Honorary Doctorate 2011

The Faculty of Psychology of the University of Basel confers the honorary degree of Dr. phil. honoris causa on Dr. Josef Perner Professor of Psychology at the University of Salzburg, in recognition of his groundbreaking research on the cognitive development of logical thinking and the naive theory of mind of children, ; of his efforts to translate basic research on mental representations, metacognition and executive processes into a psychology of the life span, and of his merits in building bridges between psychology, philosophy and linguistics in a variety of ways, thereby fruitfully integrating different theoretical traditions.

Honorary Doctorate 2010

The Faculty of Psychology at the University of Basel confers the honorary degree of Dr. phil. honoris causa on Mr. Larry R. Squire, PhD Professor of Psychiatry, Neurosciences and Psychology at the University of California, San Diego in acknowledgement of his services to build bridges between different neuroscience disciplines, by successfully linking classical psychological theories and knowledge with neurobiology-oriented experiments - thereby establishing psychology as an integral part of modern neurosciences; of his shaping the field with his seminal research on learning and memory ; and of his commitment to disseminate his knowledge for educational and therapeutic benefit.

Honorary Doctorate 2009

The Faculty of Psychology of the University of Basel confers the honorary degree of Dr. phil. honoris causa on Prof. Elke U. Weber, Jerome A. Chazen Professor of International Business, Professor of Management and Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology, Columbia University, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, for her outstanding and influential research on the nature of risk, the influence of emotions and culture on risk perception and risk behavior, and on the influence of memory processes on human judgments, for her exemplary commitment to using psychological theories and methods to examine one of today's most important questions - how do people respond to climate change - from a social science perspective, and for her contribution to an evidence-based understanding of human environmental behavior that can be used to create better structures for more environmentally sustainable behavior.

Honorary Doctorate 2008

The Faculty of Psychology of the University of Basel confers the honorary degree of Dr. phil. honoris causa on Judy S. DeLoache, PhD, William R. Kennan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, for her groundbreaking and comprehensive research on the development of children's understanding of the nature and use of symbols, especially for describing the rapid development from an initial inability to use simple object representations to competent symbol use;for her ability to demonstrate the importance of children's daily behavior for the scientific study of human development by closely observing the behavior of young children, accurately describing competent behaviors, and creating experimental studies based on these observations that demonstrate the general developmental process; for her ability to make basic developmental processes of early childhood accessible not only to the professional audience but also to the general public in an understandable way.

Honorary Doctorate  2007

The Faculty of Psychology of the University of Basel confers the honorary degree of Dr. phil. honoris causa on Mr. Robert B. Cialdini, PhD Regents Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University for his merits in bridging the gap between science and practice in many ways by making psychological findings and theories accessible to a broad public with the greatest success and at the same time enriching psychology as a science by dealing with practical issues;for his outstanding and influential research on social influence, social norms and prosocial behavior, and for his exemplary commitment to disseminating and applying these findings to solve social problems.

Honorary Doctorate 2007

Honorary Doctorate 2006

The Faculty of Psychology at the University of Basel confers the honorary degree of Dr. phil. honoris causa on Dr. Urs Baumann of Basel, who over decades has produced outstanding and innovative research work on the multimodal diagnosis of mental disorders, on the evaluation, quality and ethics of psychotherapeutic procedures and on the social foundations of well-being and mental health; who has translated clinical-psychological experience into systematic basic, therapeutic and intervention research in an exemplary manner; who as an academic teacher and mentor has promoted young scientists with great commitment and great success.

Honorary Doctorate 2005

The Faculty of Psychology at the University of Basel confers the honorary degree of Dr. phil. honoris causa on Klaus J. Jacobs Honorary President of the Jacobs Foundation (Zurich), who has been working for decades to improve the future of adolescents and young adults and has established a non-profit private foundation that uses scientific findings from psychology and its neighboring disciplines to achieve this goal;which lives and promotes the principle of equal values - entrepreneurship, social responsibility, innovation through science - and to this end brings together young people and people from science, business and politics; which supports future-oriented national and international research and training programs based on psychological findings, the focus of which is to regain, maintain and increase human skills and potential, especially of socially disadvantaged adolescents and young people.

Honorary Doctorate 2004

The Faculty of Psychology of the University of Basel confers the honorary degree of Dr. phil. honoris causa on Mrs. Edna B. Foa, PhD Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania (USA), who over decades has produced outstanding and innovative research on the etiology and therapy of obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder; whose work is not only of exceptional scientific but also of the highest social relevance; who has translated clinical-psychological experience into systematic basic and therapeutic research as well as groundbreaking theoretical work in an exemplary manner and who, as an academic teacher and mentor, has promoted young scientists with great commitment.

Honorary Doctorate 2003

Gordon H. Bower has the enviable ability to recognize important issues and fundamental problems in his science. Over the decades, he has produced outstanding research on human information processing, covering a wide range of topics from learning to memory, from perception to language comprehension. Gordon H. Bower has always taken innovative research paths in his work by creatively combining methods from mathematics, computer science, linguistics and experimental psychology. From the beginning of his academic career, he was a cognitive scientist who thought and researched in an interdisciplinary manner in the best sense of the word, and he always consistently focused on the problems to be solved. His work includes experimental animal learning and condition studies as well as laboratory studies on the organization and functioning of human memory, but also theoretical-conceptual work on the interplay of cognition and emotion as well as naturalistic field studies on the understanding of language and spatial concepts.as an academic teacher and mentor, Gordon H. Bower has promoted young scientists, including those from Switzerland and Europe, with great commitment and in an exemplary manner. The Faculty of Psychology is delighted and proud to be able to award Gordon H. Bower an honorary doctorate for his services to scientific psychology.