Nancy Etcoff
Psychologist and beauty researcher
Nancy Etcoff is an American psychologist at Harvard who studies beauty, emotion and well-being. She wrote Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty.
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American Born 1955 in the United States
About Nancy Etcoff
Nancy Etcoff is an American psychologist, born in 1955, who has taught at Harvard about the mind, brain, behavior and aesthetics. She is a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and works at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she directed the Program in Aesthetics and Well Being. For over two decades she has carried out research into beauty, emotion, well-being and the brain. Her research papers have been published in Nature, Cognition and Neuron, among other journals. She also keeps a private clinical psychology practice and advises organizations on well-being and beauty. Her 1999 book Survival of the Prettiest makes the case that human beauty has a biological basis connected to evolutionary psychology. A Discovery Channel program was made about it.