Gary Berntson

Gary Berntson (born 1945) is an emeritus professor at Ohio State University with appointments in the departments of psychology, psychiatry and pediatrics.

He is an expert in psychophysiology, neuroscience, biological psychology, and with his colleague John Cacioppo, a founding father of social neuroscience.

His research attempts to elucidate the functional organization of brain mechanisms underlying behavioral and affective processes, with a special emphasis on social cognition.

Berntson studied biology and psychology at the University of Minnesota, and was awarded a Ph.D. (psychobiology and life sciences) in 1971.

He then worked as a post-doc fellow with Neal Miller at Rockefeller University in the department of psychology between 1971 and 1973.

Since 1973, Berntson is on the faculty at the Ohio State University.

Berntson is a past president of the Society for Psychophysiological Science, and is currently a fellow of that organization.

He has served as a Special Government Employee (SGE) Defense Science Board- Task Force on Predicting Violent Behavior (2010-2012).

He received the “Paul D MacLean Award for Outstanding Neuroscience Research in Psychosomatic Medicine” from the American Psychosomatic Society (2013);

has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences Decadal Committee on Social & Behavioral Sciences & National Security (2017-2020) and a member of the NIH blueprint committee on interoception (2019-2020).

The broad interest of Berntson's program is in the elucidation of the functional organization of brain mechanisms underlying behavioral and affective processes, with a special emphasis on social neuroscience.

The program is guided conceptually by a recognition of the importance of multiple levels of analyzes in a meaningful understanding of complex neurobehavioral relations, and the strategic approach is collaborative and multidisciplinary in nature.

This is illustrated by current research on anxiety and autonomic control, which ranges from basic animal studies of central neural and neuropharmacological mechanisms, to human research that examines the links between psychological processes and autonomic as well as immune functions.

Central to this program of research is an effort to understand, at a theoretical level, the organizational principles that characterize psychobiological relations.

Recent collaborative research includes: a) the role of cognitive and social factors in autonomic regulation and immune functions, b) contribution of cortical/cognitive processes to anxiety, and the neural systems that mediate these relations, c) the impact of autonomic states on higher neural systems, d) the integrative organization of neurobehavioral, neuroendocrine, autonomic and immune systems, and e) psychoneuroimmunology and the social neuroscience of health and disease.

and the "Society for Psychophysiological Research Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychophysiology" (2020).