Özlem Ayduk

Ozlem Ayduk is a Turkish-American social psychologist at U.C. Berkeley researching close relationships, emotion regulation, and the development of self-regulation in children. She is a fellow at the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Early life Ayduk became interested in understanding human behavior in middle school when she began reading books on personality and psychopathology. Combined with her longstanding desire to become a scientist, her newfound interest led her to pursue a career in psychology. Moving to America, she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University in 1995 and 1999, respectively. She has been active with professional psychology societies. She is a Fellow at the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and served on its executive board (2015–2018) and is also a Fellow at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, where she served on the grant review panel (2016–2017) and a three-year term on the board of directors (2018–2020). The children who delayed gratification had lower body mass indexes (BMI) than the others over 30 years later. They replicated the marshmallow experiment in the late 2010s and found that contrary to the popular expectation that children's attention spans had decreased since the original experiment, the children they studied waited one minute longer on average.

Ayduk collaborated with Ethan Kross to study self distancing and emotional regulation by empirically distinguishing adaptive from maladaptive forms of self-reflection. fMRI scans showed decreased brain activity when they used their own name instead of the pronoun "I" when recounting emotionally painful past experiences. 2008: Fellow, Society of Experimental Social Psychology 2016: Fellow, Society for Personality and Social Psychology

Selected bibliography Articles 2015: "Pronouns Matter when Psyching Yourself Up". Harvard Business Review

Books 2004: Current directions in personality psychology. Pearson Prentice Hall 2007: Introduction to personality: Toward an integrative science of the person (8th edition). Wiley

Research papers Self-distancing & emotion regulation 2005: "When asking 'why' doesn’t hurt: Distinguishing rumination from reflective processing of negative emotions". Psychological Science 2010: "From a distance: Implications of spontaneous self-distancing for adaptive self-reflection". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2014: "Self-Talk as a Regulatory Mechanism: How You Do It Matters". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2015: "This too shall pass: Temporal Distance and the Regulation of Emotions". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2018: "Self Distancing: Basic Mechanisms and Clinical Implications". In International Handbook of Self-Control in Health and Well Being. Routledge

Self regulation, delay of gratification 2000: "Regulating the interpersonal self: Strategic self-regulation for coping with rejection sensitivity". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2011: "'Willpower' over the lifespan: decomposing self-regulation". Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2011: "Behavioral and neural correlates of delay of gratification 40 years later". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2013: "Preschoolers' delay of gratification predicts their body mass 30 years later". The Journal of Pediatrics 2014: "The role of emotion and emotion regulation in the ability to delay gratification". In Handbook of Emotion Regulation. Guilford Press

Rejection sensitivity, close relationships 1999: "Does rejection elicit hostility in rejection sensitive women?". Social Cognition 2001: "Rejection sensitivity and depressive symptoms in women". Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2002: "Attentional mechanisms linking rejection to hostile reactivity: The role of 'hot' vs. 'cool' focus". Psychological Science 2007: "Defensive physiological reactions to rejection: the effect of self-esteem and attentional control on startle responses". Psychological Science 2008: "Individual differences in the rejection-aggression link in the hot sauce paradigm: The case of Rejection Sensitivity". Journal of Experimental Social Psychology