Campaign to Transform the Future starts strong in 2015
APF surpassed $5 million in donations for its Campaign to Transform the Future fund in early 2015. Psychologists from around the world helped ensure that funding is available to students and early career psychologists for generations to come.
With APF grant, Johnson studies driving behaviors of adolescents with ASD
Teens are at the highest risk for motor vehicle collisions compared with other age groups, and those with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may be at even higher risk. Haley Johnson, a doctoral student in the Lifespan Developmental Psychology Program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, received the $5,000 Lizette Peterson-Homer Memorial Research Grant in 2014 to study a simulated driving performance and hazard perception of teen drivers with ASD.
Johnson will investigate whether social, motor and processing-speed impairments impact driving performance. Social skills used while driving include communicating with other drivers and interpreting the body language of cyclists and pedestrians. Because social communication is impaired in individuals with ASD, encountering situations involving a visible human element — known as social hazards — may greatly increase their risk for a motor vehicle accident. Johnson will measure responses to social hazards using variables collected by a driving simulator. She hopes that her results will help to understand and prevent car accidents among drivers with ASD.
Anne Dailey receives first Div. 39 Grant
The APA Div. 39 (Psychoanalysis) Grant supports efforts in education, research and service that advance and encourage the field of psychoanalysis with a special focus on increasing the public awareness of the benefits of psychoanalytic principles and treatments, and on the value of applying psychoanalytic thought to organizational and social problems.
Anne Dailey, JD, received the first $4,000 grant to produce a one-hour documentary film that will present an overview of the history of American psychoanalysis. The documentary will examine the reasons for its success as well as its decline, and explore the possibilities for its future.
Dailey is the Evangeline Starr Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law and a research fellow at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is a past winner of the CORST Essay Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association. A 2012 scholar-in-residence at the Erikson Institute at Austen Riggs Center, she is a current member of the Erikson Institute Council of Scholars. Along with her legal publications, her work has appeared in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and American Imago. Her book, "When Rational Minds Differ: Psychoanalysis, Scientific Psychology, and Law," is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
For more information on the Div. 39 Grant, please visit APF Funding.
Committed to creating more opportunities with APF
As a longtime supporter, former board member, and friend of the APF, E. Belvin Williams, PhD, renewed his commitment to APF's Kenneth B. and Mamie P. Clark Fund with a $10,000 pledge through the Campaign to Transform the Future.
Intrigued by conversations his mother and uncle had about people and their motives, Williams developed an interest in psychology at an early age. With the strong support of his family, Williams majored in psychology at the University of Denver and then went on to Columbia University for his doctorate in clinical psychology.
He spent many years in academia, reaching what he calls a "defining moment" when he joined the Educational Testing Service (ETS) as vice-president of operations and was thrust into a controversy about test bias in the SAT and its potential impact on how African-American and other minority students performed on the test. Williams and his ETS colleagues created review groups to examine ethnically sensitive test items, as well as the subjective perspectives of reviewers.
While on the APF Board of Trustees, Williams helped establish the Kenneth B. and Mamie P. Clark Fund. Admiring the Clarks' "work, courage and stamina" on the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Williams and his colleagues felt the fund would be an appropriate commemoration of segregation's harmful effects and the continuing poor conditions in schools attended by many African-American students. The Clark Fund provides $10,000 grants in support of research and demonstration activities that promote understanding of the relationship between self-identity and academic achievement, with an emphasis on children in grades K–8.
Williams says he hopes that, through his gift and others, the fund will continue "to have numerous projects spawned and funded," leading to "solid research results that could be shared and distributed to schools and communities both here and abroad."
When asked what he would say to others thinking about making a gift to APF, Williams responds: "I would say, ‘Do it!' It is easy to start an activity of giving in the interest of furthering a humanitarian cause."
Visit APF for more information about the Clark Fund, or call (202) 336-5843.
