Malinda Carpenter,Ph.D,
FRSE
Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". This soci ...
is a professor of
developmental psychology
Developmental psychology is the science, scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult deve ...
at
the University of St Andrews
(Aien aristeuein)
, motto_lang = grc
, mottoeng = Ever to ExcelorEver to be the Best
, established =
, type = Public research university
Ancient university
, endowment ...
, an international researcher specialising in infant and child communications,
prosocial behaviour and group reactions, in how people learn to understand others, and building self esteem;
her work includes research between ape and human
social cognition
Social cognition is a sub-topic of various branches of psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactio ...
, and more recently in considering
human-robotic communication futures.
Education and career
Carpenter graduated in French and Psychology, from the
University of Florida, Gainesville
The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida, traces its origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its ...
in 1990, and took her masters in 1993 and doctorate in 1995, at
Emory University
Emory University is a private research university in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1836 as "Emory College" by the Methodist Episcopal Church and named in honor of Methodist bishop John Emory, Emory is the second-oldest private institution of ...
, USA on ''Social-cognitive abilities of 9- to 15-month-old infants: Development and interrelationships.''
She spend two years post-doc research at the
National Institute of Mental Health
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH, in turn, is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is the prima ...
Postdoctoral Training Program in Developmental Psychology (focussing on
autism
The autism spectrum, often referred to as just autism or in the context of a professional diagnosis autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or autism spectrum condition (ASC), is a neurodevelopmental condition (or conditions) characterized by difficulti ...
) at the
University of Denver
The University of Denver (DU) is a private university, private research university in Denver, Colorado. Founded in 1864, it is the oldest independent private university in the Mountain States, Rocky Mountain Region of the United States. It is ...
, Denver, Colorado, USA and then a further two years as a post-doc Fellow at the University of Liverpool, England.
She collaborated with Virginia Slaughter, of the University of Queensland, Australia in 2008-09. Since 2013, she has worked in the University of St. Andrews, Scotland and continued her relationship with the
Max Planck Institute
Max or MAX may refer to:
Animals
* Max (dog) (1983–2013), at one time purported to be the world's oldest living dog
* Max (English Springer Spaniel), the first pet dog to win the PDSA Order of Merit (animal equivalent of OBE)
* Max (gorilla) (1 ...
for
Evolutionary Anthropology
Evolutionary anthropology, the interdisciplinary study of the evolution of human physiology and human behaviour and of the relation between hominids and non-hominid primates, builds on natural science and on social science. Various fields and ...
in
Leipzig
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...
, Germany,
since 1999, when she was senior scientist on Social Origins of Cultural Cognition in Infancy and (from 2008- 2013) when she was awarded funding to head the
Minerva Foundation
The Minerva Foundation is a US-based non-profit, scientific and charitable foundation. It is headquartered in Berkeley, California. It was established in 1983 by Helen and Elwin Marg. Other than the founders, directors include Richard M. Buxbaum ...
Research Group in the Max Planck Institute. She joined ''
academia.net'' in 2010 and speaks English, French, German, Spanish.
Carpenter has been an invited or a keynote speaker at international conferences and key summer schools over her career, for example:
* ''Cultural Learning, Imitation and Articraft Understanding: A Comparative Perspective'' at summer school,
Central European University
Central European University (CEU) is a private research university accredited in Austria, Hungary, and the United States, with campuses in Vienna and Budapest. The university is known for its highly intensive programs in the social sciences and ...
, 2005
* '
''What makes humans human? at AX Foundation seminar 2011
*''Human Robot Interaction'' ''at''
Bielefeld University
Bielefeld University (german: Universität Bielefeld) is a university in Bielefeld, Germany. Founded in 1969, it is one of the country's newer universities, and considers itself a "reform" university, following a different style of organization a ...
2014
*''From Human-Human Joint Action to Human-Robot Joint Action, and vice versa!,'' at
Toulouse
Toulouse ( , ; oc, Tolosa ) is the prefecture of the French department of Haute-Garonne and of the larger region of Occitania. The city is on the banks of the River Garonne, from the Mediterranean Sea, from the Atlantic Ocean and from Par ...
, 2016: ''The jointness in infants’ and young children’s joint action and joint attention''
*Guest speaker at cross-discipline summer workshop for early career researchers, ''Brace yourself!'' at St. Andrews, 2018.
For an up to date list of her academic related activities, see the activities page on the staff profile at the University of St. Andrews.
Recognition
In 2012, Carpenter was selected as a Fellow of the
Association of Psychological Science.
In 2018, one of her supervised students, Amrisha Vaish won their early career award.
