Greetings ARP Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Members:
Kathryn Bollich and Allison Tackman
Seattle University; The University of Arizona
Greetings ARP Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Members:
First, we'd like to introduce our new postdoctoral representative, Allison Tackman!
Thank you for electing me as your ARP postdoctoral representative! I received my Ph.D. from the University of Oregon under the exceptional guidance of Sanjay Srivastava. My primary research interests focus on how our personality affects and is affected by the social environment. As a current Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Arizona, my research interests have broadened to include learning more about the behavioral manifestations of personality. For example, in collaboration with Matthias Mehl and David Sbarra, we are examining the conditions under which self-referential language use is and is not a behavioral manifestation of depression, and the extent to which the findings are specific to depression or reflective of a broader association between neuroticism and first-person singular pronoun use.
It's also time for our next election for graduate student representative! If you're looking for a way to get more involved in ARP, through activities like organizing the mentoring lunch at the upcoming conference and representing your fellow graduate students at society meetings, this is a great opportunity for you. Details about the election will be sent out soon, but feel free to get in touch with Kathryn in the meantime if you have questions.
The next ARP conference is already just around the corner, and we look forward to seeing you there! We'll be hosting our popular mentoring lunch, as well as organizing a casual grad student and postdoc get-together to give you the opportunity to meet others in the field. We hope you join us!
Finally, as you probably know, this is an exciting time to be a student or postdoc in personality psychology. Not only is our field growing in size, developing novel methods and statistical techniques, and publishing exciting new findings, the field is experiencing tremendous self-reflection as we evaluate our research methods and publication practices. While the replication crisis was initially shocking and depressing to many, it has sparked a much needed discussion on how we can improve psychological science. We are excited to see many of you engaging in this process! Many of you might sometimes find it overwhelming and time-consuming to stay up-to-date on all of the recent developments that emerge from this debate, so we would like to take this opportunity to share three of our recommendations for how you can stay in the loop while maintaining your productivity. First, if you are not already a member, please consider joining one or both of the following Facebook groups: PsychMap and/or Psychological Methods Discussion Group. As a member of these types of groups, you can read and or comment on threads that discuss important issues concerning open science, such as pre-registration or data sharing. Links to relevant blogs and articles are also posted daily. Second, you can check ARP's meta-blog (http://www.personality-arp.org/metablog/) for posts from personality psychologists who are often writing about the latest on replication and open, reproducible science. Third, you can attend the next meeting for the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS), which will be held at the Center for Open Science this summer from July 30th through August 1st (for more information, visit improvingpsych.org). In addition to learning about how to conduct open science, the structure of this meeting provides graduate students and postdocs with the opportunity to voice their opinions and ask questions in a supportive environment.
We look forward to seeing you this June at ARP in Sacramento, and hope to see many of you this winter at SPSP in San Antonio! Please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any ideas or concerns you'd like to discuss.
- Kathryn Bollich (bollichk@seattleu.edu) & Allison Tackman (tackman@email.arizona.edu)