It feels good to reach out to friends and colleagues in ISPP during this challenging and otherwise isolated time. I love the warm emails I’ve been getting from ISPP members in response to inviting them to help ISPP on various committees and initiatives.
Our sympathies go out to all who have financial and family hardships because of COVID, and our shared sorrow for those harmed in Beirut, for those breathing smoke-filled air or inundated by floods, and for those who have lost loved ones to COVID.
Because we realize that members have their own challenges, the ISPP leadership is working hard to develop more resources for members, which we hope to start listing on our member portal in November. For example, we are hoping to get links from members on short or long research talks or lectures you might be recording that you would be willing to share with colleagues. I think this could be nice for online (or in-person) instruction and might be a blessed rescue for a colleague who had sudden changes in child care or other problems that disrupted their teaching-preparation time. So – all those of you who are having to record online lectures, or already feature them on your website, please keep this in mind! Even when our economic and social habits are interrupted, there is always good will and creativity and wisdom that we can share with and/or borrow from others.
I hope you have seen and responded to the survey just sent out – it is one example of the many kinds of data the Central Office and the Executive Committee are gathering to make plans under uncertainty and to ready ISPP to change plans as necessary (as we did last January in postponing our Santiago meeting).
COVID or no COVID, the 2021 Program Chairs, Dr. Carla Houkamau in New Zealand and Dr. Allison Harell in Canada, have also been working hard to make the 2021 conference useful and exciting. They are especially reaching out to Indigenous scholars, and in this effort, they further ISPP’s commitment to connecting people and places, respecting and expanding communities, and to a broad understanding of human beings and the ways they organize their relationships.
In addition, the 2021 conference will feature several workshops in the new methods that many of you are inventing and using, including scraping the internet for content, informed ethnography, advanced statistical techniques, and more – big and little data. As a complement, I encourage you to assemble symposia for the conference with people who might be addressing related intellectual problems with different research techniques and from different disciplinary or interdisciplinary approaches. Our conferences are fun because of the warmth and good humor of members, and they are stimulating and professionally useful because the breadth and quality of our collective work. So, we hope you continue to connect with others, even if you introduce yourselves electronically now.
We will strive to provide more information about this – but I feel everyone should know that some universities have accommodated faculty members, who they know are doing substantial extra work at their jobs and at home. Sometimes administrators will adopt better policies when told that other colleges and universities have done so. Some of the accommodations that have occurred are: (a) automatically extending tenure clocks without penalty for non-tenured faculty members, (b) softening criteria for evaluations related to raises or promotion, (c) allowing professors to teach two sections of a course at the same time online, (d) providing webcams or other equipment needed for teaching at home. While we figure out how to support students, employees, families, friends and all the rest, please be gentle with yourself, too.
There will be more good news to come, at least from ISPP! Please contact us at info@ispp.org if you have good ideas and/or ways we can help.
Felicia Pratto, President
Save the dates! ISPP's upcoming meetings
Our 2021 Annual Meeting will be held in Montreal, Canada | July 11-13, 2021
Our 2022 Annual Meeting is planned to be held in Athens, Greece.
Our 2023 Annual Meeting is planned to be held in Prague, Czech Republic.
Our 2024 Annual Meeting is planned to be held in Santiago, Chile. If you are interested in hosting a future conference of ISPP, please contact the Central Office to obtain the necessary guidelines and materials.
Call for the New Twinning Program
Call for the Twinning Program in English [see below for the call in Arabic, French, Spanish and Turkish]
We are happy to announce that we are still accepting applications for our New Twinning Program among Scholars under Threat (ISPP members who lost their academic positions or their income in direct connection with political persecution and/or to members who have been displaced as a result of political persecution). The New Twinning Program has been set up with the aim of facilitating scholarly collaborations between threatened political psychologists and program partners. These collaborations can offer the opportunity for threatened scholars to continue their academic activities, maintain and advance their careers, and integrate into international political psychology; furthermore, partners can engage in political advocacy on behalf of threatened scholar. We are grateful to the 24 scholars who have already expressed their interest to work together with a scholar under threat as partners. We would kindly like to ask our members to reach out to those scholars within their networks around the world who may benefit from participating.
You can find more information about the Twinning Program here.
