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25 Facts About Robert Zajonc

1.

Robert Zajonc argued that studying the social behavior of humans alongside the behavior of other species, is essential to our understanding of the general laws of social behavior.

2.

Robert Zajonc escaped from the work camp, got recaptured, and then sent to a political prison in France.

3.

Robert Zajonc then became Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University.

4.

Robert Zajonc had three sons with Benson: Peter, Michael, and Joseph Zajonc.

5.

Robert Zajonc spent the rest of his life with his second wife, his own doctoral student that was 26 years younger, Hazel Rose Markus, a social psychologist at Stanford, known for her contributions to cultural psychology.

6.

Robert Zajonc had one child with Markus, a daughter named Krysia.

7.

Robert Zajonc died in Stanford, California from pancreatic cancer on December 3,2008, at the age of 85.

8.

Robert Zajonc focused on processes involved in social behavior, with an emphasis on the relationship between affect, or emotion, and cognition.

9.

Robert Zajonc proposes that the mere-exposure effect proceeds unconsciously through a subliminal channel.

10.

Robert Zajonc was able to provide support for social facilitation through a variety of experiments.

11.

Robert Zajonc found that in the presence of an audience, the dominant preference would be enhanced.

12.

Robert Zajonc found that participants were affected by the presence of an audience, and fewer unique responses were given when with an audience.

13.

Robert Zajonc's proposals were presented to be contrary to the widely considered belief in most contemporary psychology theories that affective judgment is post-cognitive.

14.

Robert Zajonc was interested in studying whether after staying together for a long time, couples display similarities in their physical features.

15.

Robert Zajonc explored this by conducting a study where he collected pictures of married couples on the day they were married and then one from 25 years later.

16.

Robert Zajonc then compared these two pictures to test for physical similarities.

17.

Robert Zajonc hypothesized that venous blood from the brain was moderated by facial expressions.

18.

Robert Zajonc studied this theory by having research participants pronounce vowel sounds that resulted in a facial expression that would result in cool blood and brain patterns.

19.

Robert Zajonc was interested in manipulation of hypothalamic temperature to see if the attractiveness to stimuli could be moderated by changes in cephalic blood temperature.

20.

Robert Zajonc created two experiments to examine the attractiveness and pleasure of food in rats during hypothalamic cooling or hypothalamic eating.

21.

Robert Zajonc found that feeding was elicited during hypothalamic cooling but not heating or when the rat was left at its normal temperature.

22.

Robert Zajonc argued that this perceived conclusion as based on them incorrectly treating birth-order effects to parallel a linear relationship, in addition to shortcomings in the methods they progressed such as implementing the use of unfocused tests causing significantly significant trends to remain unrecognized.

23.

Robert Zajonc wanted to test the sensory interaction hypothesis, that a stimulus response not only depends on the intensity but depends on other aspects of the condition.

24.

Robert Zajonc found that the sensory interaction hypothesis does hold true, the pigeons not only used the intensity of the tone but used the presentation of light while making a response.

25.

Robert Zajonc won the award for the Distinguished Scientific Contribution on September 2,1979 at the meeting of the American Psychological Association.