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"Privacy is a fundamental value of record-keeping. It's considered essential to human dignity and freedom self-determination. When we start to work with people, we should ask them what information they want to keep private and they are concerned about."
Cynthia Ann Sturm, PhD, an independent practitioner in Portland, Ore., and member of APA's Council of Representatives, on the importance of quality record-keeping.
"There are numerous acts of human kindness, and I don't mean to in any way lessen that, but we simply cannot count on individual human kindness. That's why we need institutions--to make sure that our people are taken care of."
C.R. Snyder, PhD, on the need for "high hope" institutions--organizations that can focus on big-picture societal needs and provide a "collective motivation that transcends anything that an individual could possibly do."
"In order for schools to sustain their efforts, I think they must be supported by parents, policy-makers and community members that recognize the importance of evaluating our schools not just on the basis of their test scores or their football prowess, but on how human they are."
Susan P. Limber, PhD, associate psychology professor at Clemson University, on how schools need comprehensive approaches to prevent bullying.
"Digit span is a terrible predictor of anything interesting in the real world--what I call 'feral cognition.'"
Randall W. Engle, PhD, a psychology professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, on the need to study working memory from a variety of angles.
"In 1976, I had no idea how an employer would respond when an employee misses work because a kid gets sick. It's more than 25 years later, and I still don't know."
APA President Diane F. Halpern, PhD, on the problems parents continue to face when juggling the competing demands of work and family.
"After all, we all have 'practices,' don't we? Someday I want to get to the real game, the finals."
Jon D. Carlson, PhD,a private practitioner based in Lake Geneva, Wis., on the continuous learning process of being a practitioner.
"The vehicle we always thought was a way to equal opportunity is also a way to pathology."
Helen Pratt, PhD, of Michigan State University, on the idea that ethnic-minority girls who strive to adopt white, middle-class values are also increasing their risk for developing an eating disorder.
"Security is a journey, not a destination. You cannot solve your security problems once and for all and then just sit back."
Leigh W. Jerome, PhD,of Pacific Telehealth & Technology Hui, on developing effective record-keeping and storage procedures.
"I have a message to women: Only reproduce with men who are willing helpmates, and we will get rid of this problem in a few generations."
Sandra Wood Scarr, PhD,University of Virginia professor emerita of psychology, on a genetic selection strategy for balancing women's child-care burden.
"One of the most unpleasant things I do as a clinical neuropsychologist is tell parents they're not out of the woods."
Robert W. Butler, PhD,an associate pediatrics and psychiatry professor at Oregon Health Sciences University, discussing how children who have had chemotherapy or radiation treatments can develop problems up to seven years later. He noted that very young children, girls and those who receive higher doses tend to be more likely to experience such side effects as growth disorders, attention and concentration difficulties, memory problems and declines in intelligence, especially nonverbal intelligence.
"I grew up in a single-parent household where my mother had to make her way out of nowhere but modeled discipline and a giving heart. From her I learned that relationships are very precious, that we have to confirm our African-American cultural integrity.... The question of whether you succeed or fail growing up poor and black in America depends largely on parental disposition."
Thomas Parham, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of California, Irvine, on the development of African-American men in the United States.
"Academia emphasizes what you know, but what's probably more important is what you do....Our success and our work habits in graduate school are the best indicators of what we can do in any job."
Christopher N. Chapman, PhD,a usability engineer at Microsoft Corp., explaining how new psychologists can translate their skills to nontraditional careers by, for example, reframing their dissertation as project-management experience.
"The death penalty relies on a social-psychological system, a legal system, that increases the probability that people will accept it."
Craig W. Haney, PhD,a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on how jurors' instructions predispose them to weigh a criminal's aggravating factors, such as gang membership, more heavily than mitigating circumstances.
"Psychology has not just been neutral in terms of its ineffectiveness impacting women, people of poor economic backgrounds and people of color, but has actually been oppressive and harmful. We must extend in our classrooms a clear understanding that every psychology practice, theory or article we use represents a cultural bias that's imposed on our students, that everything that we do is political--political in the sense that it helps sustain the system that we're a part of, and it helps sustain oppressive conditions when we do nothing about it."
Michael D'Andrea, EdD,a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, on the need for psychology to actively infuse APA's multicultural guidelines into its education and training.
"The time to implement change is when things are good. Real leadership is to anticipate--yes, today is good, but if we keep going this way, things will be bad tomorrow. Real leadership is to look ahead-- to act, not to react."
Iris Cohen-Kaner, PhD,a psychology professor at Israel's Ben-Gurion University, on organizational leadership.
"If you're working with middle-aged and younger colleagues, you have to remember that you have to be a good co-worker and a nice person, and not say, 'I heard that idea 20 years ago, and it was stupid then.'"
Harvey Sterns, PhD,professor of psychology and director of the Institute for Life-Span Development and Gerontology at the University of Akron, on the need to evaluate your work attitudes when working with younger colleagues.
