Established in 2011, the Distinguished Scholar Award recognizes the broad scope and potentially integrative nature of scholarship in personality and social psychology. It honors a scholar who has made distinctively valuable research contributions across his or her career in areas that expand the core of social and personality research and/or integrates different topics in the discipline in significant ways. The award was established to recognize the breadth of personality and social psychology and ensure that SPSP recognizes distinguished scholarly contributions beyond the prototypic topic areas.
Past Recipients
2012 James Pennebaker
Past Citations 2012 James ("Jamie”) Pennebaker is one of the most broadly influential psychological scientists in the world today. His wide-ranging research on self-disclosure, language use, symptom perception, and health has had an extraordinary impact on personality and social psychology, clinical and health psychology, cognitive science, life-span developmental studies, and even scholarship in the humanities. His initial work demonstrated how social factors influence the perception of physical symptoms, with implications for treatment-seeking and well-being. In a series of studies that have been replicated and expanded in scope, Pennebaker and his team famously showed that writing about personal trauma and other negative life experiences can have long-term positive effects on physical health and psychological well-being. Pennebaker’s groundbreaking experiments on self-disclosure and health opened up broader inquiries into the nature of language use in everyday life. Through computer text analysis programs and other methods, he also has examined the general question of how the words we use in talk and writing reflect our underlying feelings, thoughts, and personality, and how they influence the nature and meaning of social behavior. Pennebaker’s methods for analyzing language use have been applied to everything from personal conversations and diaries to the full corpus of Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays. The findings and implications of this remarkable body of work have been published in many scientific papers and chapters, inspiring whole new areas of research, and they have reached the general public through Pennebaker’s highly successful popular books, such as the The Secret Life of Pronouns.
Nomination Instructions Information about Nominations for 2013 will be posted here when available.
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