UCLA Communication

BEC Speaker Series: Laurie Santos "The Evolution of Irrationality: Insights from Non-Human Primates"
2015-05-11 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
Laurie SantosYale, Department of Psychology “The Evolution of Irrationality: Insights from Non-Human Primates.”“I will explore the evolutionary roots of some of our species’ irrational decisions. I will start by reviewing some classic biases in the field of judgment and decision-making and will then turn to the question of how these biases came about in the first place by exploring some recent experiments in exploring similar biases in monkeys. I will then discuss new work suggesting ways that the human species is uniquely irrational.”12:00-1:30 PM Monday May 11th, 2015Haines Hall 352Lunch will be served on a first come, first serve basis; we request a $6 donation.

BEC Speaker Series: Lera Boroditsky "How the Languages We Speak Shape the Ways We Think"
2015-05-04 12:00 - 13:30
Lera Boroditsky USCD, Department of Cognitive Science “How the Languages We Speak Shape the Ways We Think” “How do the languages we speak shape the ways we think? Do speakers of different languages think differently? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do bilinguals think differently when speaking different languages? Does language shape our thinking only when we’re speaking or does it shape our attentional and cognitive patterns more broadly? In this talk, I will describe several lines of research looking at cross-linguistic differences in thought.” 12:00-1:30 PM Monday May 4th, 2015Haines Hall 352Lunch will be served on a first come, first serve basis; we request a $6 donation.

[Marschak Colloquium] Climate forcing and infectious disease dynamics in changing human landscapes
2015-04-30 15:00 - 16:30
The Jacob Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral Sciences at UCLA

PAC-12 Student Training Program
2015-04-18 08:00 - 12:00
• Gain hands-on behind-the-camera experience• Tour full production truck• Learn to operate equipment• Shadow the crew at a Pac-12 live event• Gain the opportunity to be hired for future events• Lunch will be providedWhen: Saturday, April 18Where: Easton StadiumTime: 8:00AM – 12:00PMTo Sign Up: www.pac-12.com/studenttraining OR wgulley@athletics.ucla.edu 310-825-2476For more information visit: www.pac-12.com/studenttraining

[Marschak Colloquium] Collective computation and social evolution
2015-04-16 15:00 - 16:30

[Marschak Colloquium] Two faces of subjective uncertainty
2015-04-02 15:00 - 16:30

[Marschak Colloquium] When morals matter in economic decision making
2015-03-05 15:00 - 16:30

[Marschak Colloquium] The art and science of high-fives: Field experiments at the intersection of social, developmental and educational psychology
2015-02-19 15:00 - 16:30

[Marschak Colloquium] Leveraging the science of health development: Designing systems that help children thrive
2015-02-05 15:00 - 16:30

Voice Studies Now Conference at UCLA
2015-01-31 09:00
Professor Greg Bryant and lecturer Kasia Pisanski will talk about the evolution of vocal emotion perception at the Voice Studies Now conference hosted at UCLA the last weekend in January.9:00 AM-4:00 PM: Conference Panels4:00 PM: Prof. Jody Kreiman (Keynote)

Voice Studies Now Conference at UCLA
2015-01-30 08:30
Professor Greg Bryant and lecturer Kasia Pisanski will talk about the evolution of vocal emotion perception at the Voice Studies Now conference hosted at UCLA the last weekend in January.8:30 AM-4:00PM: Conferecne Panels4:00 PM: Diamonda Galas (Keynote)

Voice Studies Now Conference at UCLA
2015-01-29 18:30
Professor Greg Bryant and lecturer Kasia Pisanski will talk about the evolution of vocal emotion perception at the Voice Studies Now conference hosted at UCLA the last weekend in January.6:30 PM: Conference Registeration7:30 PM: Concert

[Marschak Colloquium] The origin of ideas: Blending, creativity, and the human spark
2015-01-22 15:00 - 16:30

[BEC Speaker Series] Nature versus Nurture in the Inheritance of Social Status
2015-01-12 12:00 - 13:30
Most work studying the inheritance of aspects of social status across societies suggests two things. The first is that this inheritance is weak. Most social status for people is not determined by inheritance from parents. The second is that the strength of inheritance of status varies markedly across societies, so that status inheritance must be largely socially determined. In recent work using surnames as a means of measuring status inheritance across as many as twenty generations we show that in practice status inheritance is very strong, and that it varies surprisingly little across the societies and social systems. In this talk I propose that these surname results are compatible with genetics being the principle determinant of social status in most societies.

