Encyclopedia of Social Psychology

Roy F. Baumeister is currently the Eppes Eminent Professor of Psychology and head of the social psychology graduate program at Florida State University. He grew up in Cleveland, the oldest child of a schoolteacher and an immigrant businessman. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from Princeton in 1978 and did a postdoctoral fellowship in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He spent over two decades at Case Western Reserve University, where he eventually was the first to hold the Elsie Smith professorship. He has also worked at the University of Texas, the University of Virginia, the Max-Planck-Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Baumeister's research spans multiple topics, including self and identity, self-regulation, interpersonal rejection and the need to belong, sexuality and gender, aggression, self-esteem, meaning, and self-presentation. He has received research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and from the Templeton Foundation. He has over 350 publications, and his 20 books include Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, The Cultural Animal, and Meanings of Life. The Institute for Scientific Information lists him among the handful of most cited (most influential) psychologists in the world. He lives by a small lake in Florida with his beloved family. In his rare spare time, he enjoys windsurfing, skiing, and jazz guitar. Kathleen D. Vohs is assistant professor in the Department of Marketing, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. Vohs received her Ph.D. in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College in 2000. She received a postdoctoral research grant from the National Institutes of Health with which she conducted research at the University of Utah and Case Western Reserve University. In 2003, she joined the Marketing Division at the University of British Columbia, where she was awarded the Canada Research Chair in Marketing Science and Consumer Psychology. In 2007, Vohs was named a McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota. Vohs has contributed over 90 professional publications including editing four books. Her theories highlight the role of the self, broadly-defined, including self-control, self-esteem, feelings of self-threat, dieting, bulimic symptoms, sexuality, impulsive and compulsive spending, interpersonal relationships, emotions, decision making, free will, and morality. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, the Transformative Consumer Research Council of the Association for Consumer Research, Russell Sage Foundation, and the American Cancer Society. Vohs's leisure activities include yoga, travel, and drinking wine.