Eisenberg elected as 2014-2015 president of the Association for Psychological Science (APS)

Nancy Eisenberg (Arizona State University) has been elected to serve as president of APS from 2014-2015. Eisenberg is known internationally for her research on children's prosocial development and self-regulation. She made pioneering theoretical, empirical and methodological contributions to the understanding of basic developmental processes. At Arizona State University, where she is a regents' professor, her research interests are self-regulation, socialization and moral and emotional development, socioemotional competence, empathy-related responding and prosocial behavior.

A driving force in the emergence of the study of children's prosocial behavior, Eisenberg's contributions have distinguished prosocial behaviors that differ in motivation and in socioemotional correlates, the relation of parenting to prosocial behavior and the relation of prosocial behavior to empathy-related responding.

Eisenberg is also a major figure in defining the construct of emotion-related regulation. Over a decade ago, she differentiated between more effortful regulatory processes and less voluntary reactive processes. She has also identified socialization correlates of effortful control and empirically delineated the role of emotion-related self-regulation in sympathy, positive adjustment and maladjustment.

An APS Willliam James Fellow, Eisenberg was editor of Psychological Bulletin and Child Development Perspectives. She has a record of cutting-edge and socially significant scholarship that has resulted in her being considered among the premier developmental scientists in the world.

As president of APS, Eisenberg is interested in increasing diversity of participation and diversity of the content in the APS journals and conference. She defines diversity broadly, as pertaining not only to race/ethnic and gender but also to country of origin and residence (of authors) and area of study (e.g., subdiscipline). She also is interested in fostering the visibility and valuing of behavior and its development in psychological research. Eisenberg is currently past president of APA Div. 7 (Developmental Psychology).