New archives division at APA

APA will open a new archives department at its Washington, D.C., headquarters this spring to document the growth and changes in the field of psychology in America, while emphasizing how APA played a role in that development.

The archives will support the research and reference needs of APA staff, association members and qualified researchers by acting as the official repository for the records and documents of permanent historical value to the association and its affiliates.

For 27 years, APA's archives have been housed at the Library of Congress. But in 1993 the library informed APA that it could no longer accept new materials and would only house and maintain records from 1892 to 1983.

To take charge of this project, APA has hired Wade Pickren, PhD, as the first director of the archives. Pickren will be responsible for the collection, preservation and management of all archival materials created since 1983 by APA Governance, Central Office, Divisional, and State and Provincial Psychological Associations.

APA Archives will include several types of materials, including officers' files, substantive correspondence, memoranda of policy, agendas, minutes, reports, policy statements, conference proceedings, films, grants, surveys, graphs and charts, publications, testimony and administrative records. Photographs, labeled and dated, can be donated to the archives for inclusion in the APA photograph collection.

For other nonprint materials or more information about the archives, please contact Wade Pickren, APA Archives at the APA address, (202) 336-5645, e-mail: wpickren@apa.org.

Apply for dissertation award

APA's Committee on Ethnic Minority Affairs (CEMA) seeks applications for the Jeffrey S. Tanaka, PhD, Memorial Dissertation Award in Psychology, which recognizes the most outstanding dissertation in psychology that serves to enhance a better understanding of the psychological issues and concerns facing communities of color.

Tanaka was an Asian-American scholar and psychologist whose work emphasized the importance of culture and ethnicity in the scientific understanding of behavior. He served as a fellow of Div. 5 (Evaluation, Measurement & Statistics) and a member of Divisions 8 (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) and 45 (Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues). Tanaka was chair-elect of CEMA at the time of his death on Nov. 3, 1992.

CEMA welcomes applications from individuals who filed their dissertations during 1997 and 1998 on research involving one or more of the following areas:

* Enhancing the psychological understanding of ethnic-minority issues.

* Improving psychological service delivery systems to ethnic minorities.

* Developing new concepts or theories relevant to ethnic-minority populations.

* Creating methodological paradigms that promote effective research and understanding of the values, beliefs and needs of ethnic minority communities.

A CEMA-appointed selection subcommittee will choose the winner through an anonymous review process. Selection criteria include potential impact of findings on ethnic-minority populations, completeness and clarity, creativity and effectiveness of the research design. The subcommittee will choose semifinalists from all abstracts submitted. Semifinalists will be required to submit copies of their entire dissertation for the final selection process.

The winner receives $500 and a $300 travel award for APA's Annual Convention sponsored by the APA Science Directorate, and will be invited to present his or her dissertation at the convention in Boston, Aug. 20­24.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is April 1. Please provide five copies of a 1,000-word abstract. The dissertation title should appear on all five abstracts, however, only one abstract should identify the author and provide the author's current mailing address and daytime telephone number. All submissions should be sent to the Office of Ethnic Minority Affairs (OEMA) at the APA address. For additional information, contact OEMA at (202) 336-6029.

Working group on education opens new e-mail chat group

The working group of the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students (APAGS) and the Board of Educational Affairs (BEA) have created a new listserv for students and faculty. The e-mail chat group will provide an open forum for students and faculty to disseminate or request information on preparing for academic careers. The working group hopes that subscribers will use the listserv as a venue for sharing information or addressing questions pertaining to professional development, mentoring and the job market.

Students and faculty interested in getting onto an open discussion listserv for teaching and education issues should contact Sharon Leiss, Education Directorate, (202) 336-6188, e-mail: sleiss@apa.org.

APA gears up for CE cruise

Mark your calendar for the APA Continuing Education (CE) Cruise sponsored by the Office of Continuing Education and the APA CE Committee.

