Familiar Faces Elected to APS Leadership

Three members of APS’s Board may be newly elected, but these new Board members are no strangers to APS.

“I am thrilled to be President-Elect,” said Elizabeth D. Capaldi, who was elected this spring, along with Henry (Roddy) L. Roediger, III, and Robert W. Levenson who join the APS leadership ranks as Board members. “I think it’s a great opportunity and I am looking forward to this year and the next three years. I think it will be wonderful.”

“Capaldi’s, Levenson’s and Roediger’s ascension to the board means that APS will continue to be served by some of the finest scholars in psychology,” said Board member Steven Ceci. “It gratifies me to know that such top flight scientists are willing to invest their time and energy to assist APS in serving its members and fulfilling its mandate,” he added.

Capaldi is no newcomer to APS. “I was there at the very beginning and was on the Board fairly early,” she said. “I remember back then we did not know what would happen with then new organization or where it would go. Now if you look back, APS has been remarkably successful and I am looking forward to continuing APS’s improvement, expansion and success. APS is clearly a major force in the USA for psychology. I am very proud of APS,” she added.

When she is not performing her duties as Provost at the University of Florida, you may find her focusing on her research on why we like the foods we do. If she is not doing research, she may be concentrating on her some of her other hobbies which include cooking and being a dog lover. Capaldi is also a self-described exercise fanatic.

While in office, Capaldi is going to focus on what APS’s main theme was in the beginning–crossing the boundaries among the different disciplines.

“APS is a place where we can talk about all of psychology and not just our own narrow part. That’s a strength of APS. It is all of scientific psychology in one place,” she explained. “All of the other organizations I belong to get narrower every year. And I think one of the big benefits of APS is the annual APS Convention where you can talk to social, cognitive, and applied psychologists. I have some good friends who are social psychologists and I get to see them at the convention,” she said.

Currently, Capaldi is Provost at the University of Florida where she has taught since 1988. From 1991 to 1996 she served as Special Assistant to the President for the Florida Quality Evaluation Project and from 1994 to 1996 as Director of Institutional Research. She became Provost in July 1996. She was previously on the faculty at Purdue University, head of the Department of Psychological Sciences, and Assistant Dean of the Graduate School.

Capaldi received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester in 1965 and her PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Texas in 1969. Capaldi’s research is concerned with why we like the foods we like, and more generally, with how motivation can be learned. She has contributed more than 60 chapters, articles and books, co-authored an introductory psychology textbook, and edited two books on the psychology of eating.

A Charter Fellow of APS, Capaldi is also an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow. She has been active in the Psychonomic Society, the Midwestern Psychological Society, and Sigma Xi, and has served as associate editor for Psychonomic Bulletin and Review as well as consulting editor for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes. She has been a member of the National Institutes of Health Behavior and Neurosciences Review Committee, and chair of the National Institutes of Mental Health Psychobiology and Behavior Research Review Committee, in addition to her involvement in other organizations.

New Board Members
Robert W. Levenson of the University of California-Berkeley, and Henry L. Roediger III, of Washington University, in St. Louis are the newest additions to the APS Board, taking the positions vacated by Robert Bjork and Lee Sechrest.

Levenson, an APS Charter Fellow, was delighted with his nomination and election to the board.

“I have been involved with APS for a long time-almost back to the beginning,” he said. “I believe in what APS was established to do and I think it has done a good job. It has been very helpful to me over the years, so it is my opportunity to do something in return,” he added.

In his new position, there are many things Levenson would like to accomplish.” I know that I am going to be on the publications committee and we will be looking at the possibility of expanding the Society’s offerings in the world of scientific journals,” he said. “I’m certainly interested in things that continue to keep the integrity of psychology as a whole. There are things that are happening in the field that are moving more biological types towards the neurosciences, and away from psychology. Things that keep the biological and the psychological part of the field together are very worthwhile.”

