June 2004: Volume 18. No. 6

Committee on Scientific Awards Names 2004 Recipients
by Suzanne Wandersman, Director for Governance Affairs

The Committee on Scientific Awards selected the following individuals to receive the 2004 APA scientific awards in recognition of their outstanding theoretical or empirical contributions to basic or applied research in psychology.

The Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award was granted to the following individuals:

• Sheldon Cohen, Carnegie Mellon University, was recognized for his groundbreaking scientific contributions toward understanding the effects of stress and social support systems on human health and behavior.

• E. Mavis Hetherington, University of Virginia (emeritus), was recognized for her outstanding contributions to understanding the family context of children’s and adolescents’ development and adaptation.

• Richard M. Shiffrin, Indiana University, was recognized for his development of formal models of memory and forgetting; for his empirical investigations into the nature of memory and attention; for his unified accounts of attention and memory search, of recall and recognition, and of the adaptive processes that underlie explicit memory and implicit learning.

The Distinguished Scientific Award for Applications of Psychology was given to:

• Edward Taub, University of Alabama at Birmingham, for his research contributions in the areas of behavioral neuroscience and behavioral medicine.

The recipients of the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology were:

• Edith Chen and Gregory E. Miller, University of British Columbia, were honored with a shared award in the area of health psychology. Chen was recognized for her research on mechanisms linking socioeconomic status, stressful events, and children’s health. Dr. Miller was honored for his research on the influence of social and psychological factors on immune response and immune related disease.

• Elena L. Grigorenko, Yale University and Thomas G. O’Connor, University of Rochester Medical Center, were honored with a shared award in the area of developmental psychology. Grigorenko was recognized for her creative work investigating cognitive abilities and disabilities in children of different ages and in different cultures of the world. O’Connor was honored for his research that targets fundamental questions about development and psychopathology.

• Jenny R. Saffran, University of Wisconsin at Madison, was honored with an award in the area of cognition/human learning, for her insightful blend of cognitive and developmental psychology. Her research demonstrates the importance of environmental input for early language learning.

• Eric Stice, University of Texas at Austin, was honored with an award in the area of psychopathology, for his contributions to our understanding of adolescent psychopathology, including eating disorders, obesity, depression, and substance abuse.

• Klaus Zuberbuhler, University of St. Andrews (Scotland), was honored with an award in the area of animal learning and behavior, comparative, for his research on the vocal communication of monkeys in the West African tropical rainforest, using playback experiments that are both creative and carefully controlled.

The 2004 winners will be honored at the APA Annual Convention in Honolulu, Hawaii, July 28-August 1, 2004.