sexes and are due to a complex interplay of biological, developmental, and cultural factors. Differences have been found in a variety of fields such as mental health, cognitive abilities, personality, emotion, sexuality, friendship, and tendency towards aggression. Such variation may be innate, learned, or both. Modern research attempts to distinguish between these causes and to analyze any ethical concerns raised. Since behavior is a result of interactions between nature and nurture, researchers are interested in investigating how biology and environment interact to produce such differences, although this is often not possible.
Mind-blindness, mindblindness or mind blindness is a theory initially proposed in 1990 that claims that all autistic people have a lack or developmental delay of theory of mind (ToM), meaning they are unable to attribute mental states to others. According to the theory, a lack of ToM is considered equivalent to a lack of both cognitive and affective empathy. In the context of the theory, mind-blindness implies being unable to predict behavior and attribute mental states including beliefs, desires, emotions, or intentions of other people. The mind-blindness theory asserts that children who delay in this development will often develop autism.
The Sally–Anne test is a psychological test, used in developmental psychology to measure a person's social cognitive ability to attribute false beliefs to others. Based on the earlier ground-breaking study by Wimmer and Perner (1983), the Sally–Anne test was so named by Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan M. Leslie, and Uta Frith (1985) who developed the test further; in 1988, Leslie and Frith repeated the experiment with human actors and found similar results.
The empathising–systemising (E–S) theory is a theory on the psychological basis of autism and male–female neurological differences originally put forward by English clinical psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. It classifies individuals based on abilities in empathic thinking (E) and systematic thinking (S). It measures skills using an Empathy Quotient (EQ) and Systemising Quotient (SQ) and attempts to explain the social and communication symptoms in autism spectrum disorders as deficits and delays in empathy combined with intact or superior systemising.
Dame Uta Frith is a German-British developmental psychologist and Emeritus Professor in Cognitive Development at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London (UCL). She pioneered much of the current research into autism and dyslexia. Her book Autism: Explaining the Enigma introduced the cognitive neuroscience of autism. She is credited with creating the Sally–Anne test along with fellow scientists Alan Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen. Among students she has mentored are Tony Attwood, Maggie Snowling, Simon Baron-Cohen and Francesca Happé.
Alan M. Leslie is a Scottish psychologist and Professor of Psychology and Cognitive science at Rutgers University, where he directs the Cognitive Development Laboratory (CDL) and is co-director of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science (RUCCS) along with Ernest Lepore.
Glenn Daniel Wilson is a psychologist best known for his work on attitude and personality measurement, sexual attraction, deviation and dysfunction, partner compatibility, and psychology applied to performing arts. He is a fellow of the British Psychological Society and makes frequent media appearances as a psychology expert, especially in TV news and documentaries.
Autism, also called autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or autism spectrum condition (ASC), is a neurodevelopmental disorder marked by deficits in reciprocal social communication and the presence of restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior. Other common signs include difficulty with social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication, along with (perseverative) special interests, stereotypic body movements (stimming), rigid routines, and hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input. Autism is clinically regarded as a spectrum disorder, meaning that it can manifest very differently in each person. For example, some are nonspeaking, while others have proficient spoken language. Because of this, there is wide variation in the support needs of people across the autism spectrum.
The psychology of music preference is the study of the psychological factors behind peoples' different music preferences. One study found that after researching through studies from the past 50 years, there are more than 500 functions for music. Music is heard by people daily in many parts of the world, and affects people in various ways from emotional regulation to cognitive development, along with providing a means for self-expression. Music training has been shown to help improve intellectual development and ability, though minimal connection has been found as to how it affects emotion regulation. Numerous studies have been conducted to show that individual personality can have an effect on music preference, though a recent meta-analysis has shown that personality in itself explains little variance in music preferences. These studies are not limited to American culture, as they have been conducted with significant results in countries all over the world, including Japan, Germany, Spain, and Brazil.
The relationship between autism and memory, specifically memory functions in relation to Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), is an ongoing topic of research. ASD is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by social communication and interaction impairments, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior. In this article, the word autism is used to refer to the whole range of conditions on the autism spectrum, which are not uncommon.
Empathy quotient (EQ) is a psychological self-report measure of empathy developed by Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright at the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. EQ is based on a definition of empathy that includes cognition and affect.
Francesca Gabrielle Elizabeth Happé is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London. Her research concerns autism spectrum conditions, specifically the understanding social cognitive processes in these conditions.
Sex and gender differences in autism exist regarding prevalence, presentation, and diagnosis.
Neurosexism is an alleged bias in the neuroscience of sex differences towards reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes. The term was coined by feminist scholar Cordelia Fine in a 2008 article and popularised by her 2010 book Delusions of Gender. The concept is now widely used by critics of the neuroscience of sex differences in neuroscience, neuroethics and philosophy.
Peter Jason Rentfrow is professor of personality and individual differences in the Psychology Department at Cambridge University, where he directs the Social Dynamics Research Center. He is an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Alan Turing Institute.
The theory of the double empathy problem is a psychological and sociological theory first coined in 2012 by Damian Milton, an autistic autism researcher. This theory proposes that many of the difficulties autistic individuals face when socializing with non-autistic individuals are due, in part, to a lack of mutual understanding between the two groups, meaning that most autistic people struggle to understand and empathize with non-autistic people, whereas most non-autistic people also struggle to understand and empathize with autistic people. This lack of understanding may stem from bidirectional differences in communication style, social-cognitive characteristics, and experiences between autistic and non-autistic individuals, but not necessarily an inherent deficiency. Recent studies have shown that most autistic individuals are able to socialize, communicate effectively, empathize well, and display social reciprocity with most other autistic individuals. This theory and subsequent findings challenge the commonly held belief that the social skills of autistic individuals are inherently impaired, as well as the theory of "mind-blindness" proposed by prominent autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen in the mid-1980s, which suggested that empathy and theory of mind are universally impaired in autistic individuals.
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