The American Psychological Foundation (APF) will honor four psychologists for longtime service to the field during APA's 2004 Annual Convention, July 28-Aug. 1. The 2004 Gold Medal Awards for Life Achievement recognize distinguished and enduring contributions in the application, practice and science of psychology, as well as the promotion of psychology in the public interest. APF President Dorothy W. Cantor, PsyD, will present the medals at the APA/APF awards ceremony on Saturday, July 31, at 4 p.m. Meet the winners:

PUBLIC INTEREST AWARD

Florence L. Denmark, PhD

An internationally recognized scholar, administrator, researcher and policy-maker, Florence L. Denmark, PhD, is a founding member of Div. 35 (Society for the Psychology of Women) and a pioneer researcher in the psychology of women and human rights. Since the 1960s, Denmark's work has emphasized women's leadership, the interaction of status and gender, women in cross-cultural perspective and women's contributions to psychology.

Currently, she is a nongovernmental organization (NGO) representative to the United Nations from APA and the chairwoman of the New York NGO United Nations Committee on Aging. She is also the Robert Scott Pace Distinguished Research Professor at Pace University, where she spent 13 years as its psychology department chair. Before that, she was the Thomas Hunter Professor of Psychology at Hunter College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York.

Her professional affiliations are numerous. A fellow of APA and 13 of its divisions, Denmark is a former president of APA, the International Council of Psychologists, Psi Chi, the Eastern Psychological Association, the New York State Psychological Association and Divs. 35, 1 (Society for General Psychology) and 52 (International). She is co-president of the International Organization for the Study of Group Tensions, a member of APA's Policy and Planning Board and a former member of APA's Committee on International Relations in Psychology, APA's Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility in Psychology and APA's Membership Committee.

In addition, Denmark is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa, Psi Chi, Phi Alpha Theta and Sigma Xi honor societies. She has won several awards from APA, including Distinguished Contributions to International Psychology, Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest and the APA Centennial Award for Sustained Contributions to the Public Interest Directorate.

APPLICATION AWARD

Edwin A. Fleishman, PhD

Edwin A. Fleishman, PhD, has spent more than 50 years studying how the mind affects human ability and performance, as well as how we can use such knowledge to improve human resources and skills.

Fleishman is the former director of the American Institutes for Research, where he developed a research program that dealt with taxonomic issues in psychology, particularly in the area of human performance. He also was a founding president of the Advanced Research Resources Organization, where he studied performance, organizational effectiveness and human resource development. He has continued this work in academia. In 1986, Fleishman founded George Mason University's Center for Behavioral and Cognitive Studies while serving as the school's Distinguished University Professor of Psychology.

Fleishman was born in New York in 1927 and graduated from Loyola College in Baltimore in 1945. Afterward, he served in the U.S. Navy as a demobilization counselor to Navy personnel as they began their transition to civilian life after World War II.

After receiving his doctorate in applied psychology in 1951 from Ohio State University, Fleishman worked at the U.S. Air Force Human Resources Research Center in San Antonio, where he developed a program linking correlational and experimental methods in the study of human perceptual-motor abilities and performance. The resulting taxonomy still stands as a framework for describing individual differences in perceptual-motor performance, according to APF administrators.

Fleishman has served on many APA committees during his career, including the Policy and Planning Board, the Scientific Awards Committee and the Committee on Psychological Tests and Assessment. He is also a former president of APA Divs. 5 (Evaluation, Measurement and Statistics), 14 (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology) and 21 (Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology).

His other honors include the Franklin Taylor Award from the Society of Engineering Psychologists, APA's Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology, APA's Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology, the inaugural Distinguished International Psychologist Award from Div. 52 and the James McKeen Cattell Award from the American Psychological Society.

PRACTICE AWARD

Arthur L. Kovacs, PhD

Arthur L. Kovacs, PhD, a 34-year member of APA's Council of Representatives, was born in 1931 in McKeesport, Pa., and graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1953. By age 26 he had earned his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan.

After joining a group practice back in Los Angeles, Kovacs became president of the Los Angeles Society of Clinical Psychologists in the early 1960s, a time when local psychological associations struggled to secure social acceptance and stimulate financing mechanisms for psychological practice.

Kovacs entered APA's Council of Representatives in 1966 as a representative of the California Psychological Association (CPA). In that role, he helped lead a movement within state associations and APA that placed more emphasis on advocacy for the practice of psychology. Kovacs has served the better part of four decades in the council, at various times representing California and APA Divs. 12 (Society of Clinical Psychology), 29 (Psychotherapy) and 42 (Psychologists in Independent Practice). He also is a former president of Divs. 29 and 42.

Kovacs served on the CPA committee that in 1968 formed its own training institution, the California School of Professional Psychology (now Alliant University). Kovacs was the founding dean of its Los Angeles campus in 1970. As similar training programs emerged around the country, Kovacs helped found the National Council of Schools and Programs in Professional Psychology, which provided a forum for quality assurance. Beyond his work as a representative, Kovacs also edited the APA journal Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice and Training between 1976 and 1983.

Most recently, Kovacs has worked to design a viable, nationwide health-care system that would secure universal access and cede more decision-making powers to patients and professionals.

SCIENCE AWARD

Janet Taylor Spence, PhD

Janet Taylor Spence, PhD, has spent more than a half-century researching and creating theoretical models in areas such as anxiety, task performance and gender differentiation.

Throughout her career--which includes faculty positions at Northwest ern University and the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a research psychologist position at a Veterans Administration hospital in Iowa City--Spence studied such topics as elaborations of "drive theory," which states that the direction of effects on performance depends on the complexity of the task. She also researched the motivational and informational properties in hospitalized populations of "reinforcers"--items or events that provide intrinsic and material feedback on motivation.

Much of Spence's work comes from several lines of research within the field of gender psychology, still in its infancy when she began exploring it in the 1970s. Her early investigations, conducted with University of Texas colleague Robert Helmreich, PhD, assessed sex-role attitudes among men and women and explored traditional assumptions about gender-differentiating personality characteristics. The findings led Spence to examine a number of theoretical and empirical directions, ranging from the development of new conceptions of gender identity, masculinity and femininity to the study of achievement motives and their implications for accomplishments among men and women.

An Oberlin College graduate, Spence earned her doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1949. While working in the eyelid-conditioning laboratory of her future husband Kenneth Spence, PhD, at Iowa, Janet developed the Manifest Anxiety Scale to test the prediction that people with higher anxiety levels exhibit higher conditioning levels.