[Marschak Colloquium] Counting the many: The origins and limits of supermajority rule
2015-01-08 15:00 - 16:30

[BEC Speaker Series] Social and Physiological Resources and the Perception of Space
2014-12-08 12:00 - 13:30
Traditional theories of perception have assumed that visual processing is not influenced by top-down cognitive processes and is thus driven entirely by physical properties of the environment (Pylyshyn, 1984). For example, how a person sees stimuli such as a cup of coffee or a steep hill was thought to be only determined by factors such as the roughness of their surface and the amount of light entering the eye. However, recent research has shown that perception of space is also influenced by different bodily and experiential factors. I will review our recent work to suggest that perceptual processes take into account social and physiological resources, and that therefore perception of the world is a reflection of the extent to which one can act in it.

[Marschak Colloquium] Do justices defend the speech they hate? In-group bias, opportunism, and the first ammendment
2014-12-04 15:00 - 16:30

[BEC Speaker Series] Title: Sex Influences on Brain and Memory: The Burden of Proof has Shifted
2014-12-01 12:00 - 13:30
Abstract: Historically, neuroscience paid little if any attention to sex influences outside a limited area of reproductive functions. But all that is changing, and ever rapidly, with a flurry of discoveries the past 10 years in particular about sex influences on brain function down to the molecular level. My area of emotional memory is no exception. This talk will examine these developments, and detail how they are apparently irreversibly, and fundamentally, altering how the NIH funds not just neuroscience, but all of biological science.

[BEC Speaker Series] A Pan-Mammalian Tongue-Microbiome-Gut-Brain Axis? Implications for Health and Culture
2014-11-24 12:00 - 13:30
In a 2002 BEC talk, I described the working hypothesis that bittersweet taste is a marker for sensitivity to metabolic equanimity, manifested in ways ranging from responsiveness to energy balance to emotional reactivity and stress vulnerability; data from rats selectively bred on a saccharin phenotype and, to a lesser extent, humans, were presented in support of the hypothesis. This talk provides an update on our research program, including social behavior and evidence of an association between the taste phenotype and the gut microbiome. I will draw on others’ recent research with nonhuman primates (taste polymorphisms and behavioral ecology) and humans (embodied cognition) to advocate for refinement and testing of multilevel integrative models that link individual-level taste to processes at lower (gut-brain axis) and higher (sociality, culture) levels of organization.

[Marschak Colloquium] Climate Engineering: Challenges for international governance
2014-11-20 15:00 - 16:30

Communication Studies Info Session
2014-11-17 14:00 - 15:15
Questions about our major?If you would like more information about the Communication Studies undergraduate program, we invite you to attend our quarterly.We look forward to seeing you there!

[BEC Speaker Series] Males exist. Does it matter?
2014-11-17 12:00 - 13:30
A lot of evolutionary theory involves the concept of populations climbing towards peaks of higher fitness. Such theory has been written without taking into account that in most species there are two distinct classes of individuals — males and females — that influence the evolutionary process in a distinctly different way. I will talk about this, and try to shed some light on two quite broad questions: why do males exist, and what determines how they behave?

