Stephen Porges

Stephen W. Porges (born 1945) is an American psychologist and neuroscientist.

He is the Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Porges is also currently Director of the Kinsey Institute Traumatic Stress Research Consortium at Indiana University Bloomington, which studies trauma.

He was previously a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he was director of the Brain-Body Center at the College of Medicine, and at the University of Maryland.

He proposed the still-unproven polyvagal theory in 1994, which is not endorsed by current social neuroscience.

He is today a neuroscientist with interests in cranial nerve responses as they relate to both animals and humans.

Polyvagal theory is a collection of unproven evolutionary, neuroscientific, and psychological constructs pertaining to the role of the vagus nerve in emotion regulation, social connection and fear response.

It focuses on the autonomic antecedents of behavior, including an appreciation of the autonomic nervous system as a system, the identification of neural circuits involved in the regulation of autonomic states, and the interpretation of autonomic reactivity as adaptive within the context of the phylogeny of the vertebrate autonomic nervous system.

First of all, the polyvagal perspective emphasizes the importance of phylogenetic changes in the neural structures regulating the heart and phylogenetic shifts providing insight into the adaptive function of both physiology and behavior.

The theory emphasizes the phylogenetic emergence of two vagal systems: a potentially lethal ancient brain and cord circuits involved in defensive strategies of immobilization (e.g., fainting, freezing, fighting) including dissociative states.

Polyvagal responses provided a new conceptualization of the autonomic nervous system that emphasize neurophysiological mechanisms and phylogenetic shifts in the neural regulation of the psychological responses from the cranial nerves to the spine, spinal cord and lower aspects of the mammalian brain.

He is a former president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research and has been president of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences (now called the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences), a consortium of societies representing approximately twenty-thousand biobehavioral scientists.

He was a recipient of a National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Development award.

He has chaired the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, maternal and child health research committee and was a visiting scientist in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Laboratory of Comparative Ethology.

He is married to scientist C. Sue Carter, and has two children: Eric Carter Porges (currently a graduate student at the University of Chicago in Integrative Neuroscience) in Jean Decety's Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, and Seth Porges (currently an editor at Maxim magazine in New York City, and previously an editor at Popular Mechanics magazine).