John T. Cacioppo

John Terrence Cacioppo (June 12, 1951 – March 5, 2018) was the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He founded the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and was the director of the Arete Initiative of the Office of the Vice President for Research and National Laboratories at the University of Chicago. In 1973, he earned a Bachelor of Science in economics from the University of Missouri, where he was the first in his family to go to college.

A near-fatal car crash in his youth energised Cacioppo, who realised that the most important things in his life were love and social connections.

Career In the late 1970s, Cacioppo collaborated with Richard E. Petty to develop the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of attitudes and persuasion and began investigations of individual differences in cognitive motivation. They also examined the social and biological influences on mind and behavior. Petty and Cacioppo enjoyed a friendly intellectual rivalry and became best friends and eventually roommates so that, in Cacioppo's words, they "didn't have to take breaks" between scientific debates. A decade later, Cacioppo began working with Gary Berntson to pioneer a new field they called social neuroscience. This led to an expansion of Cacioppo's research examining how personal relationships get under the skin to affect social cognition and emotions, personality processes, biology, and health. By employing brain scans, monitoring of autonomic and neuroendocrine processes, and assays of immune function, he found the overpowering influence of social context — a factor so strong that it can alter genetic expression in white blood cells. The work further showed how the subjective sense of social isolation (loneliness) uniquely disrupts our perceptions, behavior, and physiology, becoming a trap that not only reinforces isolation, but can also lead to early death. In 2004, he and William Patrick began a collaboration that led to their book, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, which makes the case that social cooperation is, in fact, humanity's defining characteristic. Gary Berntson, Jean Decety, Stephanie Cacioppo , Steve Cole, Dorret Boomsma, and Abraham Palmer continue to investigate the biological mechanisms involved in social perception, interpersonal processes, cognition, emotion, and behavior.

Board roles Cacioppo served as the president of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Society for Consumer Psychology, the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and the Society for Social Neuroscience. He also served as the chair of the Psychology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; chair of the National Research Council's Board of Behavior, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences (BBCSS); and chair of the international board of the Cluster of Excellence "Languages and Emotion," Free University Berlin. He was elected as a fellow in various societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Society of Experimental Psychologists; the Society of Experimental Social Psychology; and The Royal Society of Arts. He was also elected as a distinguished member of various societies, including Psi Chi; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the American Psychological Association; the Association for Psychological Science; the Society for Social Neuroscience; the American Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research; the World Innovation Foundation; the International Organization of Psychophysiology; the Society for Personality and Social Psychology; and the Society of Behavioral Medicine.

2019 In Memoriam: John T. Cacioppo (1951 – 2018), by Philip Rubin. American Psychologist, 2019, Vol. 74, No. 6, 745.

About social neuroscience In the early 1990s, Cacioppo began working with Gary Berntson of the Ohio State University to pioneer a new field they called “social neuroscience.”

Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary attempt to trace how social forces “get under the skin” to affect physiology, as well as how physiology influences social interactions. His collaborative research on loneliness raised questions about one of the pillars of modern medicine and psychology —the focus on the individual as the broadest appropriate unit of inquiry. The new discipline that examines the associations between social and neural levels of organizations and the biological mechanisms underlying these associations. Neuroscientists have tended to focus on single organisms, organs, cells, or intracellular processes. Social species create emergent organizations beyond the individual, however, and these emergent structures evolved hand in hand with neural and hormonal mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped animals survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too reproduced. Social neuroscience, therefore, is concerned with how biological systems implement social processes and behavior, capitalizing on concepts and methods from the neuroscience to inform and refine theories of social psychological processes, and using social and behavioral concepts and data to inform and refine theories of neural organization and function

By employing brain scans, monitoring of autonomic and neuroendocrine processes, and assays of immune function, Cacioppo and colleagues found that social context alters genetic expression, for instance in white blood cells. This research also showed that “loneliness” – the subjective social isolation – disrupts perception and alters behavior and physiology, becoming a trap that reinforces isolation. . These biological pathways were argued to be unique and to lead to early death.

Cacioppo and Jean Decety played an instrumental role in the creation of the Society for Social Neuroscience in 2010.

Personal life and death Cacioppo had two children in his first marriage, with Barbara Andersen, a psychology professor, which ended in divorce. He met his third wife, Stephanie, a brain researcher at a scientific conference in Shanghai, and they married in 2011.

Cacioppo developed salivary-gland cancer in 2015. volume two Psychotherapy with Depressed Patients (2 Volumes) (Co-written with Reza Zamani and Hamideh Jahangiri ), volume one volume two

Editor Perspectives in cardiovascular psychophysiology (1982). New York:Guilford Press. Social psychophysiology: A sourcebook (1983). New York: Guilford Press. Principles of psychophysiology: Physical, social, and inferential elements (1990): New York: Cambridge University Press. Handbook of psychophysiology, 2nd edition (2000): New York: Cambridge University Foundations in social neuroscience (2002): Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Essays in social neuroscience (2004): Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Social neuroscience (2005): New York: Psychology Press. Social neuroscience: People thinking about thinking people (2006): Cambridge: MIT Press. Handbook of psychophysiology, 3rd edition (2007): New York: Cambridge University Press. Handbook of neuroscience for the behavioral sciences (2009):New York: John Wiley & Sons. The Oxford handbook of social neuroscience (2011): New York: Oxford University Press.

Former editorial duties

Psychophysiology (editor, associate editor, Methodology Editor) Perspectives on Psychological Science (Advisory Editor, associate editor, editorial board) Psychological Review (associate editor, editorial board) Social Neuroscience (associate editor, editorial board) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (guest editor) American Psychologist (guest editor) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences (guest editor, editorial board) Journal of Consumer Research (Advisory Editor, editorial board) Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences (Editorial Board) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition (Editorial Board) Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience (Editorial Board) Basic and Applied Social Psychology (Editorial Board) BioMed Central (Editorial Board) Journal of Applied Social Psychology (Editorial Board) Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics (Editorial Board) The Open Psychology Journal (Editorial Board) Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews (Editorial Board) Personality and Social Psychology Review (Editorial Board) Review of Personality and Social Psychology (Editorial Board) International Journal of Psychophysiology (Editorial Board) Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Editorial Board)