Dacher Keltner

Dacher Keltner is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Psychology, and Co-Director of the Greater Good Science Center. His research focuses on the social functions of emotion, individual differences in emotional expression, and their implications for well-being, relationships, and culture.

• Education: Ph.D. from Stanford University

Research interests include:

• Emotion and social interaction (e.g., embarrassment, love, awe)
• Power, social perception, and behavioral disinhibition
• Moral psychology (naive realism, emotion-morality links)
• Cultural variation in emotional experience

His recent publications (2024-2025) emphasize awe's role in mental health, cross-cultural emotion recognition, social class dynamics, and the intersection of emotions with creativity, morality, and technology. Key sub-fields include emotional well-being, prosocial behavior, computational emotion analysis, and evolutionary social psychology.