Reginald B. Adams, Jr.
My work currently focuses on how we extract social and emotional meaning from nonverbal cues, particularly via the face. I seek to better understand how multiple social messages (e.g., emotion, gender, race, age, etc.) combine and interact to form unified representations that guide our impressions of and responses to others. Although my questions are social psychological in origin, they draw heavily upon visual cognition and affective neuroscience to address social perception at the functional, cross-cultural, and neuroanatomical levels. Before coming to Penn State, I was awarded a National Research Service Award (NRSA) to train as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and Tufts Universities, and since have been funded by the National Science Foundation. In 2010 I received the SAGE Young Scholars Award (Early Career) from The Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology. My research has most recently been funded by NSF, NIA and NIMH (NIH).
Primary Interests:
- Culture and Ethnicity
- Emotion, Mood, Affect
- Gender Psychology
- Intergroup Relations
- Interpersonal Processes
- Neuroscience, Psychophysiology
- Nonverbal Behavior
- Person Perception
- Social Cognition
Research Group or Laboratory:
Books:
- Adams, R. B., Jr., Ambady, N., Nakayama, K., & Shimojo, S. (Eds.). (2010). The science of social vision. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Hurley, M. M., Dennett, D. C., & Adams, R. B., Jr. (2011). Inside jokes: Using humor to reverse- engineer the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Journal Articles:
- Adams, R. B., Jr., Ambady, N., Macrae, C. N., & Kleck, R. E. (2006). Emotional expressions forecast approach-avoidance behavior. Motivation & Emotion, 30, 179-188.
- Adams, R.B., Jr., Franklin, R. G., Jr., Kveraga, K., Ambady, N., Kleck, R.E., Whalen, P.J., Hadjikhani, N. & Nelson, A.J. (2012). Amygdala responses to averted versus direct gaze fear vary as a function of presentation speed. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 7, 568-577.
- Adams, R. B., Jr., Franklin, R. G., Rule, N. O., Freeman, J. B., Yoshikawa, S., Kveraga, K., Hadjikhani, N., & Ambady, N. (2010). Culture, gaze, and the neural processing of fear expressions: An fMRI investigation. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5, 340-348.
- Adams, R. B., Jr., Gordon, H. L., Baird, A. A., Ambady, N., & Kleck, R. E. (2003). Effects of gaze on amygdala sensitivity to anger and fear faces. Science, 300, 1536.
- Adams, R. B., Jr., & Janata, P. (2002). An fMRI comparison of neural circuits underlying auditory and visual object categorization. NeuroImage, 16, 361-377.
- Adams, R. B., Jr., & Kleck, R. E. (2005). The effects of direct and averted gaze on the perception of facially communicated emotion. Emotion, 5, 3-11.
- Adams, R. B., Jr., & Kleck, R. E. (2003). Perceived gaze direction and the processing of facial displays of emotion. Psychological Science, 14, 644-647.
- Adams, R.B., Jr., Nelson, A.J., & Soto, J.A., Hess, U., & Kleck, R.E. (2012). Emotion in the neutral face: A mechanism for impression formation? Cognition and Emotion, 26, 131-141.
- Adams, R. B., Jr., Pauker, K., & Weisbuch, M. (2010). Looking the other way: The role of gaze direction in the cross-race memory effect. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 478-481.
- Adams, R. B., Jr., Rule, N., Franklin, R. G., Jr., Wang, E., Stevenson, M. T., Yoshikawa, S., Nomura, M., Sato, W., Kveraga, K., & Ambady, N. (2010). Cross-cultural reading the mind in the eyes: An fMRI investigation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22, 97-108.
- Beeney, J. E., Franklin, R. G., Jr., Levy, K. N., & Adams, R.B., Jr. (2011). I feel your pain: Emotional closeness modulates neural responses to empathically experienced rejection. Social Neuroscience, 6, 369-376.
- Franklin, R. G., Jr., & Adams, R. B., Jr. (2010). The two sides of beauty: Laterality and the duality of facial attractiveness. Brain and Cognition, 72, 300-305.
- Franklin, R. G., Jr., & Adams, R. B., Jr. (2010). What makes a face memorable? The relationship between face memory and emotional state reasoning. Personality and Individual Differences, 49, 8-12.
- Franklin, R. G., Jr., & Adams, R. B., Jr. (2009). A dual-process account of facial attractiveness: Sexual and nonsexual routes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 1156-1159.
- Franklin, R.G., Jr., Nelson, A. J., Baker, M., Beeney, J. E., Lenz-Watson, A., Vescio, T. K., & Adams, R.B. Jr. (2013). Neural mechanisms of empathy for humans and animals. Social Neuroscience, 8, 217-227.
- Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., Adams, R. B., Jr., Ozono, H., Nakashima, S., Yoshikawa, S., & Watabe, M. (2010). Polling the face: Prediction and consensus across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, 1-15.
Other Publications:
- Adams, R. B., Jr., Franklin, R. G., Jr., Nelson, A. J., & Stevenson, M. T. (2010). Compound social cues in face processing (pp. 90-107). In R. B. Adams, Jr., N. Ambady, K. Nakayama, & S. Shimojo (Eds.), The Science of Social Vision. New York: Oxford University Press.
Courses Taught:
- Good Science Good Practice
- Social Affective Neuroscience
- Social Psychology at Face Value
- Social Vision
- The Laughing Animal
- The Psychology of Human Emotion
Reginald B. Adams, Jr.
Department of Psychology
544 Moore Building
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, Pennsylvania 16802
United States of America
- Phone: (814) 863-1725
- Fax: (814) 863-7002