A message from 2019 SPSP President Linda Skitka

SPSP continues to be strong and to do amazing things to support social and personality psychology! It can be hard to keep up with all that is going on, but I want to thank you for your support in helping hit many successes this year.

Through your donations, we are able to meet our major commitments, including making the conference as accessible as possible. We invest in this commitment in a number of ways, including discounted student registration and hotel fees for the conference and an annual budget of $130K a year for travel awards. SPSP has also completed its first climate survey this year and is now beginning to address the concerns raised there. The 2020 meeting will, among other changes, introduce live captioning of some of the key presentations.

In 2019, we saw many new programs and services for our members in the areas of teaching, including a new syllabi repository, grad school directory, textbook review center, and subject matter expert videos. We also added a new Member at Large to support this community.

This year we also hosted the first Summer Psychology Forum on the topic of Big Data, which was attended by 150 members. We will be hosting two Summer Forums in the summer of 2020: One on Health Disparities, and one on Dynamic Modeling. This is another example of how our support helps us to reach various members and share our knowledge more broadly.

The Summer Institute in Social and Personality Psychology (SISPP) was hosted by NYU last summer, and given demand and YOUR support, grew by 20 attendees. It also included a new workshop on Entering the Job Market, and per NSF's request, added additional training in Open Science. Work is already underway to plan the 2021 SISPP that will be hosted by the Ohio State University.

Another initiative that we are proud of in 2019 was our task force on our climate footprint, which has helped us to identify ways to be more cautious about our carbon footprint. Climate impact will be a major consideration in future conference planning, and we are encouraging members to consider carbon footprint offsets when registering for our conferences. SPSP has also funded two small research grants to support gaining greater insight into various issues associated with climate change.

SPSP also launched our second annual campaign, and through our Development Committee raised over $50,000 this year. SPSP does—and is asked to do—a LOT. SPSP provides significant discounts for student attendees, enough catering so that a student on a limited budget is guaranteed not to go hungry during the conference, student travel awards, small research grants for those at primarily undergraduate serving institutions, supporting SISPP, diversity awards….the list goes on and on.

Being able to continue to provide these services to our members is important, but costly. Please consider giving back to the Society even in small amounts to help us continue to provide these services and possibly even grow them. SPSP is also open to talking about planned giving and bequests—if interested, please contact Travis Clark at [email protected].

Thank you to our members and donors for making 2019 a record year for SPSP and for the accomplishments we were able to achieve toward our great passion for personality and social psychology.

Linda J. Skitka
President