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 The newly elected members of the Executive Board of ARP are Lynne Cooper, Secretary/Treasurer, and Will Fleeson, Matthias Mehl, Dan Mroczek and Len Simms as Members at Large. My thanks to everyone who graciously agreed to run, to the many people who submitted nominations, and to those who sent in their votes by the deadline.
Sincerely, Julie K. Norem Past President, ARP |
 My research focuses broadly on issues of risk-taking and adjustment, and the influence of personality, motives, and emotional experience on these behaviors and outcomes. Currently I am funded by an NIMH mid-career scientist development award to study intraindividual and interpersonal processes as they shape sexual behaviour, sexual risk-taking, and adjustment among individuals and couples.
I am both honored and excited to take on this new role with ARP, and look forward to the opportunity to work with all of you in shaping the future course of our organization and the field it serves. Lynne Cooper University of Missouri |
 I value highly the intellect and creativity of the Association for Research in Personality membership, so it is a great honor to be elected to its Executive Council.
I am excited by the current growth and revitalization of personality psychology. I believe there are three key factors to deepening that nascent growth in a healthy manner. (1) Sustaining the growing number and quality of younger scientists entering the field. As Associate Editor of JRP, I have been quite impressed by the depth of talent in the younger generations. However, the growth of graduate students in personality psychology is too slow. (2) Continuing to develop a mature approach to science. On the one hand, a mature approach means plowing forward with detailed, precise, and comprehensive answers to basic questions about personality, without regard for their flashiness or cool factor, but rather for their theoretical impact. On the other hand, a mature approach means being comfortable with rigorous innovation and discovery as much as with canon or tradition. The “finding” can be as important as the subsequent fine-tunings of it. (3) Building integrative, complex accounts of personality phenomena. Working together with allied fields and allied approaches is a historical strength of personality, and one that we need to continue to grow. For example, a special issue of JRP is coming out in the spring to mark the 40th anniversary of “Personality and Assessment”, in which we showcase several integrative future directions for personality psychology. As a planner for ARP conferences, I have had the opportunity to participate in Executive Council meetings. It is clear that the leadership is committed to a vision of a growing personality psychology, and I look forward to contributing to that vision. Will Fleeson Wake Forest University |
 I thank the ARP members for entrusting me with one of the member-at-large positions. It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity to serve for the society that I consider my intellectual home and academic “secure base”.
ARP welcomed me very early in my career (yes, it is still early!), at a time in graduate school when I was bouncing around with little focus between social, personality, health, and clinical psychology–even flirting with psycholinguistics. What made ARP such a welcoming place for me was that there I felt that it was perfectly ok notto have a fully-resolved identity as a personality psychologist, that it was perfectly ok to be interested in a broad array of questions, and that it was perfectly ok to do work that is not mainstream in terms of one’s approach and methods. Sam Gosling, one of my two graduate school mentors, took me to my first ARP meeting in 2003 and I have found an intellectual home there ever since. Back then, I did not know why I felt so strongly that I had discovered where I scientifically belong–only that I did. In the Incoming President's Column of the last P Newsletter, William Revelle stated what I now think is the answer: "To me, the study of personality is the last refuge for the generalist in psychology". If I could influence only one thing during my time as a member-at-large, I would like to help ensure that, in the midst of change, this idea remains at the heart of ARP. What else do I envision for ARP for the years to come? I envision that the society continues to foster a healthy growth and international focus, successfully "undocks" its pre-conference from SPSP and establishes a stand-alone (or next-to ISSID) annual meeting, and further promotes JRP to become the natural outlet for the best (personality) psychology research in our field. While achieving these goals, it is my hope that ARP strives for and thrives in continuing to do what, I think, it knows best (and what attracted me to it in the first place): To put the person front and center while at the same time reaching out to, learning from, inviting, and integrating people and ideas from our neighboring disciplines. Finally, let me share a bit of my personal and professional background. I grew up in Erlangen, Germany where I also completed my Masters degree (Diploma) in psychology. Upon graduation, I spent a year as a visiting student in Jamie