Rate My Professor Ted Ruffman

Professor Ted Ruffman is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago, where he joined in 2002 after spending 13 years at the University of Sussex in England. He was promoted to full professor in 2011. His academic qualifications include a BA from York University (Canada), an MEd, and a PhD from the University of Toronto. With over 20 years of university lecturing experience at undergraduate and graduate levels, he teaches PSYC 111 Developmental Psychobiology and PSYC 318 Developmental Psychology.

Ruffman's research focuses on social understanding across the lifespan and in dogs. He investigates whether human infants understand mental states such as desires and beliefs, whether children recognize emotional expressions as well as young adults, and whether emotion recognition, understanding of social gaffes, and lie detection deteriorate in older adults. Additional interests include the role of maternal mental state language in children's theory of mind development, age-related changes in focus on informative facial regions during emotion identification, and dogs' comprehension of human emotional expressions like sadness, anger, and fear. He has authored over 60 peer-reviewed articles, including "To belief or not belief: Children’s theory of mind" (Developmental Review, 2014), "What's good for the goose is not good for the gander: Age and gender differences in scanning emotion faces" with Sullivan et al. (Journals of Gerontology Series B, 2017), "Oxytocin improves emotion recognition for older males" with Campbell et al. (Neurobiology of Aging, 2014), "Iodine deficiency and the brain: Effects and mechanisms" with Redman et al. (Critical Reviews in Food Science & Nutrition, 2016), and "Older adults' recognition of bodily and auditory expressions of emotion" with Sullivan and Dittrich (Psychology & Aging, 2009). In 2015, he was awarded a Marsden Fund grant for his research.