APA President-elect candidates address Division 20

By Eric Butter, PhD, Debra Kawahara, PhD, Margaret Bull Kovera, PhD, and Grant Rich, PhD

APA members nominated four candidates to serve for election as the 2025 APA President; these individuals appear on the final ballot that was sent to all APA voting members. The election is being held a little earlier this year than in past years, and it closes on September 15. If you haven’t voted yet, you may find these responses from the candidates about issues relevant to Division 20 informative in your decision. Please be sure to vote! Division 20’s president Grace Caskie asked each candidate to respond to two questions.

• Question 1: Please describe any interests and/or any previous involvement in Division 20. Our members would be interested in knowing if you are a member or fellow of the division and if you have been active in any way with Division 20 activities. Please describe any professional or scholarly interests in issues related to the psychology of adult development and aging. We are interested in a wide range of professional activities, including research, teaching, practice, consulting, supervising, outreach, and advocacy.
• Question 2: Describe how adult development and aging is addressed in your platform or agenda for your presidential year.

Question 1 response

I am not a member of Division 20. But, I think I should be.

I’m a child psychologist with specialization in intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder. I collaborate with researchers on lifespan development in the context of disability. I have completed research on healthcare transition to adulthood. I’m a healthcare administrator for a regional pediatric health system and have led program development and quality improvement initiatives focused on transition to adult healthcare for congenital or chronic lifespan conditions that first emerge in childhood. Also, we know that 50% of lifetime mental illnesses start by age 14, thus I am leading university and hospital departments that have a lifespan perspective to mental wellness.

In my own practice, I have seen changes in intergenerational parenting related to the traumas of the opiate epidemic and treat grandparents parenting young children. Finally, as a senior executive with more than 1,500 employees across multiple generations, I consider the developmental needs, learning styles, and intersectional considerations of career, family, and educational life cycles. Indeed, I suspect I have much to learn, and share, with members of Division 20.

Thank you for the opportunity to reflect on the “ties that bind us” in psychology.

Question 2 response

Accelerating APA’s commitment to population health initiatives is my priority. We need an APA that is relevant every day to every one of our members for everything that matters most to us. This is more than a slogan designed to create warm feelings and to bring us together as “one”. That would be nice, but I value action. The action that brings every one of us together, every day for everything that matters most is a rally for population health.

We are a member organization with a scientific and professional mission to make society healthier, safer, and more equal. A population health movement will be focused on supporting all people to be well in their lives – at work, at play, and in their relationships. All of our best ideas for research, practice shifts, educational priorities, and applied work will be called upon. Every psychologist will be needed to change and enhance the institutions and systems that shape us.

Division 20, and the expertise held by its researchers, practitioners, educators, and consultants, will be necessary and central to the population health movement. This is an “all in” effort to think differently about the future of health, safety, and equity in America.

Question 1 response

I have been trained and use a lifespan, developmental, and strengths-based framework as a professor, researcher, therapist, and supervisor with a particular interest in BIPOC and marginalized individuals, families, and communities. In these communities, families often live and rely on multi-generational households and support, including financial, social, and emotional. As such, it is important to be informed of and use psychological science and best practices in adult development and aging. Issues for older adults often need to be identified and addressed, including but not limited to the growing epidemic of cognitive, brain, and mental disorders; generational conflict with children and grandchildren; the potential return to primary childcare responsibilities; and the loss of power and position as the family acculturates to Western culture because these issues can be unacknowledged or overlooked. However, older adults can bring a wealth of strengths to families and communities, including wisdom, experience, and cultural practices that have been linked to health and well-being. As editor-in-chief of Women & Therapy, a special issue on women and healthy aging in their 80s and 90s has been approved to highlight the positive aspects of aging and optimize quality of life.