From June 26 to July 3, the Mediterranean Cruise on Royal Caribbean's Legend of the Seas will visit Barcelona, Spain; Villifranche, France (Monte Carlo/Cannes); then travel to Rome; Ajaccio, Corsica; Messina, Sicily; Valleta, Malta; and return to Barcelona.

The cruise promises spectacular scenery, fascinating ports of call and the opportunity to earn 8 CE credits. Cruise-only prices start at $1,354 with discounted add-on airfares available.

For information, please call APA's Office of Continuing Education at (800) 374-2721, option 8, or contact Contacts Unlimited, 1053 Shady Lakes Circle, Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33418, (561) 625-1951, fax: (561) 625-8809, e-mail: contunl@aol.com.

APA designates funds for ethnic-minority recruiting

APA has allocated $75,000 to the Public Interest Directorate for fiscal year 1999 to continue implementing APA's Five-Year Plan for Ethnic Minority Recruitment, Retention and Training in Psychology.

The plan seeks to address the significant underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in psychology in a growing minority population. It sets specific objectives and actions for encouraging all psychologists to attain some level of multicultural competence in their training, research and practice activities, and for increasing the number of people of color who are psychology students, faculty and professionals.

This plan, which has been approved by APA's Council of Representatives, was developed by the APA Commission on Ethnic Minority Recruitment, Retention and Training in Psychology (CEMRRAT), and chaired by APA president Richard M. Suinn, PhD.

The funds primarily will be used for small grants. Eligible applicants for these grants are state associations, APA divisions, departments/schools of psychology, APA boards and committees, other entities of organized psychology and individuals. A small subcommittee of former CEMRRAT members--Allen C. Carter, PhD, A. Toy Caldwell-Colbert, PhD, Ena Vazquez Nuttall, EdD--established the following funding priorities in March 1998:

* Training/State Associations--State associations will make an effort to promote multicultural issues by developing and implementing strategic plans and activities, such as convention presentations on multicultural issues, recruitment of ethnic-minority members, encouragement of participation of ethnic minorities in state association leadership, advocacy of minority health issues, and promotion of people knowledgeable in multicultural issues to serve on state licensing boards. State associations will be expected to make a meaningful in-kind contribution to the funded activities. (A minimum of $7,000 is available for this priority.)

* Training/Professional Development­Linguistic Minorities--Developing programs and professional development of faculty to improve services to minorities who are learning English as a second language, including opportunities for learning a second language and establishment of practicum training in settings serving linguistic minorities. Examples of such activities include collecting and publishing model programs that focus on training for services with linguistic minority populations; developing grants for research and training with linguistic minority populations; advocating that regional accrediting bodies support and promote language programs; advocating that the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education and other similar federal grants be given to psychologists to develop such programs. (Approximately $10,000 is available for this priority.)

* Training/Science­Math and Science Research and Training--Activities that serve to identify, demonstrate, document or disseminate math, science and research education and training procedures and strategies (including distance learning) that result in increasing retention of students of color--especially in scientific psychology areas--at any level of the educational pipe-line. (A minimum of $12,000 is available for this priority.)

* Faculty/Professional Development--Activities that promote multicultural competence in teaching, practice and research among psychology faculty. ($10,000 is available for such efforts.)

* Evaluation of Mentoring Programs--Promote the evaluation and replication of model mentoring programs for ethnic minority post-secondary students by funding dissertation research by a graduate student in psychology that includes a formal evaluation of such a mentoring program. ($2,000 is available for one dissertation grant.)

* Special APA Staff Efforts--The remainder of the fiscal year 1999 funds will be spent for special APA staff efforts, such as reviewing funding requests, developing a special issue for the OEMA newsletter that focuses on model programs for ethnic minority recruitment, retention and training, and developing comprehensive data indicators for use by the Research Office in improving its tracking of the number and status of ethnic minorities in psychology.

