Stanley Coren (born 1942) is a psychology professor, neuropsychological researcher and writer on the intelligence, mental abilities and history of dogs. He works in research and instructs in psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia. He writes for Psychology Today in the feature series Canine Corner.
Background Coren was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1942 to a secular Jewish family and attended undergraduate classes at the University of Pennsylvania before earning his doctorate at Stanford University. He went on to teach in The Graduate Faculty of The New School for Social Research in New York, New York before moving to the University of British Columbia in 1973, where he was a psychology professor and the Director of the Human Neuropsychology and Perception Laboratory until 2007. He teaches and researches as a professor emeritus and serves as an adjunct professor in the graduate program at Bergin University of Canine Studies. Outside of the classroom, Coren is an aficionado of dogs, and has made a career of research into dog behaviour that has led him to national television and into international media. He is an instructor with the Vancouver Dog Obedience Training Club, and has participated in obedience trials and competitions across Canada.
Research Coren has written research papers and articles in a wide range of psychological topics areas including sensory processes (vision and hearing), neuropsychology (handedness, sleep, birth stress effects and behavior genetics) and cognition (information processing and intelligence) published in Science, Nature, and The New England Journal of Medicine. He was named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. One of his publications (co-authored with Lawrence M. Ward and James T. Enns), Sensation and Perception, has been listed as required reading for coursework at universities and went through six editions before Coren retired in 2007. Coren's research in psychology can be divided into four subject areas.
Sensory processes
Coren began his research career studying vision and visual processes. Much of his early work dealt with various visual illusions, and was done in collaboration with Joan. S. Girgus. They are credited with reopening the interest of psychologists in these visual phenomena, and pointing out how they shed light on basic visual processing. He is also credited with several breakthroughs in the study of what is known as subjective contours or illusory contours Later Coren and A. Ralph Hakstian developed methods for screening vision and hearing without the use of technical equipment, using behaviorally validated questionnaires. These allow group or survey testing for sensory deficits specifically for color blindness, color discrimination ability, visual acuity, binocular vision and stereopsis and hearing sensitivity or absolute threshold of hearing. These tests have been disseminated and were reprinted in psychological and sensory textbooks.
Handedness Coren worked on left-handedness and its causes and consequences. Specifically his research led him to believe that left-handedness could be a marker for various psychological and physical problems. Findings indicated that left-handedness was often associated with difficult or stressful births. Research showed that left-handers were much more susceptible to accident-related injuries because the constructed world and most machinery and tools are designed for the safety and convenience of right-handers. However the work that caused the largest stir and the most controversy was a series of studies in collaboration with Diane F. Halpern which showed that left-handers have shorter life spans, often dying younger because of accidents or problems associated with a compromised immune system (possibly a long-term consequence of birth stress related trauma). Although originally the source of much controversy, with confirming data coming from a number of other laboratories, these conclusions have become well enough accepted to appear in basic psychological textbooks. The discovery of a possible genetic basis of left-handedness suggests that there may be two types of left-handers, natural left-handers and a separate group who arrive at their left-handedness because of birth stress and are more susceptible to immune system related problems. Coren has suggested that in addition to genetics and birth stress other mechanisms might also contribute to the appearance of left-handedness, such as hormonal factors as in the Geschwind–Galaburda hypothesis.
Sleep Coren 's research into sleep deprivation suggests that this is contributing to accidents, psychological disturbances, and increased susceptibility to illness. This line of reasoning eventually led to the series of studies which demonstrated that simply losing one hour of sleep due to the shift to daylight saving time can cause an increase in traffic accidents and other accident related fatalities on the Monday following the time change
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