Presents a short biography of the winner of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Senior Career Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest. The 2012 winner is Bernice Lott. Lott's commitment to the public interest has always guided her career, as her groundbreaking research on gender, ethnicity, and race…

This article considers scientific and public understandings of climate change and addresses the following question: Why is it that while scientific evidence has accumulated to document global climate change and scientific opinion has solidified about its existence and causes, U.S. public opinion has not and has instead become more polarized? Our…

Presents a short biography of the winner of the American Psychological Association/American Psychological Association of Graduate Students Award for Distinguished Graduate Student in Professional Psychology. The 2012 winner is Melissa L. Anderson for her ongoing commitment to understanding, treating, and preventing domestic violence in Deaf women…

Much of psychological science and knowledge is significantly relevant to social justice, defined here as the goal to decrease human suffering and to promote human values of equality and justice. A commitment to social justice has evolved as a more important value in the last few decades for psychology, including for the American Psychological…

Intractable conflicts are demoralizing. Beyond destabilizing the families, communities, or international regions in which they occur, they tend to perpetuate the very conditions of misery and hate that contributed to them in the first place. Although the common factors and processes associated with intractable conflicts have been identified…

Keith Humphreys, recipient of the Award for Distinguished Early Career Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest, is cited for creatively combining a scientist's commitment to rigor, a clinician's emphasis on high-quality mental health care, and a policy analyst's understanding of how to address and resolve social problems. His work as a…

Suggests that individuals vary in the degree of cortical development necessary to sustain functional empathy and that most people can be trained to counterbalance the more animalistic determinants of behavior. Concludes that blockage of functional empathy by power drives forms the basis of interpersonal and social tensions. (Author/GC)

This paper explores the roots of the war on poverty by focusing on factors such as the rise of the empowerment issue, delinquency, and changes among black and white youth. It is suggested that the war on poverty had unintended consequences that have kept the empowerment issue and other important issues alive. (Author/AM)

Racialized science seeks to explain human population differences in health, intelligence, education, and wealth as the consequence of immutable, biologically based differences between "racial" groups. Recent advances in the sequencing of the human genome and in an understanding of biological correlates of behavior have fueled racialized science,…

Reviews the approaches that have been used to detect cultural, content, predictive, and selection bias in mental tests. Argues that questions of bias are fundamentally questions of validity. Concludes that although much has been learned about the technical details of test bias, social policy questions remain to be resolved. (Author/GC)

Describes how the American Psychological Association changed in response to social problems and calls for social action, examining events leading to the establishment of the Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology in 1972 and highlighting the role of African American psychologist Kenneth B. Clark in those events. (Contains…

Highlights psychologists' roles and contributions to policy development in the areas of employment, deinstitutionalization, family violence, science and technology, and education. Focuses on psychologists' participation in creating policies that respond to the realities of women's changing social roles. (KH)

Most of the social problems facing nations today, and the current drive for more citizen participation, stem from this experience of lack of power among many persons. (DM)