The November 2004 APA newsmagazine Monitor on Psychology includes an article on a July conference held at the University of British Columbia (UBC) that brought together evolutionary and cultural psychologists. Several current and former University of Michigan professors participated in the conference and were mentioned in the article.

In fact, one can trace the origins of much of this research to the mid-late 1980s at UM. Consider the following scholars mentioned in the Monitor article...

Hazel Markus, who as a graduate student and faculty member was at Michigan for approximately 20 years before moving to Stanford in 1994, progressed through different stages of studying processes related to the self-concept during the years I was in grad school (1984-89).

Hazel appeared to be moving from self-schematicity (Markus, 1977; Markus, Crane, Bernstein, & Siladi, 1982; Markus, Smith, & Moreland, 1985) to possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986; Cross & Markus, 1991; Ruvolo & Markus, 1992) to cross-cultural differences in self-conceptions. I saw Hazel give some talks at Michigan on her early ideas in the cultural area, ideas that came to fruition in publications such as Markus and Kitayama (1991, 1994). In my February 2, 2004 entry, I summarized Hazel's Presidential Address at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference, in which she presented her continued cross-cultural research (February archives).

(Many of you who are familiar with these lines of research, as well as others mentioned later in this entry, can recognize the articles in question; if you want more information such as the journals they appeared in, just e-mail me.)

Hazel's frequent collaborator, Shinobu Kitayama, was also mentioned in the Monitor article. Shinobu received his Ph.D. in 1987 from Michigan (where he was my office mate for about two or three years). After serving on the faculty at the University of Oregon and then at Kyoto University in Japan, Shinobu recently returned to UM as a professor.

Dick Nisbett, who is approaching 35 years on the UM faculty, appeared in the mid-late 1980s to be transitioning from his longtime concentration on reasoning and cognitive processes (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Nisbett, Krantz, Jepson, & Kunda, 1983; Nisbett, Fong, Lehman, & Cheng, 1987) to cultural studies. One of Dick's first major lines of cultural research (with then-graduate student Dov Cohen) involved the southern "Culture of Honor," culminating in a 1996 book by that name. More recently, Dick has blended cognition with cross-cultural studies, probing thought processes in Eastern and Western cultures. That work produced the 2003 book, The Geography of Thought.

Ara Norenzayan, a 1999 Michigan Ph.D. who is on the faculty at UBC, was also mentioned in the Monitor article.

On the evolutionary side, the Monitor article mentioned University of Texas, Austin professor David Buss, who served on the UM faculty in personality psychology from 1985-1996. A prolific author, Buss, along with his students and collaborators, has published numerous books and articles on evolution-related topics, focusing on mate-selection and related topics. Also mentioned in the Monitor article was UM psychiatrist Randolph Nesse. He spoke in the psychology graduate proseminar when I was in school.

The spread of culture is also a major interest of mine. It would have been great to go see the aforementioned (and other) speakers, but it just didn't fit within my travel plans last summer. I maintain a website on the spread of culture.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention two people featured elsewhere in the same Monitor issue with UM ties. Personality-social psychologist David Winter, who has been on the Michigan faculty since around 1988, was mentioned in an article about presidential personality traits. Finally, Steve Behnke, a UM clinical psychology Ph.D., regularly writes in the Monitor on ethical issues in psychology, in his capacity of APA Ethics Director (profile of Steve from when he began at APA).