James R. Anderson

James Russell Anderson is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Psychology at Kyoto University (Japan). He studied psychology at the University of Stirling, United Kingdom (PhD, 1981). He was principal investigator in a field study of chimpanzees in Liberia, West Africa (1982) and lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences, Queen's College Glasgow (1983) developing computer-based laboratory exercises in psychology. In the period 1983 to 1990 he held different posts as (associated) lecturer and assistant professor at the Laboratory of Psychophysiology, Louis Pasteur University, Strasbourg, while conducting behavioural research on social and cognitive processes in lemurs, and capuchin and macaque monkeys.

From 1990 until 1995, Professor Anderson worked on social behaviour, learning, cognition, and environmental enrichment in nonhuman primates at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Laboratory of Psychophysiology. From 1995-2014, he was senior lecturer and reader, Department of Psychology, University of Stirling and from 1998–2014, he was invited professor and invited research fellow at Kyoto University, where he became a full professor in 2014.

James R. Anderson has been consulting editor of the Journal of Comparative Psychology (1991-1994), an editor of the American Journal of Primatology (2006-2013), and member of the Editorial Board of Current Psychology Letters: Behaviour, Brain & Cognition (1998-2001). For the journal Primates, he was member of the Advisory Board (2002), Editorial Board (2002-2015) and is currently Vice Editor-in-Chief (2016- ). He is also on the Editorial Board of Animal Cognition (2015- ).

Professor Anderson has published more than 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and 35 book reviews. He has been on numerous radio and television programs as expert on primate cognition and intelligence. In the past decade, he has published numerous papers in the domain of comparative evolutionary thanatology, exploring what other species understand about death, and how they respond to dying and death within their societies.

During his December 2023 stay in Strasbourg, he will be hosted by Dr. Hélène Meunier (2014 Fellow) from the Simian Laboratory Europe (SILABE) of the University of Strasbourg, and will give a public lecture - Behind, in front of and around the mirror: Self-recognition in primates.

During a previous visit in November 2016, Professor Anderson gave a public lecture entitled Interactions between humans: social evaluation by capuchin monkeys.