Victor S. Johnston (born 4 May 1943) is an Irish-born

psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and explanation, interpretatio ...

whose work emphasis is emotion, and event related potentials.

Biography

Johnston received his B.Sc. in psychology, 1964, Queens University,

Belfast Belfast (, , , ; from ) is the capital city and principal port of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan and connected to the open sea through Belfast Lough and the North Channel (Great Britain and Ireland), North Channel ...

, N. Ireland; and Ph.D. in psychopharmacology, 1967,

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the City of Edinburgh Council, town council under th ...

Scotland Scotland is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It contains nearly one-third of the United Kingdom's land area, consisting of the northern part of the island of Great Britain and more than 790 adjac ...

. His doctoral research on the biochemistry of Schizophrenia was awarded the A.E. Bennett Neuropsychiatric Research Foundation Awar

His areas of study include

cognitive engineering Cognitive engineering is an interdisciplinary field that applies principles from cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and human factors to design and develop engineering systems that effectively support or enhance human cognitive proces ...

biopsychology Behavioral neuroscience, also known as biological psychology, biopsychology, or psychobiology,Psychobi ...

, and

cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, whi ...

. His major research interests are

evolutionary psychology Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regard to the ancestral problems they evolved ...

electrophysiology Electrophysiology (from ee the Electron#Etymology, etymology of "electron" ; and ) is the branch of physiology that studies the electrical properties of biological cell (biology), cells and tissues. It involves measurements of voltage change ...

and

genetic algorithms In computer science and operations research, a genetic algorithm (GA) is a metaheuristic inspired by the process of natural selection that belongs to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms (EA). Genetic algorithms are commonly used to g ...

. Dr. Johnston states, "The human brain did not evolve to accurately represent the world around us; it evolved only to enhance the survival of our genes." According to Johnston, the combination of emotions with symbolic thought produces meaning. But with this capacity comes the ability to develop meanings for things that do not exist. Little girls develop the ability to attach emotional feelings to dolls, and pretend that their toys live. Little boys learn how to pretend to hunt and fight and attach emotions to them. We learn feelings of desire, fear, and wonder by wandering to the limits of our play. Imagination allows us to create technology, mathematics, and art, but with it can also come terrifying thoughts that could cause harm to us. We grow to learn the difference between most of our thoughts and what they represent, but most of us get fooled into believing the reality of some things that don't exist at all

h1>

Awards and honours

*Awarded New Mexico Software Author of the Year Award, New Mexico Entrepreneurs Association, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos and

Sandia National Laboratories Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), also known as Sandia, is one of three research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Headquartered in Kirtland Air Force B ...

(1995). *

New Mexico New Mexico is a state in the Southwestern United States, Southwestern region of the United States. It is one of the Mountain States of the southern Rocky Mountains, sharing the Four Corners region with Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. It also ...

Inventor of the Year Award (1995) for ''FacePrints'' software. *US patent (1994) for ''FacePrints'' software that can evolve faces in a compute

*Doctoral research on the biochemistry of Schizophrenia was awarded the A.E. Bennett Neuropsychiatric Research Foundation Award (196

Academic appointments

*Professor,

New Mexico State University New Mexico State University (NMSU or NM State) is a public, land-grant, research university in Las Cruces, New Mexico, United States. Founded in 1888, it is the state's oldest public institution of higher education, and was the original land-g ...

, 1988–present *Associate Professor, NMSU, 1980–1987 *Assistant Professor, NMSU, 1969–1980 *Postdoctoral Fellow,

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, 1970–1971 *Co-Director of Yale in

Holloman Research Facility Holloman Air Force Base is a United States Air Force base established in 1942 located six miles (10 km) southwest of the central business district of Alamogordo, which is the county seat of Otero County, New Mexico, United States. The ba ...

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

of Medicine, 1967–1969

Selected works

Articles

*JOHNSTON, V. S., and Bradley, R. J. Molecular Pharmacology of Hallucinogens. In Wortis (Ed.) Recent Advances in Biological Psychiatry, 10, 1968. *SMYTHIES, J. R., Johnston, V. S., & Bradley, R. J. Behavioral models of psychosis.

British Journal of Psychiatry The ''British Journal of Psychiatry'' is a peer-reviewed medical journal covering all branches of psychiatry with a particular emphasis on the clinical aspects of each topic. The journal is owned by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and publish ...