Pennebaker’s lab at the University of Texas at Austin. After returning to Germany, I worked briefly in a psychoendocrinology lab and as a human resource consultant. I then returned to the United States to pursue my Ph.D. at UT Austin with Jamie Pennebaker and Sam Gosling as advisors. Since 2004, I have been an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. My research explores the psychological implications of people’s social lives. In an attempt to revitalize naturalistic observation research in our field, I unobtrusively sample snippets of ambient sounds directly from people’s moment-to-moment social environments. Participants wear a digital audio recorder called the Electronically Activated Recorder or EAR while going about their daily lives. The EAR periodically (e.g., every 12.5 min) records brief snippets (e.g., 30 sec) of sounds around the participants. We then code the recordings for aspects of participants’ social behaviors, interactions, and language use. We now have an archive of more than 150,000 recordings from more than 400 participants. We use these data to address the following questions: How do people differ in their daily lives? How are people's personalities expressed and perceived through the kinds of social lives they lead? How do people's cultural backgrounds shape their social lives? And, how do people use their social lives for coping with upheavals. Finally, I am interested in the potentials of quantitative text analysis as a psychological assessment tool. A central thread that runs through my research is the development of alternative assessment strategies that can complement psychology’s reliance on self-reports. Matthias Mehl University of Arizona |
 I have the highest regard for my fellow personality psychologists, so to be elected as a Member-at-Large of the ARP is truly an honor. One of the main themes I’ll emphasize during my term is how to capitalize on the recent surge of interest in personality by researchers outside of psychology. As many of you know, many epidemiologists, physicians, economists, demographers, political scientists, and others are discovering personality variables and appreciating their utility in predicting the outcomes that are important to them. For example, a Nobel Prize winning economist, James Heckman, has recently become very interested in personality predictors of some of the outcomes he studies, particularly educational and financial success. Heckman has even accepted an invitation to be our keynote speaker for the ARP meeting next summer in Evanston.
With so many non-psychologist scholars wanting to know more about the very topic to which we’ve devoted our careers, how do we best leverage that interest? How do we continue to grow interest in personality outside of psychology? We can only benefit from our field forging more interdisciplinary connections. This is what I’ll try to emphasize as a Member-at-Large. Dan Mroczek Purdue University |
 I very much appreciate the opportunity to serve as a member-at-large for ARP, and I look forward to helping the organization continue its vibrant growth over the next two years. I have been an ARP member for several years now and have been particularly impressed by the broad range of backgrounds and ideas represented by the members of the organization. To that end, I am pleased to now have the opportunity to contribute more formally to this fine organization and to more generally promote the science of personality psychology.As some may not be familiar with my background, let me introduce myself more formally. I hold a BS in Psychology from California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo and MA and PhD degrees in Clinical Psychology from the University of Iowa. In addition, I completed a pre-doctoral internship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and have been on the faculty as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, since 2003. My research is broadly relevant to measurement of and theory related to personality and psychopathology. More specifically, my lab studies dimensional models of personality and psychopathology, applied and basic psychological assessment, item response theory applications to personality, and computerized adaptive testing. In addition, I am active in a number of professional societies and serve on the editorial boards for Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Psychological Assessment, and Assessment. Moreover, I am excited to be embarking on a new grant-funded project in which we will be developing an integrative dimensional model of personality pathology and an innovative adaptive test to measure the resultant dimensions efficiently. Given my background and interests, I am most interested in helping ARP maintain its interdisciplinary focus and growing its membership base to encompass a broad range of researchers doing innovative work that is relevant to personality psychology. Also, although I see value in our annual meeting's traditional linkage with SPSP, I am looking forward with enthusiasm to the first independent ARP meeting next summer. It appears to be an exciting time for ARP. Len Simms University at Buffalo, The State University of New York |
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