Feature
The American Psychological Foundation (APF) will honor four psychologists during APA's Annual Convention, Aug. 2428, San Francisco, with its 2001 Gold Medal Awards, recognizing distinguished and enduring contributions in the application, practice and science of psychology and in promoting psychology in the public interest. This year's winners are:
Joseph D. Matarazzo, PhD, for Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology.
Herman Feifel, PhD, for Life Achievement in the Practice of Psychology.
Henry P. David, PhD, for Life Achievement in Psychology in the Public Interest.
Robert Duncan Luce, PhD, for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology.
APF President Dorothy W. Cantor, PsyD, will present the medals at the APF-APA Awards Ceremony on Saturday, Aug. 25, at 5 p.m.
Application award
Born in Italy in 1925 and raised in Schenectady, N.Y., Joseph D. Matarazzo was on active duty in the U.S. Navy for six months before being selected for officers training. He completed an accelerated undergraduate education through Navy programs at Columbia and Brown universities. After graduating from Brown in 1946 with a degree in Naval Sciences, Matarazzo served aboard a Navy oil tanker in the Far East. Soon after he was accepted as a psychology graduate student at Brown. He later transferred to the graduate clinical psychology program at Northwestern University.
He took an internship at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where he was asked to stay for graduate study to teach a medical psychology course to medical students. He received his PhD from Northwestern, taught at the Washington University School of Medicine, and then at the Harvard Medical School. After these appointments, he went on to establish the first administratively autonomous department of medical psychology in the United States, at Oregon Health Sciences University. He served as the department chair and became a tenured professor of behavioral neuroscience at the university.
Matarazzo authored the 1972 Fifth Edition of Wechsler's Measurement and Appraisal of Adult Intelligence. He has served as president of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the International Council of Psychologists, the Western Psychological Association, APA and APF. He was a principal founder of Div. 38 (Health) and of the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology and a catalyst for the establishment of the European and Italian Societies of Health Psychology and of the Japanese and Asian Associations of Health Psychology.
Matarazzo's many honors and awards include the Annual Distinguished Scientist Award (Div. 12, Clinical) and the Annual Distinguished Service to the Profession of Psychology Award (ABPP).
Practice award
Herman Feifel was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1915 and became interested in psychology while attending the City College of New York. He pursued graduate studies at Columbia University, where he focused on the newly developing area of adult development and maturity. Before he could finish his doctoral dissertation, however, Feifel enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1942 and spent four years serving as an Army psychologist. He received his discharge and completed his PhD at Columbia.
In 1950, Feifel joined the Winter General Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital--Menninger School of Psychiatry group in Topeka, Kan., and later moved to California to join the Los Angeles VA Mental Hygiene Clinic, where he ultimately assumed the position of chief psychologist. Feifel has also held an appointment at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Medicine (where he is currently Emeritus Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences), as well as several other positions at the NIMH, New York University and USC.
Feifel's publications encompass more than 125 articles and chapters as well as two books. Among his most notable is the 1959 text, "The Meaning of Death," on which he served as editor.
Feifel has served as the president of the APA Div. 20 (Aging), Council Representative for Div. 24 (Theoretical and Philosophical), and a member of APA's Board of Professional Affairs. Among numerous honors and awards, he has received the APA Distinguished Professional Contributions to Knowledge Award and the Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Clinical Psychology Award.
Public Interest award
Born in Hagen, Germany, in 1923, Henry P. David was one of a small group of children permitted to enter the United States after Hitler came to power. After completing high school in three years, David was admitted to the University of Cincinnati on a scholarship.
In 1942, David was inducted into the U.S. Army and was assigned to the Air Corps Medical and Psychological Examining Unit. He was later transferred to the Morale Division of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. Upon completion of military service, David resumed his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Cincinnati and later received his PhD in clinical psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University. Following postdoctoral training at Topeka State Hospital, David joined the Western Psychiatric Institute of the University of Pittsburgh Medical School and met and married his wife, Tema Seidman. They had a son, Jonathan (whom they lost in 1980), and a daughter, Gail, and they now enjoy two grandchildren, Sarah and Julia.
David has been the director of psychology at the Lafayette Clinic of Wayne State University Medical School, the chief psychologist for the New Jersey State Department of Institutions and Agencies, and also the associate director of the World Federation for Mental Health in Geneva, Switzerland. He was the first male elected president of the International Council of Psychologists.
David founded the Transnational Family Research Institute in 1972, an independent nonprofit organization in the behavioral sciences that focuses on reproductive behavior, and remains its director today.
David has been an active member of APA throughout his career, twice serving on the Council of Representatives. In 1969, he introduced a resolution declaring that termination of an unwanted pregnancy was a mental health and child welfare issue and a legitimate concern of the APA. He has subsequently played a major role in advancing APA's support of women's reproductive rights and in developing its thinking with regard to family planning and population policy.
Science award
Born in Scranton, Pa., in 1925, Robert Duncan Luce entered MIT in 1942 to study aeronautical engineering, but then opted to enter a Navy program rather than await being drafted. After receiving his degree, he went to midshipman school at Notre Dame and Catapult and Arresting Gear School in Philadelphia. He returned to civilian life as an MIT graduate student in applied mathematics and, on receiving his PhD in 1950, was faced with the decision between a career in mathematics with a minor interest in behavioral science or one in behavioral science tapping his mathematical training. He chose the latter.
Luce worked in a small groups laboratory at MIT and then became managing director of a mathematical social science project at Columbia University. He began collaboration on a pair of 50-page reviews that ultimately became the seminal text "Games and Decisions" (completed in 1954/1955 at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences). He became a lecturer at the Harvard Department of Social Relations, and then professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Luce spent time at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Later, he became IBM Alfred North White-head Professor of Psychology and, then, Victor S. Thomas Professor (emeritus in 1988) at Harvard. He served as chair of the Harvard psychology department and then received an appointment at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), as Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and director of the Institute of Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. He retired from UCI as professor in 1996 and as director of the institute in 1998.
Luce has chaired the Society for Mathematical Psychology, of which he was a founding member, and the psychology section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Among Luce's honors is APA's Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award in 1970.
