Upcoming Convention Highlights

We are planning a great program for you in 2012.  As always, there will be invited SWPA speakers, an APA sponsored lecture, plus invited symposia organized by our state representatives in the second year of their 2-year term.  Additionally, several of our affiliate organizations will have invited speakers (SAMR, Psi Chi, SCPA, SWToP), and there will be the traditional President's talk on Friday afternoon.  Of course, the program will be also filled with a variety of talks and posters by our members.  Finally, we will have  Continuing Education Sessions available at the convention again this year.

Volunteer opportunities will be posted in January. (Have your registration reimbursed if you work a shift!)  Stay tuned and mark your calendar for SWPA 2012!

Convention Theme: Trauma & Resilience

Each of the following SWPA invited talks will provide 1 CEU; the conference will have 20+ CEU credits.

Saul Sells Lecturer: Friday, April 13th, 1:00 p.m. James Pennebaker Professor and Chair Department of Psychology University of Texas What Our Words Say About Us Over half of the words we say, read, and hear are almost-invisible function words such as pronouns, prepositions, and articles.  Although we rarely pay attention to them, they are powerful correlates of our psychological states.  A series of studies will be summarized that show how function words can reveal our emotions, the ways we think, our social status, and the nature of our relationships with others.  The new world of computerized text analysis promises to change the ways social, clinical, personality, cognitive, and other areas of psychology do business.

Resilience after Catastrophe: Emerging Guidelines for Research and Practice Thursday, April 12th, 11:00 a.m. Ann Masten, University of Minnesota Professor Masten will highlight progress over the past decade in research on risk and resilience in the aftermath of mass trauma and its implications for prevention and practice as well as future research. Resilience will be defined from the perspective of contemporary systems theory. She will describe 4 waves of resilience research and recent conceptual advances in the prevailing risk and resilience frameworks that guide basic research and is applications to intervention and disaster preparedness. New research horizons will be discussed, particularly in relation to plausible models for biological embedding of extreme stress and the capacity for plasticity and recovery. Strong consistencies will be noted in the extant literature, suggesting basic and practical guidelines for disaster preparedness and response that are developmentally sensitive and grounded in current knowledge. Her presentation will focus on resilience processes in youth and families, although a lifespan developmental perspective will be presented.

Psychology in the Real World: The Application of Psychology to College Admissions Thursday, April 12th, 2:00 p.m. Robert J. Sternberg, Oklahoma State University College admissions are important to our society for several reasons. First, they serve as a gateway to enable some individuals to have greater opportunities, and others, lesser opportunities, in their lives. Second, they help set the course for which individuals will have opportunities to be leaders in society. Third, they serve as a signal of the attributes that our society values in who it advances through the narrowing funnel of higher educational opportunities. Many colleges in the United States rely fairly heavily on high school grade-point average and fairly narrowly conceived standardized tests for deciding whom to admit. These measures would seem to be less than complete as indicators of who will be the future leaders who make a positive, meaningful, and enduring difference to the world. They are not even particularly strong predictors of college academic success. And the college admissions tests are based on a model of testing that is now a century old. Imagine if our medical testing relied on technology of a century ago! I will discuss in my presentation three projects—Rainbow, Kaleidoscope, and Panorama—that have been used to enhance the college-admissions process. All three models are based on the augmented theory of successful intelligence, according to which future active citizens and leaders are people who are creative in coming up with new ideas, analytical in ascertaining whether their ideas are good ones, practical in implementing their ideas and persuading others to follow them, and wise and ethical in ensuring that their ideas help to achieve a common good. In the presentation, I will describe the measures we have used to assess creative, analytical, practical, and wisdom-based thinking, and will describe the results of the three implementations at diverse colleges. I will argue that, through the use of such measures, it is possible to increase prediction of academic as well as extracurricular success, reduce ethnic-group differences, and send a message to applicants that the college cares about them as a whole person, not just as a set of numbers on narrowly construed measures.

