Laura L. Carstensen

Laura L. Carstensen is the Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. Professor in Public Policy and professor of psychology at Stanford University, where she is founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity and the principal investigator for the Stanford Life-span Development Laboratory. Carstensen is best known in academia for socioemotional selectivity theory, which has illuminated developmental changes in social preferences, emotional experience and cognitive processing from early adulthood to advanced old age. By examining postulates of socioemotional selectivity theory, Carstensen and her colleagues (most notably Mara Mather) identified and developed the conceptual basis of the positivity effect.

Carstensen was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and spent most of her childhood in Rochester, New York. She graduated from the University of Rochester in 1978 and earned her Ph.D. in psychology from West Virginia University in 1983. She served as assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University from 1983-1987, and then joined Stanford University's department of psychology in 1987. In addition to her role as professor of psychology, she served as the Barbara D. Finberg director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research from 1997-2001 and chair of the psychology department from 2004-2006. With Thomas Rando, Carstensen founded the Stanford Center on Longevity in 2007, where she currently serves as its director.

Carstensen is considered a thought leader on longevity. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times,Time Magazine, and The Boston Globe. Her TED talk has been viewed more than a million times. In 2011 she published A Long Bright Future: Happiness, Health and Financial Security in an Era of Increased Longevity.

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