[BEC Speaker Series] Moral Babies: Preverbal Infants Know Who and What are Good and Bad
2014-11-10 12:00 - 13:30
How do humans come to have a “moral sense”? Are adults’ conceptions of which actions are right and which are wrong, of who is good and who is bad, who deserves praise and who deserves blame wholly the result of experiences like observing and interacting with others in one’s cultural environment and explicit teaching from parents, teachers, and religious leaders? Do all of the complexities in adult’s moral judgments reflect hard-won developmental change coupled with the emergence of advanced reasoning skills? This talk will explore evidence that, on the contrary, preverbal infants’ social preferences map surprisingly well onto adult moral intuitions. Within the first year of life, infants prefer those who help versus harm third parties, those who reward prosocial individuals and punish wrongdoers, and even privilege the intentions that drive actions over the outcomes they lead to. the second year of life, toddlers direct their own helpful actions toward helpful individuals, and harmful actions toward harmful individuals. These results suggest that our adult moral sense is supported, at least in part, by innate mechanisms for social evaluation.

[Marschak Colloquium] Quantifying country action on social policy and socio-economic rights: Can it improve transparency, accountability, and effectiveness
2014-11-06 15:00 - 16:30

[BEC Speaker Series] The Sound of Size: Human Vocal Communication of Body Size
2014-11-03 12:00 - 13:30
Body size can have an immense impact on the biology, ecology, and social status of an animal, but so too can ones ability to advertise or assess body size. Many species communicate their size vocally. Research investigating vocal communication of physical size in mammals, including humans, has focused on two salient and largely independent features of the voice: fundamental frequency and/or corresponding harmonics (perceived as voice pitch) and formant frequencies (resonance frequencies of the supralaryngeal vocal tract). In this talk, I will discuss the degree to which fundamental and formant frequencies reliably predict variation in body size controlling for sex and age, and their relative role in the perception or accurate estimation of body size in humans. The findings that I will present corroborate work on many other mammals whose mechanisms of vocal production, including anatomical constraints on size exaggeration, parallel those of humans. However, my findings also highlight the impact of psychoacoustic, sociocultural and perceptual biases on size communication in humans.

‘The Fonz’ goes to college — as a guest lecturer
2014-10-29 16:00
Henry Winkler–“The Fonz”–came to UCLA to speak as a guest lecturer for Fiat Lux freshmen seminar. Renowned for his 1970s sitcom “Happy Days” and a series of 29 children’s books, WInkler shared his process behind the books and personal anecdotes in “Collaborating in Hollywood: You’ll Never Make It in This Town Alone,” a class taught by communication studies chair Tim Groeling and two UCLA alumni working in Hollywood.

Deadline for Comm Studies Applications
2014-07-31 16:00
Application ProcedureThe Communication Studies Application will be available on June 2, 2014 at 11:00 a.m. and will close on July 31, 2014 at 4:00 p.m.The Admissions Committee will arrange to receive your UCLA transcripts from the Registrar through the end of Summer Session A 2014. General Information Students not admitted at the sophomore or junior level may reapply the following year. If you have 140 units or more, please consult with a counselor before applying. Prospective double majors must be independently accepted into the CS Department; there is no automatic acceptance. The Admissions Committee gives detailed attention to every application it receives, and its decisions each year are final. Other than to correct an error in the information it originally evaluated, the Admissions Committee is not able to comply with appeals from applicants for a second review.Please DO NOT submit letters of recommendation — they will not be accepted.Dear prospective Comm Studies majors:We are delighted to announce a major improvement in the way in which UCLA students apply to the Comm Studies major. As you already know, Comm Studies has been one of the most sought-after majors at UCLA since its creation nearly 40 years ago, with more and more outstanding students applying each year. Choosing our students from among the very best people at UCLA has been our privilege, but also our great challenge, so we have decided to improve our admissions decisions by…Giving students an incentive to take more challenging courses prior to entering the major. In our discussions with students, many told us that they had delayed taking difficult classes prior to applying for fear that receiving a lower grade might harm their chances of getting into the major–a strategy that had the unfortunate effect of making them less prepared for some of the difficult courses within the major. To ensure that students are well-prepared for the major, we have adjusted the way we evaluate the GPA of applicants, ensuring that students who take challenging courses are not penalized compared to students who take so-called “Easy A” classes.Getting to know you beyond grades. While our traditional application process has relied heavily on looking at your performance in UCLA courses, our new process will give you a chance to make a case for your admission through a series of very concise essays. The essay questions –presented below– give us a chance to better understand your experiences, attitude, accomplishments, and connection to Comm Studies. One of the most important parts of the new application is a chance for you to impress us with your best work by uploading a short creative work sample.Letting you make your case… in person: While the many applicants will still be selected and notified online before the start of Fall Quarter, our admission process will now allow some students to make their case in face-to-face interviews with an admissions committee at the start of Fall Quarter. We think giving our admissions advisory committee a chance to hear our applicants communicate will allow us to better understand how they could flourish in Comm Studies.These changes represent a lot of additional work for our applicants–and ourselves–but we truly believe they will give great students the best opportunities to be admitted to our great major. We look forward to hearing from you soon!Essay Questions:In your application, you will be asked to tell us in no more than 750 characters (each):Why do you want to be a Communication Studies major?Communication Studies is a highly selective major. Tell us briefly why you believe you should be chosen for the major.Communication Studies is a challenging major. Tell us briefly how you have overcome obstacles or adversity to achieve a goal.Communication Studies is a diverse major. Tell us briefly how you would contribute to that diversity.Communication Studies majors are leaders. Tell us briefly about a specific instance where you have successfully led others to achieve a goal.Communication Studies is a creative major. Tell us briefly about a project, short movie, writing sample, or other creative work you have completed of which you are especially proud.Creative Work:All applicants must upload a sample of your creative work for a valid application. A sample can be any format or type (e.g., special project, short film, blog, research project, writing sample, photo(s), audio file) you like, but should be something uniquely creative or exceptional. (We will also ask you to tell us about the project and explain why you are especially proud of it). For more information and instructions on uploading your creative work click here.-Tim Groeling,Associate Professor and ChairClick here to apply now!

