Nalini Ambady Biography, Age, Height, Husband, Net Worth, Family

Age, Biography and Wiki

Nalini Ambady is an American social psychologist of Indian descent. She is best known for her pioneering work in the field of nonverbal communication. She was born on 20 March, 1959 in Kolkata, India. Nalini Ambady received her B.A. in Psychology from St. Xavier's College in Kolkata, India in 1980. She then went on to receive her M.A. in Psychology from the University of Delhi in 1982 and her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University in 1989. Nalini Ambady has made significant contributions to the field of nonverbal communication. She has conducted research on the effects of nonverbal cues on social perception, including the influence of facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues on judgments of personality, emotion, and trustworthiness. She has also studied the effects of cultural differences on nonverbal communication. Nalini Ambady has published numerous articles and books on nonverbal communication, including The Study of Nonverbal Communication (1995), Nonverbal Communication in Everyday Life (1996), and Nonverbal Communication: Science and Applications (2006). Nalini Ambady is currently a professor of psychology at Stanford University. She is also a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.

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Timeline

In collaboration with Kathleen R. Bogart and Michael L. Slepian, Nalini advanced the study of “thin slices” of behavior when researching the ability to precisely recognize characteristic traits people possess along with their individuality. This method establishes a way to predict an individual’s behavior with something as simple as a swift observation of their nonverbal behavior.

With a glimpse of someone’s “thin slices” of behavior, Nalini and her colleagues believed that just by observing nonverbal behavior, one can determine with accuracy to a certain extent, behavioral outcomes influenced by personality disorders (e.g. anxiety, depression etc.); mental states (e.g. suicide); and how an individual adapts to life events. One could even go as far as specific types of life events such as traumatic experience (e.g. divorce, sexual abuse etc.).

There is only one limitation to this method, a clinician’s analysis can falter when presented with a patient suffering from particular clinical disabilities (e.g. movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease), since healthy nonverbal behavior is impaired or masked by the exhibited symptoms of these disorders. Conventional methods already entail clinicians to observe their patients and make diagnoses through intuition based on the patient’s personality traits and nonverbal behavior. With the added method of “thin-slice” judgment, specialists would have another valuable resource to provide more qualitative assessments of their patients.

It is believed that individuals react to stereotype cues, whether they are biological or behavioral. These stereotypes create expectations in others that influence an individual’s behavior toward the target person and/or group. Research has demonstrated how such expectations will affect people’s positive or negative behavior toward targeted individuals. By exhibiting these behaviors toward target individuals, they, in turn, modify their behavior and confirm the previous expectations. This creates an endless loop of self-fulfilling prophecies.

During Ambady's appointment at Stanford, she founded SPARQ, the Center for Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions. The center was initially called "The Lewin Center", after social psychology pioneer Kurt Lewin. SPARQ officially opened its doors in 2014 after the passing of Ambady, however, she remained active in its formation even during her struggle with leukemia, and until her death. The main goal of SPARQ is to improve society by taking knowledge from the field of social psychology directly to policymakers, teachers and other impactful societal figures. SPARQ is an attempt to address the gap between psychology and the real world and aims to build a bridge between the hands-on experiences of practitioners in the field, and the scientific findings of the lab. SPARQ attempts to accomplish this goal through the fostering of meaningful collaborations between practitioners and social psychologies to the benefit of both.

Ambady died on October 28, 2013 at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Published in the journal Child Development in 2010, Nalini Ambady, Kristin Pauker, and Evan P. Apfelbaum, collaborated on a research study that investigated the arrival and the background of racial stereotyping by studying 89 children between the ages of 3 and 10. For the study, the children had to complete a variety of tasks related to matching and sorting. These tasks were used as a measure to assess the children’s knowledge and how they apply positive and negative stereotypes when encountered with in-groups and out-groups. The results from those tasks implied that children start to use stereotypes on out-groups when they are around 6 years old. This could occur based on a number of factors, but this study showed that there were 2 predictors that played an important contribution to the use of these stereotypes. The first predictor was race salience, which is where one sees and then organizes those people by race. The second predictor is essentialist thinking, which is where one believes that a certain race cannot change. These two predictors showed when and how these racial stereotypes may be taking place in real-life situations.

Nalini Ambady and Jamshed Bharucha produced a study published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science in 2009 that focused on articles regarding how culture can affect neural activation. They suggest a framework for cultural neuroscience in which both features are objective: culture mapping and source analysis.