Question 2 response

Throughout my career, I have utilized a collaborative and inclusive approach to bring people together to work on important issues. I pride myself on working hard with individuals and groups, listening, understanding, and including multiple perspectives in making strategic, creative, practical, and consensual decisions based on data. My action plan is to amplify the voices of all psychologists and create and support initiatives that engender belonging, inclusion, and collaboration in APA. This aligns with Division 20’s values and agenda of bringing together researchers, therapists, educators, and experts, including those with expertise in adult development and aging, to provide a forum for science, practice, education, and advocacy as well as to improve the human condition.

By utilizing our science, practices, and advocacy, we can educate people on not only the challenges, but growth and satisfaction that often accompany aging and adult development, as well as combating the negative stereotypes and unfair discriminatory practices that persist against older adults in society and psychology. My campaign slogan is “Strength in Unity”, and I believe that we, as agents of change, must include older adults in our efforts in addressing marginalized identities in our calls for social justice. I welcome Division 20 to work collaboratively with me as APA President on mutual goals.

Question 1 response

I have not been previously active in Division 20, although I am supportive of the mission of the division, especially after witnessing first-hand the challenges of aging while serving as the family with responsibility for the care of my mother who recently passed away in her upper 80s. Before this experience, I have engaged in outreach activities with the aging through my church, visiting with those who are homebound, providing transportation to church services, and participating in intergenerational choirs. For a decade, I taught the intro to psychology course at my college, which included a week of instruction on development throughout the lifespan. In my consulting practice, I have provided attorneys with information about eyewitness abilities across the lifespan, often dispelling myths about the capabilities of older adults. So, although adult development and aging have not been a central focus of my professional activities, I do touch on relevant issues in my teaching and practice.

Question 2 response

The first pillar of my platform is increasing access to mental health care, and I have centered the needs of the aging in that portion of my platform. We are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, which appears most acute in young adults and our elders. It is essential that we create pathways to increase the number of people providing health care to address the rising tide of depression in these populations, which is going to require creative solutions to the exploding cost of higher education.

Question 1 response

I have an abiding interest in adult development, and my PhD from the University of Chicago is in psychology: lifespan human development. At Chicago, I was fortunate to learn the psychology of midlife and aging directly from Professor Bernice Neugarten, past president of the Gerontological Society of America, who though retired, invited a handful of us graduate students weekly to her home for discussion. Her model of activity and adaptation inspired me, and I later worked with Chicago’s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on his Creativity in Later Life study, where I interviewed eminent elder creators, such as diverse Grammy and Pulitzer award winning musicians Ravi Shankar and Oscar Peterson and Harvard biologists Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould.

Since Chicago, I frequently teach the lifespan in cultural context course (often to adult students) and publish on the socioemotional development of emerging adults/aging creators, with a special focus on trauma/resilience in cultural context. How passion, and intrinsic motivation (e.g., flow!), continue even after extrinsic rewards have been achieved (e.g., Nobel Prize!) will always fascinate me.

I have been a member of Division 20 and continue to monitor its activities with interest, though in recent years I receive my journal affordably wrapped into institutional subscriptions.

Question 2 response

To build on my answer to question 1, I note that, despite over 25 years of experience as a lifespan developmentalist, experiencing the recent loss of both of my elderly parents was a painful—and learning—experience for me. All the research and scholarship can only go so far in terms of preparing one for the experience as an adult child advocating for one’s parents’ health in a care system of Byzantine bureaucratic complexity. Much of my experience occurred during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was partly advocating and supporting from Alaska and partly while relocated for some months in the lower 48. The lessons I learned, and emotions I experienced are raw and real, and I hope to channel that energy and information to help others. To be sure, I cannot do this alone, and I anticipate outreach to form and rejuvenate workgroups on aging drawn from leadership/members from several APA divisions, including scholars, practitioners, and policymakers beyond psychology. Many issues in elder care directly relate to multidisciplinary care coordination; other issues relate not only to physical changes but to emotions, cognitions, and behaviors that psychologists must work on to understand. To succeed we must work together.