,115, 55–68,1969. *DELGADO, J. M. R., Johnston, V. S., Wallace, J. D., and Bradley, R. J.: Operant Conditioning of Amygdala Spindling in the Free Chimpanzee. Brain Research, 22:347–362, 1970. *JOHNSTON, V. S., Hart, M., and Howell, W. The nature of the medial wall deficit in the rat. Neuropsychologia, 12, 497–503, 1974. *JOHNSTON, V. S., and Chesney, G. L. Electrophysiological correlates of meaning. Science, 186, 944–946, 1974. *PRIBRAM, K. H., Day, R. U., and Johnston, V. S.: Selective Attention: Distinctive Brain Electrical Patterns produced by Differential Reinforcement in Monkey and Man. In D. I. Mostofsky (Ed.) Behavior Control and Modification of Physiological Activity, Prentice Hall, 1976. *JOHNSTON V. S., Holcomb P. J.: Probability Learning and the P3 Component of the Visual Evoked Potential in Man. Psychophysiology 17(4):396–400, 1980. *JOHNSTON V.S., Partridge, D., and Lopez, P. A neural theory of cognitive development. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 100, 485–509, 1983. PARTRIDGE, D., Johnston, V.S. and Lopez, P.: Computer Programs as Theories in Biology. J. Theor. Biol., 108:539-64, 1984. *JOHNSTON, V. S., Miller, D. and Burleson, M.: Multiple P3s to Emotional Stimuli and Their Theoretical Significance. Psychophysiology, 23:684-94, 1986. *PARTRIDGE, D., Johnston, V. S. and Lopez, P.: Experiments with a Cognitive Industrial Robot. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 27:435–448, 1987. *JOHNSTON, V. S., Burleson, M., and Miller D. Emotional value and late positive components of ERP's. in Current Trends in Event-Related Potential Research. (E.E.G. Supp. 40) Eds. R. Johnson Jr., J.W. Rohrbaugh & R.Parasuraman. 1988. *JOHNSTON, V. S.: Evaluating a New Technique for Improving Eyewitness Identification. Final Report for National Institute of Justice Grant No. 90-IJCX0025, 1990. *JOHNSTON, V. S., and Wang, X. T.: The Relationship between Menstrual Phase and the P3 Component of ERPs. Psychophysiology, 28:400–409, 1991. *CALDWELL, C. and Johnston, V. S.: Tracking a Criminal Through "Face-Space" with a Genetic Algorithm. In: R. K. Belew and L. B. Booker (eds), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Genetic Algorithms. pgs 416–421. San Diego, CA:

Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Morgan Kaufmann Publishers is a Burlington, Massachusetts (San Francisco, California until 2008) based publisher specializing in computer science and engineering content. Since 1984, Morgan Kaufmann has been publishing contents on information te ...

, 1991. *WANG, X. T., Johnston, V. S., and Oliver, J. C.: Evoked Brain Potential Studies of Emotional and Cognitive Processes. Acta Psychologica Sinica, 24:406–414, 1992. *WANG, X. T. & Johnston, V. S.: Adaptive Changes in Cognitive and Emotional Processing with Reproductive Status. Brain, Behavior and Evolution, 42:39–47, 1993. *JOHNSTON, V. S., and Franklin, M.: Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder? Ethology and Sociobiology, 14(3):183–199, 1993. *JOHNSTON, V. S. Method and apparatus for generating composites of human faces U.S. Patent # 5,375,195, 1994. *WANG, X. T. & Johnston, V. S.: Perceived Social Context and Risk Preference: A Re-examination of Framing Effects in a Life-Death Decision Problem. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 8:279–293, 1995. *JOHNSTON, V. S., and Oliver-Rodriguez, J. C: Facial Beauty and the Late Positive Component of Event-related Potentials.

Journal of Sex Research The ''Journal of Sex Research'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering the study of human sexuality and the field of sexology in general. It is published by Routledge on behalf of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. In 1963, t ...

. 34, 188–198, 1996. *JOHNSTON, V. S., and Caldwell, C: Tracking a criminal suspect through face space with a genetic algorithm. In Back, T, Fogel, D, Michalewicz, Z. (eds.) Handbook of Evolutionary Computation; Oxford University Press. 1997. *OLIVER-RODRIGUEZ, J. C., Guan, J., and Johnston, V.S. Gender differences in Late Positive components evoked by Human Faces. Psychophysiology, 36: 176–185, 1999. *JOHNSTON, V. S. Why We Feel: The Science of Human Emotions. Perseus Press: Reading, Mass. 1999

Books

*''Why We Feel, the Science of Human Emotions'' (200

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Johnston, Victor 1943 births Living people Evolutionary psychologists American science writers Irish emigrants to the United States Alumni of Queen's University Belfast Alumni of the University of Edinburgh