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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.
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Douglas L. Medin
Northwestern University William James Fellow Award Best known for his research on concepts and categorization, Doug Medin studies how our ideas of the natural world develop, examining biological thought from a cross-cultural perspective He also investigates the role of culture and moral values in the decision-making process. Through a collaboration with researchers on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin and the American Indian Center in Chicago, Medin has explored the scientific reasoning orientations of children across cultures, as well as across urban versus rural populations.
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Janellen Huttenlocher
University of Chicago (retired) William James Fellow Award In a remarkable career, Janellen Huttenlocher has published on a range of research topics, including language, spatial coding in adults and children, quantitative development, and memory. She is a major figure, both within these subfields and in psychology at large. Huttenlocher has been particularly interested in the role of the child’s environment in the development of cognitive skills. One of her most famous findings is that the verbal behavior of parents and teachers not only determined children’s vocabulary growth, but also their grammatical learning.
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Encountering Connections May Make Life Feel More Meaningful
Experiencing connections, regularities, and coherence in their environment may lead people to feel a greater sense of meaning in life, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research, conducted by graduate student Samantha Heintzelman of the University of Missouri, along with advisor Laura King and fellow graduate student Jason Trent, suggests that meaning in life has an important adaptive function, connecting people to the world that surrounds them and, thereby, boosting their chances of survival. “Meaning in life tells the individual when the world is making sense,” say Heintzelman and colleagues.
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Extreme Political Attitudes May Stem From an Illusion of Understanding
Having to explain how a political policy works leads people to express less extreme attitudes toward the policy, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research suggests that people may hold extreme policy positions because they are under an illusion of understanding -- attempting to explain the nuts and bolts of how a policy works forces them to acknowledge that they don’t know as much about the policy as they initially thought.
