New APS Award Recognizes Early Career Achievement

Recently established by the APS Board of Directors, the Janet Taylor Spence Early Career Award will recognize transformative contributions to psychological science by rising stars in the field. APS Past President John Cacioppo, who developed the award along with current President Linda Bartoshuk and Immediate Past President Walter Mischel, said that the Spence Early Career Award celebrates “the many new and cutting edge ideas coming out of our most creative and promising investigators who, together, embody the future of psychological science.”

Cacioppo also emphasized that the award would recognize young researchers who cross traditional sub-discipline lines in psychology, honoring “contributions that reveal the organization underlying complex human behavior by drawing upon multiple fields of psychological science.”

This award is a fitting tribute to its namesake, Janet Taylor Spence, the first elected President of APS. “Janet Spence’s career embodies the transformative contributions to psychological science that the award named for her is intended to recognize,” said Bartoshuk. Spence developed new approaches to research and pioneering tools including the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale and the Attitudes Toward Women Scale and, noted Bartoshuk, she epitomized the spirit of crossing disciplinary boundaries with work on topics ranging from schizophrenia to developmental psychology to gender bias.

“The award will be given to our most creative and promising young investigators; Janet Spence was such an investigator at the beginning of her career,” said Bartoshuk.

The first awards will be conferred by Spence herself in May 2010 at the APS 22nd Annual Convention in Boston.