Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups. Ψ (psi), the first letter of the Greek word psyche from which the term psychology is derived, is commonly associated with the science.
Health psychology is the study of psychological and behavioral processes in health, illness, and healthcare. The discipline is concerned with understanding how psychological, behavioral, and cultural factors contribute to physical health and illness. Psychological factors can affect health directly. For example, chronically occurring environmental stressors affecting the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, cumulatively, can harm health. Behavioral factors can also affect a person's health. For example, certain behaviors can, over time, harm or enhance health. Health psychologists take a biopsychosocial approach. In other words, health psychologists understand health to be the product not only of biological processes but also of psychological, behavioral, and social processes.
Quantitative psychology is a field of scientific study that focuses on the mathematical modeling, research design and methodology, and statistical analysis of psychological processes. It includes tests and other devices for measuring cognitive abilities. Quantitative psychologists develop and analyze a wide variety of research methods, including those of psychometrics, a field concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement.
Claude Mason Steele is a social psychologist and emeritus professor at Stanford University, where he is the I. James Quillen Endowed Dean, Emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Emeritus.
Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory. She designed the strange situation procedure to observe early emotional attachment between a child and its primary caregiver.
Michael I. Posner is an American psychologist who is a researcher in the field of attention, and the editor of numerous cognitive and neuroscience compilations. He is emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, and an adjunct professor at the Weill Medical College in New York. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Posner as the 56th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where she focuses on affective science. She is a director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory. Along with James Russell, she is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion Review. Along with James Gross, she founded the Society for Affective Science.
Neal Elgar Miller was an American experimental psychologist. Described as an energetic man with a variety of interests, including physics, biology and writing, Miller entered the field of psychology to pursue these. With a background training in the sciences, he was inspired by professors and leading psychologists at the time to work on various areas in behavioral psychology and physiological psychology, specifically, relating visceral responses to behavior.
Peter Salovey is an American social psychologist and current President of Yale University. He previously served as Yale's Provost, Dean of Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Dean of Yale College. Salovey is one of the early pioneers in emotional intelligence.
The Decade of Behavior is the American Psychological Association's nickname for the 2000s. The name represents a public education campaign to bring attention to the importance of behavioral and social research. The initiative has been endorsed by more than 70 professional associations across a variety of disciplines. The campaign was first championed in 1998 by Richard C. McCarty, then-Executive Director of Science of the APA.
Charles Adolphus Kiesler was an American educator, psychologist and university administrator. He served as chancellor and 19th chief executive officer of the University of Missouri campus in Columbia, Missouri. He was also the founding president of the American Psychological Society and elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Before becoming chancellor at the University of Missouri he was provost at Vanderbilt University and dean of the Carnegie Mellon University College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Kiesler was born in St. Louis, Missouri and held degrees from Michigan State University and Stanford University. He died in 2002 in San Diego, California.
Rodney L. Lowman is an American psychologist, academic administrator and entrepreneur whose major contributions have been in the areas of career assessment and counseling, ethical issues in Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the integration of clinical psychology and I-O psychology and helping to develop the field of consulting psychology. In a study of the most prolific contributors to the Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, Lowman was rated the second highest contributor for articles for the period 1992–2007.
Norman Bruce Anderson is an American scientist who was a tenured professor studying health disparities and mind/body health, and later an executive in government, non-profit, university sectors. Anderson is assistant vice president for research and academic affairs, and research professor of social work and nursing at Florida State University. He previously served as chief executive officer of the American Psychological Association (APA), the largest scientific and professional association for psychologists in the United States. Anderson became the APA's first African-American CEO when he was named to the post in 2003. He was the editor for the APA journal American Psychologist. Prior to joining APA, Anderson was an associate director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and held other roles in academia.
Gerald Paul Koocher is an American psychologist and past president of the American Psychological Association (APA). His interests include ethics, clinical child psychology and the study of scientific misconduct. He is Dean Emeritus Simmons University and also holds an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School. Koocher has over 300 publications including 16 books and has edited three scholarly journals including Ethics & Behavior which he founded. Koocher was implicated as an author of the so-called "torture memos" that allowed psychologists to participate in torture during interrogations in the Hoffman Report, an APA investigation into psychologists' involvement in interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Gordon Logan is the Centennial Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. A cognitive and mathematical psychologist, Logan is well known for his work on cognitive control and inhibition of cognitive and motor activity, divided attention and the nature of the human brain’s processing limitations, and the fundamental characterization of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD. He has also done extensive research on the hierarchical control of skilled copytyping, which he views as a useful model for hierarchically organized complex human skills in general. He collaborates on research that applies mathematical models to neural and behavioral data.
Sharon Stephens Brehm was an American psychologist who served as president of the American Psychological Association (APA). She was a professor of psychology at the University of Kansas. She held administrative roles at Binghamton University and Ohio University, before becoming chancellor of Indiana University Bloomington.
William Bevan was an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association (APA). He founded the Talent Identification Program at Duke University.
Nicholas Hobbs was an American psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association (APA).
Nancy Elinor Adler is an American health psychologist. She is the Lisa and John Pritzker Professor of Medical Psychology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and director of UCSF's Center for Health and Community Sciences. Adler is known for her research on health behaviors, health disparities, and social determinants of health.
Bunmi O. Olatunji is an American psychologist who is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Social Sciences at Vanderbilt University. He is Director of the Emotion and Anxiety Research Laboratory and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for the Vanderbilt University Graduate School. Olatunji studies the psychopathology of obsessive–compulsive disorder.
