President's Column

Serving as your president continues to be interesting and enjoyable. Div. 1 is involved in a number of projects this year. I list some of these below:

• Awards for Completed Research. An important role of our division is to formally recognize psychologists and their work. These awards include the William James Book Award; the George A. Miller Award for outstanding papers on general psychology; the Ernest R. Hilgard Award for career contributions; and the Arthur W. Staats Lectureship relating to the integration of psychology. We also recognize student research with the Anne Anastasi Graduate Student Awards and the Raymond Corsini Award for Student Poster presentations at APA.
• Service Awards. Our C. Alan Boneau Award recognizes exceptional service to the division. We also have other service awards to thank the many people who work for the division.
• New award for our members working at institutions whose primary mission is undergraduate education. This will be a small grant to help in doing a research project relating to general psychology. Many of our members work at undergraduate institutions, which we wanted to recognize with the new Mary Whiton Calkins Grant. We are working with the American Psychological Foundation (APF) in administering this award.
• Developing an interesting program for division members and others at the annual meeting at APA. We continue to work on developing special events in the division suite as well as celebrating our award winners and arranging other interesting programs related to general psychology.

In addition to honoring researchers, our own journal, Review of General Psychology® , publishes four times a year, under the editorship of Gerianne M. Alexander. Every issue has a number of review articles relating to a variety of topics in psychology. For example, in the March 2017 issue, we have a paper by Peter Lamont on the experience of magic from a historical perspective, a paper by Gregg Henriques linking personality and psychotherapy, a paper by Jessica R. Carre and Daniel N. Jones on how personality relates to conclusions drawn from examining data and a paper by Andreas Elpidorou on the moral dimensions of boredom, along with several other interesting papers. Each of these papers will stimulate thought and perhaps provide material for your classes.

We have a very large and active Executive Committee. It has been growing as we add new positions. For example, we added an early career representative, Emily Dow, two years ago. We were fortunate that our first appointee to this position had served earlier as the student representative, so she was able to contribute much to this new position. Allowing some of these new positions to have a formal vote is one purpose of the bylaws revisions included in this issue. Since we have not had a midwinter meeting of the committee for some time, I decided we should schedule this for this year. I was pleased to get to know some of the members better and felt we had a very productive meeting. We met in Washington, D.C., at APA's headquarters. Although these meetings are expensive, it is essential to give our committee members time to discuss their work for the division and to get feedback from all of us about ways we can improve, as well as to receive thanks from all of us for their work.

Being there in Washington allowed me and our incoming president, Deborah Johnson, to go a day early and to meet with some of the APA staff that we actively work with. Keith Cooke is our official division liaison who helps us with membership issues and individual questions relating to personal APA membership issues. We also spent some time with Mare Meadows discussing the status of our journal and how to handle the transition to a new editor. Our current editor's term ends with the final issue of the journal in 2019. We need to give the new editor some lead time to begin publishing articles that he or she has accepted and edited. We anticipate about a year of overlap so that the new editor has papers ready for publication in 2020. We expect to form a search committee to find candidates for this position later this year. We also had a very helpful discussion with Erin Carney from APF about how to set up our new Mary Whiton Calkins Grant.

Along with these more traditional activities, we have also been engaged with other divisions in APA on several projects. The Committee on Division/APA Relations solicits proposals every year for these types of collaborative projects. Div. 1 has not had a recent history of involvement with these joint projects, so I was delighted we could work on two of them in addition to sponsoring a joint social hour.

• Joint social hour with several other divisions at the convention to allow you to meet others and talk about issues of mutual interest.
• Collaborative project funded by APA to help develop a website for syllabi for psychology courses from scholars from other countries.
• Collaborative project funded by APA to identify useful apps for smart phones relating to psychological methods and statistics and to clinical work.

Finally, in response to the continuing interest among psychologists about how and when the results of psychological research replicate, I will be speaking about this issue in my presidential address at convention. I have been excited to work on this talk with Clare Mehta and Emily Keener, two active members of our division.

If you have interest in any of these projects, please let me know. If you have thoughts about the division, let me know, too.