Profiles

David Edwards , Behavioral Neuroscience

While David Edwards may be best known by Emory students for his large-enrollment introductory psychology class that deals with connections between biology and behavior, he also regularly teaches a small-enrollment seminar about the psychology of love.

In fact, when Daria Snadowsky, author of Anatomy of a Boyfriend ( Delacorte Books, 2007), was recently asked how Emory helped her career, she mentioned Professor Edwards' Psychology of Love class as being “invaluable.”

“For our final project, Dr. Edwards allowed us to do anything we wanted as long as it represented what love meant to us, so I wrote a short story about a girl's first serious relationship,” Snadowsky said. “A few years later I reopened that Word file on my computer and started adding on to it, and it eventually grew into Anatomy of a Boyfriend.”

In 2007, David Edwards (Charles Howard Candler Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience) received the Crystal Apple Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Lecture Education, the only teaching award at Emory that is completely student organized.

“Teaching Emory students has been the single-most rewarding aspect of my almost-forty-year career as a university professor,” Professor Edwards said recently.

Edwards, who also received the prestigious 1989 Emory Williams Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Social Sciences, believes the scientific process of analysis and synthesis that he teaches in all his psychology courses can be applied throughout a person's life. “We can use this process to understand literature, film, art, even personal relationships.”

In his research these days, Edwards studies the effects of athletic competition on levels of the “stress” hormone cortisol and the “sex” hormone testosterone in women athletes. Most recently, he has found that higher before-game levels of testosterone (but not cortisol) are positively related to way women's volleyball and softball players rank their teammates on a number of items having to do with leadership and playing ability.

He believes that understanding status is pertinent to understanding interpersonal dynamics in most social groups, and results that link testosterone and status in athletic contexts may also have relevance for understanding social relationships in other settings.

Homepage: http://www.psychology.emory.edu/nab/edwards/index.html

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