Mario Mikulincer

Dr. Mario Mikulincer is professor of Psychology and Dean of the New School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC Herzliya). From 1985 (after earning his PhD in University of Bar-Ilan), he published more than 280 articles and book chapters, two authored books (Human learned helplessness: A coping perspective, Plenum Press, 1994; Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change, Guilford Press, 2007), and three edited book (Dynamics of romantic love – attachment, caregiving, and sex, Guilford Press, 2006; Prosocial motives, feelings, and behavior: The better angels of our nature, American Psychological Association, 2009). His main research interests are attachment theory, terror management theory, personality processes in interpersonal relationships, coping with stress and trauma, grief-related processes, and prosocial motives and behavior. Currently, he is extending this work to the psychodynamics of the attachment system and applications of attachment theory to clinical, educational, health, and organizational psychology.

Dr. Mikulincer is a fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Association for Psychological Science, and received the E.M.E.T. Prize in Social Science for his contribution to psychology and the Berscheid-Hatfield Award for Distinguished Mid-Career Achievement from the International Association for Relationship. He served as Associate Editor of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Personal Relationships, is a member of the editorial boards of several leading journals in the field of personality and social psychology, and was recently elected as the editor of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships for the 2010-2015 period.

Between 1995–1999, Dr. Mikulincer headed the Psychology department at Bar Ilan University (1995-1999) and served as chairman of the interdisciplinary studies unit at Bar-Ilan University (2000-2004) and as Dean of Bar-Ilan University’s Regional Colleges (2004-2006). In October 2007, he moved to the IDC Herzliya, founded the New School of Psychology, and is currently serving as its Dean. In 1996 he founded, along with the late Prof. Victor Florian, the Peleg-Bilig Center for the Study of Family Well-Being.  Additionally, he was among the founders of the Gonda Brain Research Center at Bar Ilan University.

With Dr. Phillip Shaver (University of California at Davis), his main collaborator during the last decade, Mikulincer is mainly focused on the understanding and analysis of attachment-related processes in adulthood. Mikulincer and Shaver's work has deepened and enriched our understanding of the psychological meanings and functions of interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, their work provides a bridge between different theoretical frameworks – psychodynamic approaches, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and personality and social psychology – and research traditions such as cognitive-experimental methods, self-report measures, and qualitative analyses.

In their studies, Mikulincer and Shaver transform the study of attachment processes in adulthood from a narrow framework for explaining romantic relationships to a broader framework that can explain a wide range of human emotions, cognitions, and behaviors in both the interpersonal and intrapersonal domains. Specifically, their work reveals that attachment processes are highly relevant for many psychological processes, such as coping with stress, maintaining mental health, managing the terror of death, and activation of other behavioral systems (e.g., exploration, affiliation), as well as societal phenomena (e.g., out-group hostility, prosocial behavior). Their work also moved attachment research from an emphasis on correlates of individual differences in attachment style to the experimental manipulation of attachment-related mental representations. In this way, Mikulincer and Shaver refined and enriched Bowlby’s concept of attachment working models, revealing these models to be a hierarchical network of precisely specifiable general and specific cognitive representations of self and others. Their work also made a pioneering contribution to understanding the mental activation of the “attachment behavioral system” in adulthood – a concept that before Mikulincer and Shaver’s work was only a theoretical abstraction.