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Ellen M. Markman
Stanford University William James Fellow Award Ellen Markman’s work has covered a range of issues in cognitive development. She conducted some of the pioneering research on the development of comprehension monitoring in children. Much of her work has addressed questions about the relationship between language and thought in children focusing especially on categorization and inductive reasoning and on how infants and young children figure out the meanings of words. In particular, Markman addressed the question of how young children solve the inductive problem that word learning poses.
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Ed Diener
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign William James Fellow Award Nicknamed “Dr. Happiness,” Ed Diener is one of the leading pioneers in scientific research on happiness. He developed the Satisfaction with Life Scale and many other research protocols currently used by psychologists; he is chiefly responsible for coining and conceptualizing the term “Subjective Well-Being (SWB)” — how people experience the quality of their lives. According to Diener’s research, there is a positive level of SWB throughout the world, with the possible exception of extremely poor countries.
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Wide-Eyed Fear Expressions May Help Us – and Others – to Locate Threats
Wide-eyed expressions that typically signal fear may enlarge our visual field and mutually enhance others’ ability to locate threats, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research, conducted by psychology graduate student Daniel Lee of the University of Toronto with advisor Adam Anderson, suggests that wide-eyed expressions of fear are functional in ways that directly benefit both the person who makes the expression and the person who observes it. The findings show that widened eyes provide a wider visual field, which can help us to locate potential threats in our environment.
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Uta Frith
University College London and University of Aarhus William James Fellow Award An internationally renowned developmental psychologist, Uta Frith has pioneered much of the current research into the cognitive neuroscience of autism and dyslexia. In fact, she is regarded as one of the first scientists to recognize autism as a condition of the brain rather than the outcome of detached parenting, a conclusion she argued for persuasively in her seminal 1989 book Autism: Explaining the Enigma.
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Allan R. Wagner
Yale University William James Fellow Award Allan Wagner has been a major innovator of powerful concepts that have revolutionized theories of habituation, classical conditioning, and instrumental conditioning. His proposals, in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Robert Rescorla, of the fundamental laws of conditioning provided significant hypotheses that have dominated and reshaped the understanding of associative processes. The Rescorla-Wagner Model of Pavlovian conditioning assumes that learning is determined by the discrepancy between what is expected to happen and what actually happens.
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John R. Weisz
Harvard University James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award John Weisz has committed his scientific career to improving the lives of children and adolescents who have serious emotional and behavioral problems. His research focuses on promoting youth mental health through evidence-based intervention. Through his deployment-focused model and his own research, he has promoted the idea that both interventions and intervention science are enhanced when treatment development and testing are carried out in the clinical care contexts for which the interventions are ultimately intended.