Column European Assocation of Personality Psychology (EAPP)
Filip De Fruyt
As a follow-up on a column written in the previous P-Newsletter (issue 8 of October 2013) by past-EAPP president Marco Perugini and Jaap Denissen, I am happy to discuss how EAPP and ARP will collaborate more intensively in my function as new EAPP president.
ARP and EAPP organized a joint board meeting at the 17th European Conference in Lausanne past summer in July, attended by Dan Ozer, Will Fleeson, Erik Noftle, Jennifer Tackett and Lynne Cooper on behalf of ARP and by Marco Perugini, Filip De Fruyt, Jens Asendorpf, Ioannis Tsaousis, Dick Barelds, Jaap Denissen, Manfred Schmitt, Martina Hrebickova, Wendy Johnson and Jerome Rossier representing EAPP. Different initiatives were agreed upon to strengthen the collaboration between societies.
First, both societies appointed liaison persons, Jaap Denissen for EAPP and Bill Fleeson for ARP, who will be included into all Executive Committee or Board communications and will also mutually attend executive committee/board meetings (without vote right). Secondly, we agreed to allocate an invited symposium slot for one group in the other’s bi-annual conference. Content and line-up of speakers in such symposium will be the responsibility of the organizing group. The conference organizer will foresee a favorable time slot in the program and the symposium will be announced as an EAPP or ARP invited symposium in the program. EAPP will thus organize a symposium at the ARP Conference in St. Louis, Missouri in 2015, and there will be an invited symposium organized by ARP at the 18th EAPP conference in Timisoara in 2016. Third, we will contribute a column to each other’s newsletter and include a link on our respective web-sites. Finally, ad hoc committees will discuss possibilities of having a reduced membership fee for joint membership of both societies and eventually sponsoring a joint award to recognize important international collaborations.
This list of initiatives nicely illustrates that there is a lot of enthusiasm at both sides of the Atlantic to collaborate. These come on top of our already existing formal and informal connections via the organization of summer schools, expert workshops and individual contacts at conferences. All these efforts should contribute to expanding the science of personality and making our discipline more visible within the scientific community and society in general. Reviewing our joint planned actions, you will have noticed that we highly value transparent communication and bottom-up input initiatives. Therefore, I am really looking forward to suggestions from members of both societies to achieve these goals. See you all in St. Louis in June next year!
Best wishes,
Filip