OEMA will use the small grants as seed funds that will empower and support interested individuals, organizations and educational institutions. Funded activities will serve as demonstration models. Consequently, brief reports of findings or outcomes will be requested by APA. OEMA anticipates funding three or four proposals under each priority area. Proposals that are consistent with the Five-Year Plan and the funding priorities identified above will be funded on a first-come-first-served basis.

OEMA will administer the Five-Year Plan's implementation funds. Questions and brief applications (five pages or less including justified budget) should be directed to OEMA's Director, Bertha G. Holliday, PhD, at the APA address, phone: (202) 336-6029, e-mail: bholliday@apa.org. Requests for copies of CEMRRAT's Final Report should be directed to Sherry Wynn at the same phone number or by e-mail: swynn@apa.org.

APA journal receives new look

Subscribers to Contemporary Psychology (CP) can expect a new and improved journal, complete with a fresh look and a new title--Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books. CP will continue to provide timely reviews of books, tapes, films, and other media, but reviews will be of the latest material and will go into greater depth than before.

CP's previous mission was to represent all facets of psychology with as many reviews as possible; reviews were therefore short and noncomprehensive. In addition, valuable journal space was used on listings of books for which no review could be provided. Now that PsycINFO incorporates book records into its database, these listings are no longer necessary.

Readers can look forward to the following changes in 1999:

* Reviews within one year of the item's publication date.

* Longer, 'meatier' reviews that cover not only content but also the publication's relevance to psychologists.

* More comparative reviews of publications on a single topic that point out the strengths and weaknesses of each publication.

* More reviews of textbooks to assist instructors in choosing coursework materials.

* More reviews of trade books and fewer reviews of compilations.

* Essays about the impact of information technologies, such as the Internet and electronic journals, on psychology and scholarly publishing.

A favorite department of CP that will not change is Point/Counterpoint, which provides a forum for lively discussion of previously published reviews.

Because CP will be published bimonthly instead of monthly, and the overall pages published per volume will decrease slightly, the journal will be less expensive to produce. APA is passing the savings on to subscribers, as well as a journal that is perhaps even more interesting to read than before.

Science Directorate accepts proposals for OHP curricula

APA's Science Directorate welcomes applications from universities interested in developing curricula in occupational health psychology (OHP), the field that focuses on organizational and job design factors that contribute to injury and illness at work.

Proposals must contain the following information:

*Faculty qualifications.

* Institutional commitment.

* External collaborations.

* Proposal quality and
easibility.

* Planned program
evaluation.

* Budget justification and written documentation from the dean or other university official that confirms the proposed courses or curricula can be offered at the uni-
versity.

APA anticipates awarding $18,000 to $22,000 to each recipient, and will distribute funding for these awards in April. Limited funding may be available for an additional year. The deadline for proposals is March 1.

Examples of appropriate training activities under this program include, but are not limited to, the development in the following areas:

* Organizational psychology--providing a focus on organizational risk factors for stress, illness and injury at work, and intervention strategies.

* Clinical psychology--improving the recognition of job stress and its organizational sources.

* Human factors engineering--providing more of an exclusive focus on occupational health and safety.

The Science Directorate also encourages increased exposure of behavioral scientists to research methods and practice in public/occupational health and epidemiology.

Universities may propose the development of a new survey course or clusters of courses, graduate minor or master's/doctoral degree programs, or practica or internship experiences at the predoctoral level. Because occupational health is inherently multidisciplinary, these training experiences should draw upon and integrate knowledge and faculty from several relevant areas, such as psychology, management, public health and human factors engineering.

Applications can be found at the APA Web Site at www.apa.org/science/ohp. For further information, contact Adonia Calhoun, at acalhoun@apa.org.

APF honors eminent psychologists

The American Psychological Foundation (APF) presented several psychologists with distinguished awards: the Esther Katz Rosen Grant, the Robert A. and Phyllis Levitt Dissertation Award and the Early Career Award in Neuropsychology.

