Abigail Marsh is a psychologist and neuroscientist who works as a professor at Georgetown University's Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program, where she is the director of the Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience.
Much of Marsh's work pertains to the study of altruism and why people may help others at their own cost. More generally, she researches in the field of social and affective neuroscience and psychology. On the topic of altruism, Marsh's research has yielded more information about the amygdala, showing that in altruists, the amygdalae tend to be larger, and in psychopaths it tends to be smaller. The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for processing emotions and fear. In 2014, Marsh published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that concluded a spectrum existed with extreme altruists on one end and psychopaths at the other. She has also published multiple studies that show, when altruists watch someone else feel pain, they have levels of activity in similar regions of their brain as when they were feeling the pain themselves, and concluded that altruists are better at recognizing the fear of others. Marsh leads work at Georgetown with altruistic donors, particularly those who donated kidneys to strangers. Her work with children and adolescents has been used to show how different neural workings can lead to behavioral problems. She has studied the brains of children and adults who have psychopathic traits and found that it is strongly inherited, one factor of which is a fearless maternal influence. Children who display risky behavior, she concluded, are more prone to becoming psychopathic, and that such psychopaths are hard to detect as they may believe they are no different than those around them. In 2017 Marsh wrote Good for Nothing about the topic of altruists and psychopaths. In 2019, Marsh researched altruism in kidney donors and stem cell donors using behavioral investigations and brain imaging, as well as using those methods to study the causes of conduct problems in children and adolescents. In the same year, she led a study that found, among other conclusions, that Americans are surprisingly successful at distinguishing other Americans from Australians by visual cues, like walking, waving one's hand, or smiling.
Awards and recognition
Marsh is a recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health's 2007 Richard J Wyatt Memorial Award for translational research. In 2014, Marsh was awarded the Cozzarelli Prize for research on altruism she had published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research she coauthored studied "extraordinary altruists", using people who donated kidneys to strangers. In 2016, Marsh was named a fellow in the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. In 2017, the S&R Foundation awarded Marsh their Kuno Award for Applied Science for the Social Good. In 2018, Marsh was awarded the Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology for her book The Fear Factor.
''The Fear Factor''
Marsh published The Fear Factor in 2017, a book about her research on aggression, altruism, and empathy in the context of neuroscience. The full title is The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between.
