Matthew Lieberman

Mathew Dylan Lieberman PHD is a Professor and  SCN (Social Cognitive Neuroscience) Lab Director at UCLA Department of Psychology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences.

Personal life and Education
Lieberman was born in Atlantic City, N.J. His father was a lawyer and his mother an art teacher. His wife, Naomi Eisenberger, is an assistant professor on the UCLA Psychology Department faculty. Lieberman was a graduate of Harvard University where he later taught several classes.

Research and Career
Lieberman conducts research into the neural bases of social cognition and social experience, with particular emphasis on the neural bases of emotion regulation, persuasion, social rejection,  self-knowledge, theory of mind, and fairness. His research interests also include Social Cognitive Neuroscience, Neural Bases of Automatic and Controlled Social Cognition & Affect and Neural Bases of Personality. Social cognitive neuroscience focuses on how the human brain carries out social information processing. Lieberman uses functional neuroimaging  (fMRI) and neuropsychology to test new hypotheses regarding social cognition. Lieberman is the founding editor of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. In 2007, he won the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology. In 2011 he was the recipient of UCLA Gold Shield Faculty Prize Lieberman's work has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, DARPA, and the Office of Naval Research.

Selected Publications

 * Lieberman, M. D. (2010). Social cognitive neuroscience. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds). Handbook of Social Psychology (5th ed.) (pp. 143–193). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
 * Falk, E. B., Berkman, E. T., Mann, T., Harrison, B, & Lieberman, M. D. (2010). Predicting persuasion-induced behavior change from the brain. Journal of Neuroscience, 30, 8421-8424.
 * Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S., Pfeifer, J. H., Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18, 421-428.
 * Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302, 290-292.

Lieberman has also published many videos of his Social Psychology lectures on the internet.