Darcia Narvaez, Kindred World’s President, to Receive APA Div. 24 Presidential Citation Award

Kindred World is proud to announce that Darcia Narvaez, PhD, our president and co-founder of the Evolved Nest Initiative, is the recipient of the 2024 Presidential Citation Award from Division 24 of the American Psychological Association (APA). Established in 2019, the Presidential Citation Award honors a nationally or internationally recognized scholar who has made significant contributions to the field of psychology or to a body of interdisciplinary scholarship.

Narvaez was nominated for the Presidential Citation Award based on her work that supports the flourishing of theoretical psychology in both a distinguished record of publication and teaching and the educational outreach programs and events offered to the general public through the Evolved Nest Initiative. The 2024 Presidential Citation is awarded directly from the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Division 24, of the APA.

The 2024 award is the second time the APA has recognized Narvaez’s work. Her book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom, also won the APA’s 2015 William James Book Award. The Evolved Nest Initiative, ENI, is based on the interdisciplinary science research and insights found in this book. ENI is an educational outreach initiative of Kindred World, an award-winning American nonprofit that has advocated for Welcoming a Wisdom-based, Wellness-informed World for over two decades.

“The APA award for interdisciplinary scholarship is following the direction of all sciences at this time, and we are grateful for their recognition and proud of our president for her commitment to humanity’s flourishing,” said Lisa Reagan, Kindred World’s founder.“Kindred World is honored to champion the science lens Dr. Narvaez’s work integrates in her holistic, unifying theory of humanity’s evolutionary pathway to wellbeing, our Evolved Nest. We hear almost daily how her work is positively impacting the lives of parents and professionals who now move forward in confidence to make informed, often counter-culture, wellbeing choices.”

The Evolved Nest Initiative was founded in 2019 and in those five years has produced a Virtual Learning Center, Self-Directed Curriculum, three films, a dedicated platform for discussion, and holds ongoing monthly live meetings with the public to discuss EN science and cultural transformation strategies based on humanity’s evolved nest.

More About Dr. Narvaez

Narvaez is a Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the co-founder of the public and professional educational outreach project The Evolved Nest Initiative whose nonprofit mission is to share her interdisciplinary research into developing appropriate baselines for lifelong human wellness by first meeting the biological, psychological, and social needs of infants and maintaining nestedness lifelong. The evolved nest provides a wellbeing baseline that is imperative at this time as the United States ranks 41st out of 41 developed countries in public policies that support families.

In a 2020 analysis of top scientists, Narvaez emerged in the top 2% of scientists worldwide. Of the eight million scientists in the world, the analysis concerned those who had at least five articles published in scientific journals between 1996 and 2017– over six million scientists. Individuals were ranked according to various criteria, including number of citations of their work.

In 2022, Narvaez, a fellow of the American Psychological Association, American Educational Research Association and Association for Psychological Science, was elected a fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest international body of professional scientists in the world and publisher of the prestigious journal Science. Narvaez was honored for her distinguished contributions illuminating typical and atypical development in terms of well-being, morality and sustainable wisdom.

For the first portion of her academic career, Narvaez investigated moral psychology and moral development in typical ways — through studying reason, cognition, and education. But the USA’s invasion of Iraq with wide popular support triggered her wide reading across fields of study to figure out how this could have happened. As she read deeper into neuro- and clinical sciences along with evolutionary systems theory and ethnographies, she began to pull together the bigger picture.

“I realized that all these fields bore on moral development. I was awakened to the fact that human beings are a particular species with particular needs that, especially in early life, need to be fulfilled in order to construct an individual’s sociality and compassionate morality,” she said. “The key insight was realizing that our species’ evolved nest is vital for fostering our cooperative human nature. When the evolved nest is degraded, as it is in industrialized countries, it can impair capacities for cooperation and compassion because early stress is toxic to species-typical neurobiological function.”

Her empirical, theoretical, and applied research now focuses on the kinds of characteristics notable in communities that provide the evolved nest to children from conception, societies that demonstrate wellbeing, heart-minded morality, and communal imagination.

Narvaez’s book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom, was chosen for the 2017 inaugural Expanded Reason Award from among more than 360 total entries from 170 universities and 30 countries. Narvaez received the prize, including a substantial monetary award, at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Vatican City on September 27, 2017. The book also received the William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association in 2015. She is former executive editor of the Journal of Moral Education.

Narvaez hosted interdisciplinary conferences at the University of Notre Dame regarding early experience and human development in 2010, 2012, and 2014 (with accompanying edited volumes through Oxford University Press). In 2016 she organized a conference on Sustainable Wisdom: Integrating Indigenous KnowHow for Global Flourishing. (Click on the links to see the full conferences in video on the Evolved Nest’s YouTube Channel.)

She is the author or editor of numerous books, chapters, and articles. See The Science page on the Evolved Nest Initiative’s website for listings.

Narvaez is the current president of the award-winning, venerable nonprofit Kindred World. The Evolved Nest is an initiative of Kindred World. See all of Kindred World’s strategies and initiatives for advancing a Wisdom-based, Wellness-Informed Society here.

Read Dr. Narvaez’s posts on the Evolved Nest at Kindred Magazine.