SPSP Block Award
In February, 2021, I was awarded the Jack Block Award of The Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) recognizing a lifetime contribution to personality and social psychology.
What follows on this personal web page is the citation, a brief talk I gave about my career (so far) and the amazing luck I have had to have had such great students, mentors, and friends.
The citation
Professor William Revelle's career demonstrates the truth of his own assertion that, "The study of personality is the last refuge of the generalist in psychology." A self-avowed generalist, Professor Revelle has made important contributions to psychometrics, methods, biological approaches to personality, motivation, cognition, emotion, and trait psychology. A passionate and generous advocate for rigor, his methodological contributions span decades--ranging, remarkably, from seminal early work on the application of factor analysis to personality psychology to contemporary R tutorials for psychological research.He continues to push the field to ever-increasing levels of sophistication. Long a champion of the relevance of cognitive ability to the science of personality, Professor Revelle has fostered the inclusion of cognitive variables in our science by designing and validating measures for researchers. He has made creative contributions to the understanding of personality structure, traits, and emotions.
Professor Revelle is an outstanding exemplar of the benefits of personality psychology remaining a refuge for generalists. Indeed, his accomplishments demonstrate that the field requires generalists if we are to understand the whole person. His expansive perspective on individual differences is one that would have been celebrated by Jack Block, himself. Revelle has made remarkable and longstanding contributions to the field of personality psychology as well as obtained numerous leadership roles in the field.
My presentation
I gave a talk summarizing 55 years of work. My first version of this took 18 minutes (6 minutes over the guidelines) and I then redid it in 12 minutes by leaving out the more self indulgent bits. What follows here is the introduction by the Robin Edelstein and then the talk I gave. Dale Miller's, Judith Harackiewicz's and Janet Helms' talks follow if you are interested. I also share a link to slides for the longer talk. The picture here is the Campbell Award winner, Dale Miller.
The longer talk is available as slides here
For the awards ceremony presentation, skip to minute 45 of the following video. (or listen to the music by Tigirlily and watch many other awards.)