Communication Studies Department Graduation 2014
2014-06-15 10:30 - 12:30
Congratulations! The Faculty and Staff of the Department of Communication Studies are looking forward to sharing this wonderful occasion with you.This year’s speaker will be Raymond G. Nasr.Raymond Nasr is the former Director of Executive Communications at Google Inc. He held this role from 2001 to early 2005 and was responsible for several aspects of the public communications for the senior management of the company, including Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt as well as Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.Prior to Google, Nasr was Director of Corporate Relations at Novell Inc, where he led the company’s corporate and government relations efforts. Before Novell, Nasr held various positions in the areas of public relations and corporate speechwriting at Apple Computer Inc, and at Sun Microsystems Inc.Since 2004, he has been a Communications Coach and Course Assistant at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University in the course on Venture Capital and Entrepreneurship. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Said School of Business at Oxford University.Currently, Nasr maintains a communications consultancy where he has advised a number of start-up companies and venture capital firms, including Pandora Media, Inc., Twitter, Inc., Snapchat, Inc., and Innovation Endeavors. He is also a past President of the Churchill Club, a Silicon Valley-based business and technology forum.Nasr received his BA in Communication Studies from UCLA (1984), and his Law Degree with Honors from Pembroke College, Cambridge (1986).In June of 2007, Nasr became a Certified Sommelier through the London-based Court of Master Sommeliers. And in January 2009 he was appointed Director of Wine Programs in the Wine Division of Silicon Valley Bank.

Communication Studies Information Session
2014-05-14 13:00 - 14:00

Communication Studies Department 40th Anniversary
2014-04-24 18:00
Tim GroelingProfessor and ChairUCLA Department of Communication StudiesInvites you to theUCLA Department of Communication Studies40th Anniversary CelebrationFor the conversation Communication Studies: The Next 40 Years Moderated by Tim Groeling Featuring Judy Johnson ’84 President, Western Region, GolinHarris Andrew Lenchewski ’98 Creator and Executive Producer of Royal Pains Julia Lam ’05 Co-founder and CEO of Enchanted Labs Ron Pitts ’86 sportscaster and entertainment reporter Thursday, April 24, 20146:00 p.m.Reception to followCalifornia NanoSystems Institute (CNSI)UCLA Campus Click here to RSVP by Thursday, April 17Parking available for $12 in Structure 9 Inquiries: LSevents@support.ucla.edu or (310) 825-4038
