Joseph Tennant is a Research Associate on the Mystical Experiences in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Project. He is working with Prof Alasdair Coles, Dr. Sofia Eriksson, and Dr. Joanna Collicutt on better understanding the psychology and neurology of religious experience by investigating euphoric or transcendent auras that sometimes accompany seizures in some patients with epilepsy. This project investigates both the physiological origins of these auras as well as the way in which patients understand and interpret them.
Joseph is a cultural psychologist specializing in the psychology of religion and morality. His dissertation focused on a comparative study of Atheists and Evangelicals in the American Midwest, which investigated the differences between these groups in both the types of moral judgments they used as well as the justifications they employed. His previous work investigated the psychological and demographic predictors of creationist belief.
Joseph received his PhD in Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago. Before that he received his bachelors degree in psychology from the University of Kansas, with a minor in qualitative methods for the social sciences. His research interests include morality, religion, religious politics in the United States, and mixed methodology in psychological research.
