Colin Wayne Leach

Colin Wayne Leach

Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1995

Bio

Professor Colin Wayne Leach, Ph.D. is a social and personality psychologist who studies status and morality in emotion. He is also interested in protest, resistance, and societal change; prejudice, stereotypes, and …isms; trans-disciplinarity and systems theories, methods, and statistics. His recent research examines sentiment regarding societal issues using micro behavioral- (psychophysiology, EEG, self-report) and macro social- (media, NLP, network) science methods.

At Columbia University, Colin is Professor of Psychology & Africana Studies and Dean of Faculty Diversity & Development, Barnard College; Graduate Faculty in Psychology, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences; Research Fellow, Institute for Research in African-American Studies; Member, Data Science Institute; Faculty Affiliate, Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute.

              Colin is an elected fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology and is a recipient of the Kurt Lewin medal for scientific contribution from the European Association of Social Psychology.  In addition to authoring over 100 publications, Colin co-edited the volumes Psychology as Politics (Political Psychology, 2001), Immigrant Life in the U.S. (Routledge, 2003), The Social Life of Emotions (Cambridge, 2004), and Societal Change (Journal of Social & Political Psychology, 2013). He has been Editor, Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, Co-Editor, Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, and Associate Editor, European Journal of Social Psychology.

Representative Publications

Leach, C.W. Ferguson, S.T., & Teixeira, C.P. (2024) Protest now: A systems view of 21st century movements. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 27, 1188-1206. DOI: 10.1177/13684302241245660

Morrill, T., Deng, Z., Chen, Y., Ananthram, A., Leach, C.W., & McKeown, K. (2024). Social Orientation: A New Feature for Dialogue Analysis. THE 2024 JOINT INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS, LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION (LREC-COLING). https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.04770

Leach, C.W. & Iyer, A. (2024) Moral Improvement of Self, Social Relations, Society. Annual Review of Psychology, 75, 295-310.

Leach, C.W. & Teixeira, C.P. (2022). Understanding Sentiment Toward “Black Lives Matter”. Social Issues and Policy Review, 16 (1), 3-32. https://doi.org/10.1111/sipr.12084

Leach, C.W. & Bou Zeineddine, F. (2021). A Systems View of Emotion in Socio-political Context. Affective Science, 2, 353–362. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00051-z

Reinka, M.A. & Leach, C.W. (2018). Racialized images: Tracing appraisals of police force and protest. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 115, 763-787.

Leach, C.W., Bilali, R., Pagliaro, S. (2015). Groups and Morality. In M. Mikulincer, P.R. Shaver, J.F. Dovidio & J. Simpson (Eds.) APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 2: Group Processes (pp.123-149). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Leach, C.W. & Cidam, A. (2015). When is shame linked to constructive approach orientation? A meta-analysis. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 109, 983-1002.

Leach, C.W., Spears, R., & Manstead, A.S.R. (2015). Parsing (malicious) pleasures: gloating and schadenfreude about others’ adversity. Frontiers in Psychology, 6 (201) 1-13. 

Brambilla, M. & Leach, C.W. (2014). On the importance of being moral: The distinctive role of morality in social judgment. Social Cognition, 32, 397-408.

van Zomeren, M., Leach, C.W., & Spears, R. (2012). Protesters as “passionate economists”: A dynamic dual pathway model of coping with collective disadvantage. Personality & Social Psychology Review, 16, 180–199.

Gausel, N. & Leach, C.W. (2011). Concern for self-image and social-image in the management of moral failure: Rethinking shame. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41, 468-478.

Iyer, A., & Leach, C.W. (2009). Emotion in inter-group relations. European Review of Social Psychology, 19, 86-125.

Leach, C.W., & Spears, R. (2008). “A vengefulness of the impotent”: The pain of in-group inferiority and schadenfreude toward successful out-groups. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 95, 1383-1396.

Leach, C.W., van Zomeren, M., Zebel, S., Vliek, M., Pennekamp, S.F., Doosje, B. Ouwerkerk, J.P., & Spears, R. (2008). Group-level self-definition and self-investment: A hierarchical (multi-component) model of in-group identification. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 95, 144-165.

Leach, C.W., Ellemers, N., & Barreto, M. (2007). Group virtue: The importance of morality (vs. competence and sociability) in the positive evaluation of in-groups. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology. 93, 234-249.