In a research study published in 2009, Nalini Ambady and Max Weisbuch explored the importance of nonverbal behavior in shaping culture. They used television as a communication medium to investigate the impacts of nonverbal bias on individuals. They discovered that nonverbal bias influenced individuals’ beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. In research constituting 4 studies, they found out that there was a favorable nonverbal attitude towards especially slim female characters in popular TV programs, and exposure to nonverbal bias against heavier women in TV programs influenced the participants’ attitudes about ideal weight. In the last study, they found out that the regional difference in exposure to nonverbal bias accounted for regional variance in unhealthy dieting behavior among female teenagers.

She held academic positions at Harvard University, Cambridge and the College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts before being appointed as Professor in the Department of Psychology at Tufts University in 2004. She subsequently moved to Stanford University, California in 2011. She was the first Indian-American woman to teach psychology at Harvard, Tufts, and Stanford.

Ambady was diagnosed with leukemia in May 2004 but recovered after treatment. In 2011, the cancer recurred in a more aggressive form. Her friends and family led an intensive worldwide campaign to find a compatible bone-marrow donor since they were unable to successfully locate any in existing bone-marrow registries. This was partly due to the low numbers of Indians on such registries worldwide and a limited base of donors numbering around 25,000 in the few Indian registries that exist. Her plight sparked a global effort to increase participation in bone marrow registries among South Asian ethnic groups. Though as many as thirteen potential donors were located over a period of time, many of them refused to go through with the transplant process after identification.

Nalini Ambady, Margaret Shih, Amy Kim, and Todd L. Pittinsky worked together on a research study that examined the impact of positive and negative stereotypes had on cognitive performance and shared their findings in the journal Psychological Science in 2001. They accomplished this using two studies which consisted of three separate age groups of children. The first group was between the grade of kindergarten to grade 2 (lower elementary grades). The second group was between the grade of grade 3 and grade 5 (upper elementary grades). The third group was between the grades of grade 6 and grade 8 (middle school). The study showed results of children in lower elementary grades and middle school grades having shifts in their performance based on the positive and negative stereotypes. These findings were also consistent with the adult findings. The stereotypes were subtle and resulted in negative stereotypes impeding one’s performance and positive stereotypes facilitating one’s performance. Stereotype susceptibility development is a critical area and is a necessity to be able to understand the connections between an individual’s behavior and stereotypes.

Ambady and Marvin A. Hecht investigated the relationship between the study of nonverbal communication and psychology in their 1999 article published in the New Jersey Journal of Communication. The study of nonverbal communication was invented in the 1950s primarily as a cross-disciplinary effort on the part of the psychiatrists, linguists and anthropologists. This was surveyed in the 1960s and 1970s by an explosion of empirical research, books, and popular media attention. However, in the 1908s psychologists began to frequently integrate nonverbal communication variables into new research. Attention to nonverbal cues waned as the cognitive revolution gained momentum. In this generation, there is a renaissance of awareness in nonverbal communication, particularly among those who study emotion, psychophysiology and person perception. Consequently, the future of nonverbal communication may lie where it started; as an interdisciplinary venture.

Ambady was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science. She won the AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research in 1993. She was presented the Carol and Ed Diener Award in Social Psychology in 1999 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology for substantial contribution to the field. She also received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Bill Clinton.

Previously, through a meta-analysis published in 1992,  Nalini and co-author Rober Rosenthal coined the term “thin slices” of expressive behavior as a valid method of predicting human behavior. The results of their findings presents that thin slices provide a 70% accuracy prediction as opposed to the 30% when using other assessment methods.

After completing her PhD in 1991, she quickly entered the ranks of academia by accepting a position as an assistant professor at the college of the Holy Cross; she become an associate professor at the Tufts University. Ambady later joined the Stanford faculty in 2011, becoming the first individual of Indian origin to teach Stanford’s department of Psychology. Most notably in her academic career she introduced and conducted extensive research around the concept of thin slice judgments. While teaching at Stanford she founded the SPARQ center and worked to build it until her death in 2013 from leukemia. Her death sparked campaigns to increase the number of South-Asian bone marrow registries globally.

A native of the state of Kerala, India, Ambady did her schooling at the Lawrence School, Lovedale, and joined college at the Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi. Subsequently, she moved to the United States for higher education, completing her M.A. in Psychology from the College of William & Mary, Virginia. She earned her Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University in 1991 under the guidance of Robert Rosenthal, with whom she researched thin slice judgments.

Nalini Ambady (March 20, 1959 – October 28, 2013) was an Indian-American social psychologist and a leading expert on nonverbal behavior and interpersonal perception. She was born in Calcutta, India and earned her bachelor’s degree at Lady Shri Ram College for women, Delhi University. She furthered her education by moving to the United States for her master’s degree in psychology, from the College of William and Mary, and later received her PhD in social psychology from Harvard. While completing her research at Harvard, she met her husband Raj Marphatia, who was studying at Harvard Law school.