APF awarded the first Esther Katz Rosen Grants to research teams from Ball State Univer-sity and Purdue University. Cheryll Adams, PhD, Tracy Cross, PhD, and Felicia Dixon, PhD, of Ball State University, won $24,420 for their project, 'Psychological, social, and emotional development in academically gifted adolescents.' Margaret Keiley, PhD, Douglas Sprenkle, PhD, and Sidney Moon, PhD, of Purdue University, won a $25,000 for 'Development of the Purdue Affect Regulation Scales for the gifted.'

The Esther Katz Rosen trust supports scientific research on the psychological aspects of giftedness in childhood and adolescence. The award covers a maximum of two years of research, and the two teams will present the results of their studies at the APA Annual Convention in 2000.

The Adams, Dixon and Cross project will examine how an adolescent's self-concept is affected by moving to a more academic environment. Specifically, the study will focus on the impact on gifted junior and senior high school students of the living and learning environment of the Indiana Academy. The researchers hope to monitor the psychological change of the students while they live and attend school in this residential setting by administering the MMPI-A, Self- Perception Profile for Adoles-cents (Harter Scale) and the Self-Description Question-naire III (March Scale) over a two-year period on three separate occasions. Other data--including SAT scores, GPAs and standardized achievement test scores--will complement the information gleaned from the research in-struments used in this study.

The Keiley, Sprenkle and Moon project involves the development of an instrument that measures the affect regulation constructs of tolerance, control, expression and awareness in gifted adolescents. The research team identified two challenges facing researchers in this area:

* The need to develop reliable and valid measures of affect regulation that distinguish between functional and dysfunctional modes and that take into account the exceptional regulation skills of gifted children.

* Investigating relationships between family processes and gifted children's affect regulation skills.

Using a large sample of gifted and nongifted adolescents, the researchers will administer affect regulation instruments they have developed to test for construct validity and reliability, and whether the measures identify emotional giftedness.

In recognition of her ongoing study, 'Ventilatory effects of benzodiazepine receptor inverse agonists in rhesus monkeys,' Lisa René Gerak, PhD, won the Robert A. and Phyllis Levitt Best Disserta-tion Award. Gerak, a graduate research assistant at Louisiana State University, described a novel procedure for studying benzodiazepine dependence in non-human primates. The $2,000 award recognizes the best dissertation in psycho-pharmacology and drug abuse.

Gerak earned her PhD from Louisiana and received a predoctoral National Research Service Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Upon completion of her PhD, Gerak won the Chancellor's Award, an award recognizing an outstanding graduate.

Marlene Behrmann, PhD, received the 1998 Robert A. and Phyllis Levitt Early Career Award in Neuropsychology for her work on the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying high-level (cortical) vision. Behrmann used the study results to support her understanding of various visual processes by examining the behavior of brain-damaged adults with acquired cognitive deficits. She examined how this normal visual processing operates and develops novel diagnostic markers of particular neuropsychological deficits. Her research also involves devising effective methods of rehabilitation for patients with neuropsychological deficits. Behrmann is an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh, in the departments of communication disorders and neuroscience.

The Robert A. and Phyllis Levitt Early Career Award in Neuropsychology is awarded to an APA member who is not more than 10 years postdoctoral degree and who has made a distinguished contribution to neuropsychology in research, scholarship and clinical work. APA's divisions 40 (Neuropsy-chology) and 28 (Psychophar-macology and Substance Abuse) awards committees select the recipient, and the APF Board approves the recommendation.

The Levitt awards were established in 1995 to promote promising careers in neuropsychology and pharmacology. Winners receive a certificate of recognition, $1,000 and an invitation to present research at APA's Annual Convention.Y

Push to expand, validate prevention

And Mary Ann Pentz, PhD, director of the Center for Prevention Policy Research at the University of Southern California, talked about using community-based prevention programs to create environmental factors, such as media messages, that encourage people to abstain from substance abuse. Pentz also moderated the briefing.




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