Épisodes

  • 165 – Ying Wong: From Cultural Psychology to Global Business
    Dec 4 2025

    Anjie chats with Dr. Ying Wong, founder and CEO of B.peachy and former cultural psychologist. Ying received her PhD in Psychology from Stanford in 2007, where she studied shame and guilt through a cultural lens. After academia, she built an impressive career across global business, and she now is the founder and CEO of B.peachy, a company dedicated to menstrual care.


    In this episode, Anjie and Ying discuss Ying’s remarkable journey from academia into the business world, and how she has carried her training in social psychology into every stage of her career. They talk about what it was like to pivot into consulting and how her psychology training prepared her to build products and teams.


    If you found this episode interesting at all, subscribe on our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but helps us reach more people and get them excited about psychology.


    Links:

    Dr. Wong’s company B.peachy: https://bpeachy.online/

    Dr. Wong’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ying-wong/



    Anjie’s website: https://anjiecao.github.io/


    Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

    Podcast Substack: https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/


    Voir plus Voir moins
    30 min
  • 164 - Susan Engel: Do We Become Less Curious As We Grow Older?
    Nov 21 2025

    Adani chats with Dr. Susan Engel, a Senior Lecturer and Senior Faculty Fellow in Psychology at Williams College. Susan’s research spans many areas, including the development of curiosity and invention, children’s ideas, the impact of college, and school reform. In this conversation, we discuss Susan’s seminal research on children's curiosity, how curiosity develops into adulthood, and her latest book, The Intellectual Lives of Children. Susan also shares the story behind how she first started in this field of research, and the projects she’s excited to work on next.

    Susan’s website: https://psychology.williams.edu/profile/sengel/
    Susan’s book The Hungry Mind: https://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Mind-Origins-Curiosity-Childhood/dp/0674984110
    Susan’s book The Intellectual Lives of Children: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-intellectual-lives-of-children-susan-engel/1136606329
    Susan’s upcoming book American Kindergarten: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo258923309.html

    Adani’s website: https://www.adaniabutto.com
    Adani’s Bluesky: @adani

    Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod
    Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

    Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

    Voir plus Voir moins
    49 min
  • 163 - Roger Levy: The Science of Language in the Era of AI
    Nov 14 2025

    Su chats with Dr. Roger Levy. Dr. Levy is a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where he directs the Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory. His research focuses on theoretical and applied questions in the processing and acquisition of natural language. His work furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of language processing and acquisition, combining computational modeling, psycholinguistic experimentation, and analysis of large, naturalistic language datasets, to help design models and algorithms that will allow machines to process human language. In today's episode, we discuss his research background together with his recent work "The Science of Language in the Era of Generative AI".

    Roger’s review: https://mit-genai.pubpub.org/pub/ak3evnmm/release/1

    Roger’s lab website: http://cpl.mit.edu/

    Roger’s personal website: https://www.mit.edu/~rplevy/


    Su’s Twitter: https://x.com/sudkrc


    Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

    Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

    Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

    Voir plus Voir moins
    41 min
  • 162 - Adam Benforado: How prioritizing kids benefits us all
    Nov 6 2025

    In today’s episode, Adani chats with Adam Benforado, a lawyer, writer, and professor at Drexel University’s Kline School of Law. Adam’s research, teaching, and advocacy are focused on children’s rights and criminal justice, and he brings insights from the mind sciences—most notably cognitive psychology—to law and legal theory. In this conversation, Adam tells us about his latest book, A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All, laying out the multifaceted, complex context around children’s rights and parental authority in the U.S. Adam also shares how he first got to work on the issues he now champions and what his future vision is, for children and society more broadly.

    Adam’s website: https://www.adambenforado.com/
    Adam’s book, A Minor Revolution: https://www.adambenforado.com/a-minor-revolution
    Adam’s twitter: @Benforado
    Adam’s new organization, Minor Power: ​​https://www.minorpower.org/

    Adani’s website: https://www.adaniabutto.com
    Adani’s Bluesky: @adani

    Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod
    Podcast Substack

    Stanford Psychology Podcast - Newsletter for the official Stanford Psychology Podcast!

    Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

    Voir plus Voir moins
    51 min
  • 161 - Yuan Chang (YC) Leong: Emotional arousal & dynamic brain connectivity
    Oct 30 2025

    Su chats with Dr. Yuan Chang (YC) Leong. YC is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He is the director of Computational Affective and Social Neuroscience Lab, which is a part of the Department of Psychology, a member of the Institute of Mind and Biology and the Neuroscience Institute, and an affiliate of the Data Science Institute. His research explores the neural and computational mechanisms underlying how goals, beliefs, and emotions influence human cognition, with a focus on why people interpret and respond to identical situations in different ways. In today's episode, we discuss what’s on YC intellectual radar these days, alongside with his recent paper "Dynamic brain connectivity predicts emotional arousal during naturalistic movie-watching," in which they show that we can decode arousal with open movie fMRI datasets.

    YC’s paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40215238/

    YC’s lab website: https://mcnlab.uchicago.edu/

    YC’s personal website: https://ycleong.github.io/


    Su’s Twitter @sudkrc

    Su’s Bluesky @sudkrc.bsky.social


    Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

    Podcast Bluesky @stanfordpsypod.bsky.social

    Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

    Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

    Voir plus Voir moins
    41 min
  • 160 - Jennifer Hu: From Human Minds to Artificial Minds
    Oct 24 2025

    Su chats with Dr. Jennifer Hu. Jenn is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, directing the Group for Language and Intelligence. Her research examines the computational principles that underlie human language, and how language and cognition might be achieved by artificial models. In her work to answer these questions, she combines cognitive science and machine learning, with the dual goals of understanding the human mind and safely advancing artificial intelligence. We are discussing Jenn’s paper titled “Signatures of human-like processing in Transformer forward passes."


    Jenn’s paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14107

    Jenn’s lab website: https://www.glintlab.org/

    Jenn’s personal website: https://jennhu.github.io/


    Su’s Twitter: https://x.com/sudkrc


    Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

    Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/


    Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

    Voir plus Voir moins
    35 min
  • 159 - Dawn Finzi: From Vision Neuroscience to ML Engineering (Psychologist in the Wild Series)
    Oct 16 2025

    Elizabeth chats with Dr. Dawn Finzi, a Machine Learning engineer on the Perception team at Zoox, and a recent alumni of our very own Stanford’s Department of Psychology, as a part of our new Psychologist in the Wild series. During her PhD, Dawn studied the functional organization of the human visual system, focusing on both the structural underpinnings and the overarching computational goals. In this episode, Dawn shares her scientific journey from PhD to industry, and how her PhD experience translates to her current role at Zoox.

    If you found this episode interesting at all, subscribe on our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology.


    Dawn’s website: https://www.dawnfinzi.com/


    Elizabeth’s: website: imelizabeth.github.io

    Elizabeth’s BlueSky: @imelizabeth.bsky.social


    Podcast BlueSky @StanfordPsyPod.bsky.social

    Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

    Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/


    Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com


    Voir plus Voir moins
    26 min
  • 158 - David Almeida: Can Stress Be Good For You?
    Oct 9 2025

    Jane chats with Dr. David Almeida, a Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State. He is the Principal Investigator of the National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE), the largest longitudinal diary study of daily experiences and health in the United States. Dr. Almeida’s work examines how daily experiences of stress are associated with health and well-being.

    In this episode, Jane and Dr. Almeida discuss the ways in which people experience and react to stress in their daily lives, who is most likely to experience and be reactive to stress, ways to manage stress, and even some unexpected upside of experiencing stress in daily life.

    If you found this episode interesting at all, subscribe on our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology.

    Some papers relevant to today’s discussion:

    • Changes in daily stress reactivity and changes in physical health across 18 years of adulthood
    • Longitudinal change in daily stress across 20 years of adulthood: Results from the National Study of Daily Experiences
    • The Mixed Benefits of a Stressor-Free Life

    Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

    Podcast Substack

    Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

    Voir plus Voir moins
    44 min