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Abigail Marsh

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Abigail Marsh (born 1976) is an American 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

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

She graduated from Dartmouth College in 1999 with a bachelor of arts in psychology.[5] She received her PhD in social psychology from Harvard University in 2004, where she previously earned an MA in the same discipline in 2001.[6][7]

Career

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After graduating from Harvard, Marsh worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health until 2008.[8][9] She then began to work at Georgetown University, and in October 2013, she became 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 pharmacology.[9] Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation.[6][11] She is on the advisory board of 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, she presented her story and work in a TED talk in Banff, Canada.[20][21]

Research

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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 that, when altruists watch someone else feel pain, they have levels of activity in similar regions of their brain as when they feel pain themselves, concluding that altruists are better at recognizing the fear of others.[24] Marsh leads work at Georgetown with altruistic donors, particularly those who have 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][26]

In 2019, Marsh did research on 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]

Books

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Good for Nothing

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In 2017, Marsh published the book Good for Nothing, on the topic of altruists and psychopaths.[26]

The Fear Factor

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Marsh's second book, The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between, which also came out in 2017, covers her research on aggression, altruism, and empathy in the context of neuroscience.[29][30]

Awards and recognition

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Marsh is a recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health's 2007 Richard J Wyatt Memorial Award for translational research.[6] In 2014, she received the Cozzarelli Prize for work on altruism she had published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America|Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research she coauthored studied "extraordinary altruists", focusing on people who donated kidneys to strangers.[31] In 2016, Marsh was named a fellow in the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.[3] In 2017, the S&R Foundation awarded her 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 2017 book The Fear Factor.[1]

References

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  1. ^ a b "Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science | SPSP". spsp.org.
  2. ^ a b "Author Abigail Marsh on the Black Eyed Peas". wsj.com. January 3, 2018.
  3. ^ a b c d Dec 2017, Teresa Wiltz '83 | Nov-. "What Makes Nice People Nice?". Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  4. ^ "How Fear Makes You Do Good or Evil". National Geographic News. January 3, 2018. Archived from the original on April 1, 2020.
  5. ^ "Georgetown University Faculty Directory". gufaculty360.georgetown.edu.
  6. ^ a b c "The S&R Kuno Award Winners | S&R Foundation". sandrfoundation.org. Archived from the original on August 5, 2020. Retrieved April 17, 2020.
  7. ^ "Researchers | Prospective Psychology". prospectivepsych.org.
  8. ^ a b "The Altruistic Brain: Making the Choice to Help". Boston College Events.
  9. ^ a b "Abigail Marsh – Roots of Empathy".[permanent dead link‍]
  10. ^ "11 Faculty Receive Tenure". October 18, 2013.
  11. ^ "NSF Award Search: Award#1729406 – Neural and cognitive bases of costly altruism toward strangers". nsf.gov.
  12. ^ "Abigail Marsh". Donor to Donor. Archived from the original on August 29, 2019. Retrieved April 16, 2020.
  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". The Guardian – via 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. ^ a b Marsh, Abigail. "Abigail Marsh | Speaker | TED". ted.com.
  21. ^ Marsh, Abigail (September 16, 2016). "Why some people are more altruistic than others" – via ted.com.
  22. ^ "Impulses, intent, and the science of evil". Science | AAAS. July 31, 2019.
  23. ^ "Right on!". 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".{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  25. ^ "For the first time, a neural link between altruism and empathy toward strangers". ScienceDaily.
  26. ^ a b 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 wsj.com.
  29. ^ "Abigail Marsh".
  30. ^ Murphy, Heather (April 24, 2018). "Why It Seems as if Everyone Is Always Angry with You". The New York Times – via NYTimes.com.
  31. ^ "Marsh Receives Cozzarelli Prize for Outstanding Research on Altruism". Association for Psychological Science - APS.
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