Manos Tsakiris
Professor of Psychology,
Royal Holloway, University of London
Director of the Centre for the Politics of Feelings,
University of London
I am Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London where I direct the Lab of Action & Body. From 2021, I am the Director of the interdisciplinary Centre for the Politics of Feelings.
I studied psychology (BSc, Panteion University Athens, 1995-1999), philosophy (MSc in Philosophy of Mental Disorder, King's College, London, 1999-2000), and cognitive neuropsychology (MSc, UCL, 2000-2001) before completing my PhD (2006) in psychology and cognitive neurosciences at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL. In 2007, I joined the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, where I am currently Professor of Psychology.
Between 2009 and 2015, I led the Plastic Self ERC Starting Grant project. Between 2016 and 2020, I led the interdisciplinary Body & Image in Arts & Science (BIAS) project at the Warburg Institute, and since 2017 the INtheSELF ERC Consolidator project at the Lab of Action & Body at Royal Holloway.
I am fortunate and grateful to have received the Young Mind and Brain Prize in 2014, of the 22nd Experimental Psychology Society Prize in 2015, and the NOMIS Foundation Distinguished Scientist Award in 2016.
The research at our lab is highly interdisciplinary and uses a wide range of methods to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms that shape the experience of embodiment and self-identity.
Featured recent publications
Our face changes as we age, but these transformations do not necessarily alter our self-identity. But what happens when the face is altered or replaced through facial transplantation?
Azevedo, R. T., Diaz-Siso, J. R., Alfonso, A. R., Ramly, E. P., Kantar, R. S., Berman, Z. P., Diep, G. K., Rifkin, W. J., Rodriguez, E. D., & Tsakiris, M. (2023). Re-cognizing the new self: The neurocognitive plasticity of self-processing following facial transplantation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 120(14), e2211966120 | read the article here
The novelist Haruki Murakami, in his novel “Kafka on the Shore”, wrote that “time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirring of the heart”. Our results show that this may indeed be the case as our time perception may be changing during every single heartbeat.
Arslanova, I., Kotsaris, V., & Tsakiris, M. (2023). Perceived time expands and contracts within each heartbeat. Current Biology : CB, 33(7), 1389-1395.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.034 | read the article here
As many have argued, one of the biggest casualties of the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be the erosion of societal trust. In a set of studies we looked at how people perceive faces generated by AI. Interestingly, these faces look more real than real faces So, what are the consequences for social trust?
Tucciarelli, R., Vehar, N., Chandaria, S., & Tsakiris, M. (2022). On the realness of people who do not exist: The social processing of artificial faces. IScience, 25(12), 105441. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.105441 |read the article here
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Manos Tsakiris, 2016 NOMIS Distinguished Scientist
Mind the body: Manos Tsakiris at TEDxGhent
