Biography
Emma Templeton studies what makes people feel connected in conversation. Conversation is a rich, complex, and ubiquitous social behavior with important implications for mental and physical well-being. Templeton's research aims to preserve and respect this complexity so that findings from the lab can meaningfully generalize to everyday life. 听
Templeton has collected and analyzed hundreds of unstructured conversations between strangers and friends. She treats the conversation itself as meaningful data鈥攓uantifying behaviors as they dynamically unfold and testing how those features predict feelings of connection. 听
But understanding what makes a conversation go well assumes that people are conversing in the first place. Research shows that people are spending less time in conversation than they used to鈥攁nd less than they would like to. Templeton is excited to launch a new line of research examining the conditions that encourage more, and higher-quality, conversations. This work will ask how social environments, events, and institutions can be structured to facilitate meaningful connection. 听
Templeton received a PhD in Psychological and Brain Science at Dartmouth and an AB in Psychology from Harvard.
Academic Areas
- Behavioral Science