ISPP is committed to the protection of its members whose academic freedom is at risk anywhere in the world due to the political context where they work and/or live. Therefore, we offer emergency funds to members who lost their academic positions or their income in direct connection with political persecution and/or to members who have been displaced as a result of political persecution and are without an official affiliation or income in their current location. You can help by donating to the ISPP Scholars under Threat fund through this link.
ISPP has recently supported 17 scholars from Turkey. Therefore, at the moment we cannot accept applications for emergency funds. We are currently collecting donations in order to be able to reopen the emergency fund.
ISPP is proud to announce its partnership with Scholar Rescue Fund
ISPP is proud to announce its partnership with Scholar Rescue Fund, an initiative of the Institute of International Education. IIE-SRF arranges and funds fellowships for threatened and displaced scholars at partnering higher education institutions worldwide. As part of our partnership, we offer a one-year free ISPP membership for Scholars Rescue Fund fellows in the year following their SRF fellowship.
Additionally, we offer free remote participation in the Annual Meeting or 50% discount from registration fee for in-person participation; eligibility for travel funds for early career scholars, and invite them to participate in the Twinning Program. For more information please contact info@ispp.org.
ISPP Presidential Scholarship for the Political Psychology of Criminal Justice
ISPP’s past President, Nick Valentino, reserved the majority of his discretionary fund to enable the Society to award a scholarship in the coming year to a scholar working on questions related to role of racism in criminal justice institutions. We therefore welcome any ISPP members working in this area to submit a 2-page application discussing their work and their plans for utilizing the $2,000 scholarship. The awardee will be recognized at the 2021 ISPP Annual Meeting in Montreal (safety permitting). The ISPP Presidential Scholarship for the Political Psychology of Criminal Justice is an opportunity for us all to think about the role of racism and racial inequality in society as a whole, and in our institutions of criminal justice in particular. The $2,000 Scholarship is open to all ISPP members, and can be used to fund the ongoing research program of the awardee.
Please send 2-page description of your work, plus a CV, to Info@ISPP.org
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Psychology, University of Oslo
Applications are invited for a 3-4 year position as Postdoctoral Fellow in social or developmental psychology to be based at the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo.
The postdoctoral fellow will work in research on affective and metacognitive feelings led by Professor Rolf Reber. There will also be room to implement own ideas. They are especially interested in:
(1) affective aspects of perception
(2) developmental aspects of metacognitive feelings.
(3) The role of metacognitive feelings in believing statements (among others fake news).
Assistant Professor of Psychology, American University of Paris
The American University of Paris invites applications for a full-time position in the Department of Psychology at the rank of Assistant Professor, beginning 1 August 2021. Candidates should be generalists in psychology who have the expertise to teach courses in Social, Cultural, and/or Personality Psychology as well as Qualitative and Quantitative methods.
Assistant Professor in Social Psychology, Clark University
The Department of Psychology invites applications for the position of Assistant Professor (tenure-track) to begin in August 2021.
We seek a social psychologist (holding a Ph.D. in Social Psychology by the time of the appointment) whose program of research relates to urgent social issues, who works with diverse community samples (not limited to student samples and crowdsourced samples) and considers the social and political context in their research and theorizing, and who uses multiple methods. Specifically, to complement and further build on the Psychology Department's and the Social Psychology program's existing strengths, the ideal candidate will work on the social psychology of social issues (e.g., criminal justice and policing, environment, health, immigration, poverty and inequality, racism) from a critical perspective. Ideally, the candidate's work has links with but is also distinct from other faculty in all three programs in the department.
Catholic University seeks Psychology of Terrorism Instructor for Spring '21
The Department of Psychology at the Catholic University of America is seeking an instructor for an undergraduate course in Psychology of Terrorism, for the Spring 2021 semester. We expect that the course will be taught online. A doctoral degree is required, either in psychology or a closely related field, as is US citizenship.
Here is a brief description from the course catalog: “This course reviews the psychological (clinical, forensic, political, social) underpinnings of terrorism, and the practical implications for living in a post 9/11 world. Topics include psychological approaches as applied to terrorist motivations, characteristics of terrorist organizations, counter-terrorism strategies, and emerging threats such as weapons of mass destruction and cyberterrorism.”
If you are interested, please contact Dr. Barry Wagner as soon as possible for more information, wagnerb@cua.edu, and attach a CV.
Call for submissions
Call for papers: Special Issue on COVID-19: Risk Communication and Blame
The aim of this Special Issue is to explore the concept of blame in COVID-19 risk communication from a variety of perspectives in order to inform public policy and develop effective risk communication strategies.
