Rate My Professor Dacher Keltner

Dacher Keltner is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his B.A. with highest honors from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1984 and his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University in 1989. After completing NIMH postdoctoral fellowships at UC Berkeley (1989-1990) and UC San Francisco (1990-1992), he served as Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from 1992 to 1996. He joined UC Berkeley as Assistant Professor in 1996, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1998, and became Full Professor in 2002. Keltner is the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, where he also serves as co-director. He hosts the center’s award-winning podcast, The Science of Happiness, and co-instructs its popular online course. With over 200 scientific publications cited more than 112,000 times according to Google Scholar, he is one of the world’s foremost emotion scientists. His research examines the social functions of emotions in relationships, friendships, groups, romantic partnerships, and parent-child attachments, as well as data-driven studies of facial and vocal expressions using machine learning.

Keltner’s academic interests encompass emotion and social interaction, individual differences in emotion, conflict and negotiation, culture, power and social hierarchies, social class, inequality, awe, compassion, and moral intuition. Key publications include the seminal papers “Power, approach, and inhibition” (Psychological Review, 2003), “Fear, anger, and risk” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001), “Compassion: an evolutionary analysis and empirical review” (Psychological Bulletin, 2010), and “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion” (Cognition and Emotion, 2003). He has authored six books, including Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (2009), The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence (2016), and Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (2023), and co-edited The Compassionate Instinct. Among his honors are the Association for Psychological Science William James Fellow Award for lifetime achievement (2026), APS Mentor Award (2025), Templeton Positive Psychology Excellence in Research Prize (2000), Western Psychological Association Outstanding Researcher Award (2002), UC Berkeley Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award (2002), and Outstanding Teacher Award (2002). Keltner advised Pixar on Inside Out and Inside Out 2, taught the Science of Happiness course to inmates at San Quentin State Prison, and lectures widely to health care providers and executives.