Richard J. Gerrig, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Stony Brook University. He received his B.A. from Yale in 1980 and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1984. Gerrig’s primary research focuses on readers’ experiences of narrative worlds. He considers both the basic cognitive psychological processes that enable readers to understand discourse and the broader consequences of readers’ experiences of being transported to narrative worlds. With Philip Zimbardo, he is the author of the introductory textbook Psychology and Life.