Murray-Helson Award
The Murray-Helson Award, established in 1978, recognizes distinguished contributions to the study of individual lives and whole persons. The winner is selected by a joint committee that includes representatives from both ARP and the Personological Society and is invited to give the Henry A. Murray and Ravenna Helson Award Address at the biennial ARP conference.
The Murray and Helson tradition may be characterized as a style of intellectual leadership that has contributed outstanding work exhibiting several of the following characteristics:
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- Receptiveness to the value of bringing together a variety of disciplines, theoretical viewpoints, and research techniques.
- Use of conceptual tools that lend themselves to the integration of “the tough and tender” in personality research.
- A theoretical outlook that recognizes intrapsychic structure and the thematic unity of individual lives in the midst of phenotypic diversity.
- Interest in imagination and in biography, literature, and myth as psychological data.
- Interest in the biological, social, and cultural contexts of personality.
- Demonstrates intellectual leadership that has contributed outstanding work to the study of individual lives and the whole persons.
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2024 Winner: Chris Hopwood
Dr. Christopher Hopwood, Professor of Personality Psychology at the University of Zurich, has been awarded the 2024 Henry A. Murray and Ravenna Helson Award for distinguished contributions to the study of individual lives and whole persons. Professor Hopwood will be honored at the biennial conference in June 2025 where he will give an invited address
The Henry A. Murray and Ravenna Helson Award, established in 1978, recognizes outstanding scientific and humanistic scholarship in the psychological study of individual human lives. The award is named for Henry A. Murray and Ravenna Helson, pioneering personality psychologists. Henry A. Murray is probably best known for the 1938 volume, Explorations in Personality. Ravenna Helson too published groundbreaking papers on the study of women’s lives, personality structure and development among creative scientists and artists, and other topics, and she launched the iconic Mills College longitudinal study. In the decades since both Murray and Helson’s seminal contributions, these pioneering researchers envisioned a broad-based, integrative approach to studying human lives in their biological and cultural contexts, bringing together psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, the biological and medical sciences, and even literary studies under the banner of what Murray called personology. The personological tradition in the psychological and social sciences emphasizes the complex interplay between biology and culture in shaping human behavior, the inherent unity and synthesizing power of individual personality, the development of personality across the life course, the blending of nomothetic and idiographic approaches to examining human personality, and the role of imagination, narrative, biography, and myth in the study of lives. As articulated below, Dr. Hopwood accomplishments as a scholar exemplify these themes.
Throughout his career, Dr. Hopwood has brought together a variety of disciplines, theoretical viewpoints, and research techniques. He is trained in both clinical and basic (personality) psychology, and he has established himself as an expert in a range of topics including psychopathology, psychotherapy, assessment, personality development, interpersonal processes, and human-animal intergroup relations. Within personality psychology, he has published from a variety of theoretical viewpoints, including interpersonal, trait, psychodynamic, humanistic, biological, and personological. He regularly uses a wide range of assessment methods, including self and informant report, narratives, observational assessment, and ambulatory assessment. He collects data at different timescales ranging from years to seconds, in a variety of cultures throughout the world (most recently including China and sub-Saharan Africa) using specialized designs such as twin or psychotherapy studies. He is also a major advocate for openness, transparency, and reproducibility and helped lead major enhancements of open science practices in his role as action editor for the Journal of Personality Assessment.
Dr. Hopwood’s work also exemplifies Murray and Helson’s integration of both the tough and tender. Some of his most highly cited papers are concerned with methodological issues such as factor analyses, longitudinal modeling, machine learning, and the integration of multimethod assessment data. Yet much of his work also focuses on how to apply personality psychology to reduce suffering and improve welfare in clinical settings, for the general population, and non-human animals. A particular focus throughout Dr. Hopwood’s career has been the use of narrative and biographical approaches to bring life to personality assessment. He has published four books in which biography was the primary method of analysis. In one, he brought together scholars from multiple theoretical paradigms to collaboratively assess a single person, Madeline G. In this 17-year follow-up to Wiggin’s Paradigms of Personality Assessment, Dr. Hopwood weaves in different theoretical frameworks and a developmental perspective to paint a rich portrait of this fascinating person and thereby illustrates the value of different perspectives for understanding a rich human life. Relatedly, in the spirit of Murray and Helson, Dr. Hopwood has a strong record of bringing together different approaches to studying persons. For example, in a study about realness, Dr. Hopwood and his colleagues develop a model of authenticity that is rooted in humanistic, existential, and psychodynamic theories from which the concept originally came, and from which the literature on authenticity drifted over time.
In sum, Dr. Hopwood is a leader in the field at the intersection between clinical, developmental, and personality psychology. His integration of different theoretical and methodological approaches to studying the whole person and individual lives helps push forward Drs. Murray and Helson’s vision of psychological assessment in new and important directions.
List of Award Winners
2022 Kate McLean
2020 Brian Little
2018 Phebe Cramer
2016 Oliver C. Schultheiss
2014 Dean Keith Simonton
2013 Paul Wink
2012 Brent Roberts
2011 Michelle Fine
2010 Jefferson Singer
2009 Avril Thorne
2008 Robert Emmons
2007 Daniel Ogilvie
2006 Bertram Cohler
2005 Eric Klinger
2004 Salvadore Maddi
2003 Carol Ryff
2002 David Winter
2001 Seymour Epstein
2000 Steve West
1999 Robert White
1998 David McClelland
1997 Irving Alexander
1996 Edwin Schneidman
1995 Abigail Stewart
1994 Ted Sarbin
1993 Ruthellen Josselson
1992 M. Brewster Smith
1991 Jane Loevinger
1990 Sylvan Tomkins
1989 Dan McAdams
1988 Rae Carlson
1987 Alan Elms
1986 William Runyan
1985 Jack Block
1984 Ravenna Helson
1982 Suzanne Kobasa
1980 Donald MacKinnon
1979 Nevitt Sanford