Rate My Professor Jamin Halberstadt

Professor Jamin Halberstadt is Professor and Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago, where he joined in 1997. He holds a B.A. with Honours in Philosophy from Swarthmore College (1989) and a PhD in social psychology from Indiana University (1996). With over 20 years of research experience and more than 15 years teaching graduate and undergraduate courses such as PSYC 212: Social and Applied Psychology and PSYC 426: Social Cognition, Halberstadt directs the Social Cognition Laboratory. He is a member of the Social Perception Area of Research Excellence, the Memory Theme, the Otago Lifespan Development Research Group, and a founding member of the OZONE young researcher advisory group. Halberstadt has supervised eight PhD students and been named an outstanding research supervisor four times by the Otago University Student Association.

His eclectic research interests include social cognition, the interaction of emotion and cognition, intuition and reasoning in decision making, social categorisation, facial attractiveness, emotion perception, and decision making. Specific foci encompass cognition-emotion interactions and the role of emotional similarity in categorization and decisions; cognitive fluency effects on social categorisation, including the averageness-attractiveness relationship; and the impairing influence of introspection and verbalization on social judgments like behavioural predictions, emotional memory, emotional expressions, and face recognition. Halberstadt's honors include Fellow of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology and the Association for Psychological Science, the New Zealand Association of Scientists Research Medal, and the University of Otago's Carl Smith Medal. He holds an 'A' ranking in New Zealand's Performance-Based Research Fund and serves as Associate Editor for Psychological Science and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology journal. He has authored or co-authored over 50 research articles and chapters in top international journals, including the book Death Anxiety and Religious Belief: An Existential Psychology of Religion (2016, with Jonathan Jong), and highly cited papers such as 'Prototypes are attractive because they are easy on the mind' (2006), 'Emotional state and the detection of change in facial expression of emotion' (2000), and 'The attractiveness of nonface averages' (2000). His work has received nearly 10,000 citations and features in over 100 publications and conference presentations, with regular international conference appearances and media coverage.