Constructive Memory: Linking the Past and the Future Thursday, April 12th, 3:30 p.m. Daniel Schacter, Harvard University Memory is a constructive process that is prone to various kinds of errors and distortions that can have serious consequences in everyday life. However, there is growing evidence that some memory distortions reflect the operation of adaptive cognitive processes that contribute to the efficient functioning of memory. This talk will consider cognitive and neuroimaging studies that link memory distortions with adaptive processes, with a particular focus on the role of memory in allowing individuals to imagine or simulate possible future events. Recent studies show that imagining future events depends on much of the same cognitive and neural machinery as remembering past events.  Simulation of future events requires a system that allows the flexible combination of details from past events into novel scenarios. Human memory possesses these characteristics, which makes the system adaptive for simulating alternative future scenarios based on past experiences, but may also make the system prone to error.

	Hormones in the Wild: Anthropological Perspectives on Traumatic Experiences and Cortisol Friday, April 13th, 9:00 a.m. Mark Flinn, University of Missouri More details coming soon.
	G. Stanley Hall/Harry Kirke Wolfe Invited Lecture Friday, April 13th, 11:00 a.m. An Attentive Exploration of Ethnic Identification Perspectives and Influences on Change, Measurement, and Theory Joseph Trimble, Western Washington University The meaning and measurement of ethnic identity is complicated and filled with many problems owing in part to the fact that human beings have multiple, intertwined identities that influence one another in ways that are not fully understood. The enactment and nature of an individual’s unique ethnocultural identity can be influenced by lifeways and thoughtways, which may be at variance with conventional expectations and proscriptions. A person’s identities, as well as the sociocultural contexts in which these identities are enacted, must be factored into the measurement and theory of an identity construct. However most of the research and scholarship on the measurement of identity has been limited to the abstraction of ethnicity at a social and psychological level of analysis; other dimensions of one’s identity are given less attention in the psychological literature. The lecture will explore these topics and pose questions concerning the teaching and research about the construct. For example, what deep or surface cultural attributes will a multiethnic category permit? If a researcher is interested in discovering deep cultural or ethnic contributions to a cognitive learning style, for example, how will the contributions be disentangled from one’s multiethnic worldview or orientation? One principled way we can meet the challenge posed by the enlarging catalogue of uniqueness is to engage in a thorough inquiry all the while realizing that the world is constantly changing.
	President’s Talk Risk-Taking in Young Adults: A Terror Management Perspective Friday, April 13th, 4:00 p.m. Shelia M. Kennison Oklahoma State University In recent research, my students and I have found that there is a link between ageism and risk-taking in young adults (Kennison & Ponce-Garcia, 2011; Popham, Bradley, & Kennison, 2011; Popham, Kennison, & Bradley, 2011).  Young adults may seek out experiences that make them feel strong and invulnerable to reduce their death anxiety.  The results are consistent with Terror Management Theory, which claims that fear of death is a central determinant of human behavior (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991).  The presentation will review the recent research showing a link between adult risk-taking and ageism and discuss possible ways to reduce risk-taking in young adults.

SAMR Invited Speaker Nothing so useful as a good theory?  Trials and tribulations in the application of behavioral theory in disease management and prevention. Tonja Nansel Senior investigator at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Prevention Research Branch The development of behavioral intervention trials addressing health-related behaviors is guided by behavioral theory and the body of research addressing topic-specific aspects of the population and problem being addressed.  Indeed, theory-based interventions have been found to be more effective than those not guided by behavioral theory.  However, in analyses, the theoretically-driven and empirically-grounded constructs may only explain a small proportion of variance in the behavior of interest.  Behavioral intervention trials in families of youth with type 1 diabetes conducted by our research team highlight challenges associated with applying behavioral theory in the development and testing of behavioral interventions.   These include challenges in integrating multiple theoretical perspectives, measuring relevant constructs, and using subsequent findings to inform behavioral theory.  Importantly, what are the implications when findings do not support the theoretical pathways?  Such findings are relevant for improving not only study design and analyses, but also for informing the application of behavioral theory to health behavior intervention research more broadly.