Rate My Professor Kendra Seaman

Kendra Seaman is the Fellow and Eugene McDermott Distinguished Professor and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Dallas School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, joining the faculty in 2019. She received dual BAs in Psychology and Biology from the University of Kansas in 2002, an MA in Psychology in 2010, and a PhD in Applied Experimental Psychology in 2015 from The Catholic University of America. Prior to her appointment at UT Dallas, she held postdoctoral positions as a Research Fellow at Yale University from 2015 to 2017 and as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Duke University from 2017 to 2019. Dr. Seaman directs the Aging Well Lab in the Center for Vital Longevity, where her team employs behavioral, computational modeling, and neuroimaging techniques to study processes that promote health and well-being across adulthood.

Her research focuses on the intersections of learning, motivation, decision-making, and adult development, including age-related differences in social influences on decision-making, such as greater reliance on social factors and learning from social feedback among older adults; variations in choice behavior across monetary, health, and social reward domains; temporal discounting and its age-related changes; and the processing of risk, probability, and expected value. Dr. Seaman has obtained grants from the National Science Foundation, such as the 2021–2024 award for Psychological Mechanisms of Skewed Decision Making across Adulthood, and from the National Institute on Aging. She has been honored with the George L. Maddox Aspiring Investigator Award from Duke University School of Medicine, the Maddox Fellowship from Duke's Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development in 2018–2019, and the Alexis F. Dillard Student Involvement Chancellor's Award from the University of Kansas. Prominent publications include "Temporal Discounting Across Adulthood: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis" (Seaman et al., 2022, Psychology and Aging), "Adult Age Differences in Evoked Emotional Responses to Dynamic Facial Expressions" (Abiodun et al., 2023, The Journals of Gerontology: Series B), "Development and Validation of the Social Motives Questionnaire" (Gong et al., 2019, The Gerontologist), "Age Differences in the Social Associative Learning of Trust Information" (Seaman et al., 2023, Neurobiology of Aging), and "Individual differences in skewed financial risk-taking across the adult life span" (Seaman et al., 2017, Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience). Her scholarship, cited over 850 times according to Google Scholar, advances understanding in cognitive aging and decision neuroscience.