Levenson is also interested in the efforts that APS Executive Director Alan G. Kraut has been undertaking to try to keep behavior an important part of the missions of funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

“I think this is very critical,” said Levenson. “The behavioral part of psychology has an enormous amount to offer the neuroscience parts of the field. It seems like there is such a strong move towards the study of the brain and fundamental neuro-processes that it is easy for behavior to be pushed aside. I think that whole endeavor–both human and animals studies of behaviors–has clearly been one of the most productive parts of psychological research. And so I am very interested in things that preserve that tradition. Of course that means, because of the realities of research, there has to be continuing funding for basic behavioral research,” he said.

Levenson’s research interests include the physiological, facial expressive, and subjective aspects of emotion; the influence of culture, age, and gender on emotion; and the physiological and affective processes in marriage and intimate relationships. Currently, Levenson is director of the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California-Berkeley. Before coming to Berkeley, he had taught at Indiana University and the University of California-San Francisco.

Levenson graduated from Georgetown University in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology. In 1972, he received his masters from the same institution. In 1974, he received his PhD from Vanderbilt University. He is a member the Society for Psychophysiological Research; the International Society for Research on Emotion, Cognition, Emotion, and Personality Study Section at NIMH; the Executive Committee Postdoctoral Training Program in Emotion Research; the Behavioral Sciences Task Force at NIMH; the Academy of Psychological Clinical Science; and has served as chairperson of the publication board for the Society for Psychophysiological Research and as an associate editor for Psychophysiology.

“There are two things I really enjoy about APS,” said Levenson. “First, it’s the only meeting that I go to where you have the chance to hear about the full spectrum of what is going on in psychology in a kind of user friendly, listener friendly format. It is nice not to be cut off from the rest of the field as what happens in the specialty meetings,” he said. “And the other thing is that Alan Kraut has done a terrific job of working with Congress and working with the leadership of the Institutes in terms of keeping support for psychological research on the front burner. I think this has been enormously important to the field and I think APS deserves an enormous amount of credit for those efforts. Most research psychologists are terrible lobbyists and it is really nice to have an organization that can do this positively and effectively,” he added.

APS Charter Fellow Henry L. Roediger, III, is similarly enthusiastic about being elected to the Board. “APS has had outstanding leadership since its inception and I want to help in any way I can,” he said.

“I feel like I have been associated with APS since the beginning,” said Roediger. “I was an early member of the Assembly of Scientific and Applied Psychology, the precursor to APS. I also attended the organizational meeting at the American Psychological Association in 1988, when many people expressed a need for a more formal, new organization, which developed into APS,” he added.

Roediger said that as a Board Member he hopes to help out on the APS publications, especially since he has a lot of experience in that area. He served as editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition for five years and was the associate editor for three years. During most of the time he served on the Council of Editors of the American Psychological Association and was chair of the council for one year. He was also the founding editor of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review of the Psychonomic Society and served on its Publications Committee, which he chaired for two years.

“I have been concerned with issues surrounding scholarly publishing for a good part of my academic career,” he said.

Roediger is currently James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Washington University. He has held other positions at Rice University, Purdue University, and Yale University. He received his BA from Washington and Lee University in 1969 and his PhD from Yale in 1973.

Roediger is a member of many organizations including the Canadian Psychological Society, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, Memory Disorders Research Society, the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, the Society for Neuroscience, and the Psychonomic Society.

Lean and Nice
“What I like best about APS is that APS is ‘lean and nice,'” said Capaldi. “It has never become bureaucratic. It has never become interested in anything except what seemed to be the most important academically sound issues and I like this very much. And of course the people in APS are wonderful. I think APS stands for good things and APS is effective in achieving their goals,” she added.

Roediger agrees, “APS has been a strong advocate of academic, scientific psychology and has produced two outstanding journals. It is amazing how it has established itself as a premier organization and strong force for scientific psychology in such a short period of time. The achievements of APS Executive Director Alan G. Kraut and the elected officers over this period have been remarkable.”