She was associate editor of the academic journal ''
Cognition
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...
'' (2013–14) and on the editorial board of ''
Child Development Perspectives
''Child Development Perspectives'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Society for Research in Child Development. Its editor-in-chief is Rob Kail. The journal aims to publish short articles o ...
'' since 2013.
At the opening of the Leipzig Center for Early Child Development, in 2016, marking the 50th anniversary of conferences of the
German Society for Psychology
The German Society for Psychology (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie) is the German national society of psychologists for education and research in psychology.
The society was founded in 1904 as the ''Gesellschaft für Experimentelle Psyc ...
, Carpenter was asked to be one of the keynote speakers, talking upon ''Affiliation, alignment and belonging in infancy and early childhood.''
In 2021, Carpenter was elected as a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh
The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established i ...
.
She has joined the
Templeton World Charity Foundation
The John Templeton Foundation (Templeton Foundation) is a philanthropic organization that reflects the ideas of its founder, John Templeton, who became wealthy via a career as a contrarian investor, and wanted to support progress in religious an ...
funded Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute: 'A new community exploring intelligence, mind, and cognition in all its forms'.
Research experiments and publications
Carpenter's research has involved practical as well as theoretical studies and in outreach to share her findings with the public. Her studies have formed part of international research bases, cited for psychology and developmental behavioural themes, such as
*
Imitation
Imitation (from Latin ''imitatio'', "a copying, imitation") is a behavior whereby an individual observes and replicates another's behavior. Imitation is also a form of that leads to the "development of traditions, and ultimately our culture. I ...
*
Intention
Intentions are mental states in which the agent commits themselves to a course of action. Having the plan to visit the zoo tomorrow is an example of an intention. The action plan is the ''content'' of the intention while the commitment is the ''a ...
*
Joint attention
Joint attention or shared attention is the shared focus of two individuals on an object. It is achieved when one individual alerts another to an object by means of eye-gazing, pointing or other verbal or non-verbal indications. An individual gaze ...
*
Nonverbal communication
Nonverbal communication (NVC) is the transmission of messages or signals through a nonverbal platform such as eye contact, facial expressions, gestures, Posture (psychology), posture, and body language. It includes the use of social cues, kinesi ...
*
Bootstrapping (linguistics)
Her earlier experiments were described in detail so they could be replicated.
Her collaborative research on chimpanzees was published in a book. As well as collaborations listed, her work was also with
Michael Tomasello
Michael Tomasello (born January 18, 1950) is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.
Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is c ...
and jointly published their 2005 research,
and earlier
George Butterworth
George Sainton Kaye Butterworth, MC (12 July 18855 August 1916) was an English composer who was best known for the orchestral idyll ''The Banks of Green Willow'' and his song settings of A. E. Housman's poems from '' A Shropshire Lad''.
Early ...
. Her international interests in 2017 extended to
bilingualism
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...
in young children, and she was nominated by the students union in St. Andrew's for a 2019 Teaching Awards and shortlisted as a finalist for her academic mentorship.
Later she engaged in more public communications on the research and its impact for child development practices and parenting skills. Carpenter supported a local community science outreach (March 2018: ''becoming one of us),'' and a public radio debate on 'crowd science', as reported in ''
Church Times
The ''Church Times'' is an independent Anglican weekly newspaper based in London and published in the United Kingdom on Fridays.
History
The ''Church Times'' was founded on 7 February 1863 by George Josiah Palmer, a printer. It fought for the ...
.'' She was interviewed in the
Greater Good podcast, from
Berkeley
Berkeley most often refers to:
*Berkeley, California, a city in the United States
**University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California
* George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher
Berkeley may also refer ...
on how her experiment on using familiar objects and dolls positioning, to see if they influenced children's behaviour towards acting helpfully to adults. The St. Andrew's Baby and Child (ABC) Lab. was another such project, which had been enrolling mother and child pairs, and individual children to observe and assist the research. The project drew the attention of
Netflix
Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a fil ...
for a follow up to its TV series on ''Babies?'' The series 2 episode 4 ''Relationships'' was described as 'A coy smile, a puppet show and a pointed finger lead to discoveries in how babies get along with others using humor, morality and shared experiences', and featured Carpenter's team's studies.
External resources
* Netflix trailer for ''Babies? season 2''
* Research publications (University of St. Andrew's listing
* Research works (Orcid Listin
* Research works (LOOP Listin
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Carpenter, Malinda
Developmental psychologists
Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
Academic staff of Max Planck Society
Academics of the University of St Andrews
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
Emory University alumni
Women psychologists