James A. (Jim) Coan, PhD. Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology, is Director of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, and faculty adviser to the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the University of Virginia. He is the author of numerous scientific articles, as well as the author and editor of two books on the study of emotional behavior.
For the past 15 years he has studied the neuroscience of emotional and interpersonal behavior. His neuroscientific work on the effects of supportive social behavior has been featured in numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, National Public Radio, Time Magazine and the Discovery Channel. His hand holding experiment is rapidly becoming one of the most world renown experiments in the field of neuroscience.
In February 2010 Jim Coan received the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science. At the congres Dr. Coan will be discussing Social Proximity and Soothing and what has become known in the field of Affective Neuroscience as Social Baseline Theory. University of Virginia.
