Harris Friedman, PhD
Honorary Research Fellow
Email: harris.friedman@aleftrust.org
Biography
Harris Friedman is Research Professor (retired) of Psychology at University of Florida, and now is affiliated part-time with several universities where he supervises doctoral dissertations and mentors other faculty as a subject-matter expert on research methods. He received his PhD in clinical psychology with a specialization in transpersonal psychology and a cognate secondary specialization in sociology from Georgia State University, and received applied diplomas in both clinical and organizational psychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology. He is a licensed psychologist in Florida, and consults locally in Florida in clinical and internationally in organizational psychology. He is a prolific researcher who studies both transpersonal, as well as a broad range of other, topics in psychology and sociology. He is particularly interested in conducting high-quality scientific research on transpersonal topics, as well as in debunking poorly conducted research in all sciences. He has more than 200 scholarly papers, many published in top professional journals (such as five papers in American Psychologist), as well as over a dozen books. His innovative work is often covered by the global media. He is a Fellow of both the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Association for Psychological Science, and has received many awards, such as the Abraham Maslow Award from the APA for lifetime contributions to furthering the frontiers of human knowledge and the lifetime achievement award for contributions in the public interest from the Florida Psychological Association. He is a past president of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, and has been president of the board of the International Transpersonal Association since its reestablishment. He serves as the Senior Editor of the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies and the Associate Editor of Humanistic Psychologist. He is also one of the founders of Alef Trust and serves as one of its three trustees.
Research interests
Harris is most interested in the following academic and research areas: measuring and employing transpersonal constructs in research; exploring the development and use of transpersonal assessments and interventions in clinical and other applied psychological work; understanding and measuring transcultural phenomena, especially as related to conflict resolution and beneficial social change; research methodology, especially related to extending high-quality scientific research into frontier areas such as transpersonal psychology and parapsychology, as well as debunking questionable research that promises more than it delivers; and transspecies research that explores non-human sentience.
Key publications
Friedman, H. L. (2018). Transpersonal psychology as a heterodox approach to psychological science: Focus on the construct of self-expansiveness and its measure. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 6(1), 230-242. https://doi.org/10.1037/arc0000057
MacDonald, D. A., Friedman, H. L., Brewczynski, J., Holland, D., Salagame, S. K. K., Mohan, K. K., Gubrij, Z. O., & Cheong, H. W. (2015). Spirituality across cultures, languages, and measures. PLOS One, 10(3), e0117701. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0117701
Bloom, T., & Friedman, H. (2013). Classifying dogs’ (Canis familiaris) facial expressions from photographs. Behavioural Processes, 96, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2013.02.010
Brown, N. J. L., Sokal, A. D., & Friedman, H. L. (2013). The complex dynamics of wishful thinking: The critical positivity ratio. American Psychologist