Call for data: Meta-analysis on strength of social identification and trait anxiety or anxiety psychopathology
We're trying to hunt down the grey literature of studies that have correlations between strength of social identification (with any group) and trait anxiety (e.g., the STAI-Trait, GAD-7, etc.) or anxiety psychopathology (e.g., DASS anxiety subscales, the HADS, the SPIN, etc). I'm guessing that some of you have a number of these kind of datasets stored away somewhere and I'm hoping we can impose on you to help us out.
This is the information we need:
• The correlation (Pearson's r) between Anxiety and Social Identification.
• The name of these two measures, whether they are standardised, and their reliability (Cronbach alpha).
• The specific social group to which the social identification measure was in reference to
• Description of the sample, total N, plus a breakdown of the number of male and female participants and the mean age.
• The authors of the project.
If you have data that might be relevant, please contact Diana Cárdenas:diana.cardenas@anu.edu.au
Obituary for Dr. William Robert Meyers
Dr. William Robert Meyers, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Cincinnati, died on August 22, 2020, after a long illness. He was born in South Orange, New Jersey on March 31, 1934, the son of Joseph Francis Meyers and Eleanor Adeline Meyers, nee Calestine. His father died when he was three years old. He was separated from his mother for several years, enduring dire conditions in foster homes during the Depression. As he grew into adulthood, he became committed to social justice and developed tremendous empathy for children.
Bill grew up with his mother in a third-floor walk-up, cold-water tenement in Manhattan. He excelled as a student and passed the entrance exam for Stuyvesant High School. Although his mother was unable to advise or encourage him, he applied, and against all odds, was accepted and awarded a full scholarship by Harvard University. As an undergraduate, he majored in American History. He also spent two years at Harvard Law School, but left feeling that the law was too adversarial for his temperament. He earned his Ph.D. through Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, which added to Bill’s preference for the big picture over details, disregard of disciplinary boundaries, and large repertoire of analytic methods.
After an early career that included research and urban planning, he became the Director of Research for the Peace Corps. This ended when the Nixon administration removed high-level appointees in order to appoint their own people. He came to the University of Cincinnati first as an assistant to its President, and transitioned to the Psychology Department. His professional interests were clinical psychology, urban psychology, and political psychology, in particular the study of dictators. He was a dedicated, outstanding teacher who could explain difficult concepts to anyone. He mentored and advocated for his students, while challenging, supporting and nurturing their growth.
Bill married Susan Reeder in 1961. They divorced in 1987; she died in 2013. He married Patricia (Pat) O’Connor in 1995. He is survived by Pat; two children from his first marriage, Sarah Elizabeth (Sally) Meyers Faust (Christopher), and Steven Meyers (Christine); two grandchildren, Allison Faust Ray (Mitchell) and Bradley Faust; and a stepson, Christopher Miller. Bill put his family’s welfare above his career, and worked to nurture his children to become good people.
Bill was a magnificent human being. He had a wry, playful sense of humor. He was given to gentle teasing, irony, and occasional zingers that could go over your head until you did a second take. He was a gentleman toward all, and listened deeply to people. He was outraged at social injustice and outspoken about the welfare of children. When he saw something wrong, he intervened.
He loved to travel to new places, to eat in restaurants, to tour the world. He was gregarious and uninhibited in meeting new people. He was a writer, a photographer, an amateur astronomer, a bridge player, a cyclist and tennis player, a classical music lover, an ardent appreciator of actors, a speaker of French and Italian, a voracious reader, and an aficionado of Italian made-for-TV detective movies. He loved sitting in cafes and public places to watch humanity walk by, visiting parks to commune with nature, and gazing upon ancient stars and galaxies. He appreciated life, living it to the end, and was sorry to leave us.
Because of Covid risks to guests, the family will not convene an immediate memorial. The family requests that gifts in William R. Meyers’ memory be directed to:
• RAICES, a nonprofit that works to reunite children who were separated from their parents at our borders, and to prevent such family separations
• WGUC, Cincinnati Classical Radio
• ACLU, which works to defend a broad range of civil rights and to address injustices (a charity, but not tax-deductible)
The next ISPPNews will be published in November 2020.
To submit your contributions for ISPPNews please send an email to the ISPP Central Office.
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