SPSP 2016 Annual Convention Begins to Take Shape

It might feel like we were just in Long Beach, but it’s already time to start thinking about SPSP 2016! We’ll be returning to southern California—this time, sunny San Diego! As usual, we’re planning to showcase cutting-edge research from across the subfields of our discipline. We welcome submissions on everything you would find on the pages of our finest journals, but we’re also hoping that presenters from related disciplines in the behavioral sciences will consider submitting their best work.

To encourage such disciplinary-spanning perspectives, we will be featuring two special invited sessions that you will want to mark off on your calendars. The first will be an exciting panel discussion on some core premises of human genes and cultural evolution, featuring heavyweights in the field. The second will be a symposium on the promises of big data, featuring the work of prominent economists, computer scientists, as well as psychologists. We are excited about these sessions, and we hope you are too.

In addition to regular symposia and poster sessions, we’ll also have a number of special sessions and events, including mentoring lunches, receptions, sessions on professional development, and, for the first time ever, three data blitzes! We’ll have two blitzes for senior-level PhD students and post-docs, but we’re also adding a third blitz session, open to researchers who are no longer students. We especially encourage junior faculty members at teaching-intensive universities, small colleges, and other institutions outside the R1 research world to submit talks to this new blitz session; our hope is that this session will provide an opportunity to hear from a wider range of voices than we often do.  

There will also be a couple of changes to the submission process this year. The web portal will be open for regular symposiums and poster submissions from July 1-14. Then, after decisions have been made, from September 8-18 we’ll open the portal again, for submissions to all three data blitzes and professional development symposia.  This two-wave system should make the process of submitting a data blitz talk much simpler than it’s been in the past, and, we hope, to encourage more young scholars to submit to these exciting events.