Robert Zajonc

Zajonc's first marriage, to Donna Benson, ended in divorce. He had three sons with Benson: Peter, Michael, and Joseph Zajonc. He spent the rest of his life with his second wife, Hazel Rose Markus, a social psychologist at Stanford, known for her contributions to cultural psychology. Zajonc had one child with Markus, a daughter named Krysia. He died in Stanford, California from pancreatic cancer on December 3, 2008, at the age of 85.

The capacity to which IQ is birth-order dependent was challenged by Wichman, Rodgers, and MacCallum (2006) whom claim that the observed differences were a product of between-family differences instead. Zajonc argued that this perceived conclusion as based on them incorrectly treating birth-order effects to parallel a linear relationship, in addition to shortcomings in the methods they progressed such as implementing the use of unfocused tests causing significantly significant trends to remain unrecognized. A study by Bjerkedal et al. (in press) offers support to the with-in family nature of the phenomena through its own findings showing that increasing birth rank paralleled a decline in IQ in a sample of 127,902 Norwegian same-family siblings.

In 1980, a speculative and widely debated paper entitled "Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences," invited in honor of his receipt of the 1979 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, made the argument that affective and cognitive systems are largely independent, and that affect is more powerful and comes first.  This paper stimulated a great deal of interest in affect in psychology, and was one of a number of influences that brought the study of emotion and affective processes back into the forefront of American and European psychology. The nature of affective judgments can be perceived as independent of, and precede in time of, the perceptual and cognitive operations often thought of as constituting the basis of these affecting judgments. His proposals were presented to be contrary to the widely considered belief in most contemporary psychology theories that affective judgment is post-cognitive. The partial autonomy of the systems underlying cognition and affect were observed in his findings reflecting that the presence of recognition memory is not always necessary for the production of reliable affective judgments. However, it was described that these systems are not entirely independent of each other either and do affect one another in several ways, and simultaneously, contribute separate conserves of effects to the processing of information.

Zajonc won the award for the Distinguished Scientific Contribution on September 2, 1979 at the meeting of the American Psychological Association. His Award address, published in American Psychologist as work on "Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences," was highly influential in re-focusing interest on affective processes in psychology.

Zajonc, along with Greg Markus, developed the Confluence Model (1975), which provided a mathematical model of the effect of birth order and family size on IQ scores quantifying the relationship between in-family dynamics variability and intellectual ability. In forming this quantitative value, the confluence forms an averages of the absolute intellectual capacities of the entire family environment. As families increase in size, the overall IQ of the family drops; children from larger families do have slightly lower IQs. The last child in the family is denied the opportunity to tutor younger children, and there is a slight "extra" detriment for being the youngest child in a family. These effects are theoretically important, but the size of the effects is fairly small (amounting to a range of about 3 IQ points), thus, birth order is not an absolute determining factor for IQ although its influence is apparent.

Zajonc was the winner of the 1975 AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research.

After the end of World War II, he immigrated to the United States, where he applied for undergraduate admission at the University of Michigan. Under probation, he was accepted. In 1955, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he was a professor for nearly four decades, until 1994. During his time there, he held the positions of Director for the Research Center of Group Dynamics in the 1980s and Director of the Institute for Social Research in the 1990s. He then became Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University.

Robert Bolesław Zajonc (/ˈzaɪ.ənts/ ZY-ənts; Polish: [ˈzajɔnt͡s]; November 23, 1923 – December 3, 2008) was a Polish-born American social psychologist who is known for his decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes. One of his most important contributions to social psychology is the mere-exposure effect. Zajonc also conducted research in the areas of social facilitation, and theories of emotion, such as the affective neuroscience hypothesis. He also made contributions to comparative psychology. He argued that studying the social behavior of humans alongside the behavior of other species, is essential to our understanding of the general laws of social behavior. An example of his viewpoint is his work with cockroaches that demonstrated social facilitation, evidence that this phenomenon is displayed regardless of species. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Zajonc as the 35th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He died of pancreatic cancer on December 3, 2008 in Palo Alto, California.

Zajonc, born in Łódź, Poland on November 23, 1923, was the only child of the family. In 1939, before the Nazi invasion of Poland reached Łódź, his family fled to Warsaw. During their short stay, the building they were living in was hit by an air raid. Both of Zajonc's parents were killed, and he was seriously injured. The rest of his time in Warsaw was dedicated to studying at an underground university in Warsaw until he was sent to a German labor camp. He escaped from the work camp, got recaptured, and then sent to a political prison in France. After escaping for the second time, he joined the French Resistance, continuing his studies at the University of Paris. In 1944, he moved to England where he became a translator for the American forces during their European Campaign.

(d) The theory of emotional efference (Waynbaum, 1907), one of the implications of this theory is that the similarity in facial features could be attributed to the feeling of empathy. When you are being empathetic towards someone you unknowingly mimic their expression which then leads you to feel similar emotions. So the involvement of facial motor muscles in empathy might result in similar facial features among people who have lived together for a long period of time.