The 113th annual American Psychological Association convention was held August 18-21 in Washington, DC. I attended and came across several people with current and former University of Michigan ties. I figure the best way to recap the convention is just to proceed in chronological order.

August 18

Opening night, last Thursday, the UM psychology department held an Alumni Social Hour. Most other schools participate in an overall Alumni Night with each school getting its own table in a large ballroom, but the Michigan program is large enough to have its own social hour. The Michigan social hour was very well attended in the 1980s and early 90s, as I recall, but less so after that; it may even have been scrapped for a time in recent years.

Thus, it was nice to see the Michigan social hour being held this year. Due to a delay in my connecting flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Washington, DC, I was barely able to get to the final 20-30 minutes of the Michigan social hour, but I was glad I did. The event was co-hosted by current Department Chair Rich Gonzalez and Professor Emeritus Bill McKeachie. I was able to chat with both of them, as well as with a couple of current graduate students.

Copies of the annual departmental newsletter, On Our Minds..., were also available at the social hour (the newsletter is also available online). In addition to news items and profiles about people in the department, the newsletter also announced the merger of the personality and organizational psychology programs into a new one called Personality and Social Contexts.

August 19

The first several sessions I attended on Friday (one of which I participated in) did not include any former Wolverines. However, in the late afternoon at a social hour for researchers of alcohol and other drug use and addiction, I saw 1987 Michigan Ph.D. Kerth O'Brien. Although I didn't immediately associate Kerth with research on substance use, she has studied health and high-risk behavior for roughly two decades, so I guess her presence at the social hour wasn't that surprising.

August 20

Saturday afternoon, things really started to get rolling, in terms of seeing former Michigan people. At a 1:00 poster session, I saw Danny McIntosh. Danny's time in the graduate program (1987-1992) overlapped with mine (1984-1989), and we collaborated (along with Phoebe Ellsworth, whose research interests I described a few entries ago) on a study of stress, coping, and health among law students during the latter part of my time at UM (and continuing after my graduation). References to a couple of articles we published from that study are available on this list of Danny's publications. It had been years since Danny and I had seen each other in person, so it was nice that he was at APA. In recent years, Danny has been part of a colllaborative group studying psychological reactions to 9/11, the products of which include an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

While Danny and I were conversing, another person, Chris Davis, joined in. I did not know Chris, but it quickly became clear that his research background in stress and coping matched Danny's very closely. Chris received his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, working with UM Ph.D. Darrin Lehman. Chris also did a post-doctoral fellowship at UM in the 1990s with sociologist Ron Kessler (more on Kessler later) and along the way co-authored several papers with former UM faculty members such as Camille Wortman and Susan Nolen-Hoeksema.

Then, at 2:00, the aforementioned Ron Kessler, a professor at Harvard Medical School after many years on the Michigan faculty, gave a major address on the National Comorbidity Survey, which he has headed up. The NCS was the first nationally representative survey to examine the prevalence of clinically diagnosable mental disorders in the United States, as well as treatment utilization. Thus, even though Ron is a sociologist, the relevance of his work to psychology could not be clearer. During his APA address, in setting up the historical context for the NCS, Ron alluded to the Michigan heritage in this type of research, citing the 1957 study, Americans View Their Mental Health, by Gerry Gurin, Joe Veroff, and Sheila Feld (Ron has also cited this earlier project in his writings).

From there, at 3:00, I went to see a talk by Sheena Iyengar, a rising star in the field of decision-making research. Sheena was introduced by Stanford professor Hazel Markus, who was a Michigan professor during my time in grad school.

Conclusion

In addition to the "maize and blue" presence at the APA convention, another thing I found interesting was the layout of the convention area in downtown Washington. The 2000 APA convention had also been held in the nation's capital, but at the old convention center. The old convention center was imploded in 2004 (see the video!), so now there's a huge dirt field, surrounded by a number of attractive, modern buildings (some of them hotels and the others probably office buildings), with the huge, new convention center slightly off in the distance, though still visible. I think a park or garden would round off the area nicely, but it seems likely some new commercial venture will go in the empty space. It will be interesting to see what the same area looks like when the APA convention comes back to DC in 2011.