A few brief items on developments from roughly the past month involving people associated with the social psychology program (and related ones) at the University of Michigan in the 1980s...

The Spring 2005 issue of Dialogue, the newsletter of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, came out recently. Paula Niedenthal, an '87 UM Ph.D., wrote a piece on the process of becoming an academic in France, where she's been since the late 1990s (she previously had served on the faculties at Johns Hopkins University and Indiana University in the U.S.).

Separately within the same Dialogue issue, Paula contributed a two-page cartoon series under the rubric of "Social Psychology: Graphic Version -- Ch. 1, Conformity." Paula and I overlapped for three years during graduate school and I remember her, back then even, having a talent for drawing cartoons reminiscent of those in the New Yorker magazine (click here for the New Yorker's "cartoon bank").

The Dialogue issue also contained an extensive display of statistics -- both on individual researchers and at the institutional level -- on publication patterns in the top social-personality psychology journals from 1994-2004. Many Michigan faculty members, alumni, and former post-docs were among those listed. Further, in the institutional statistics, UM topped the publication productivity statistics for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and was the only school to appear among the top publishing institutions for all six journals considered.

Beyond the issue of Dialogue, here are two additional items...

University of Texas professor David Buss, a faculty member in UM's personality psychology program from 1985-1996 and longtime researcher in evolutionary psychology, has published a new book entitled The Murderer Next Door. An extensive description of the book is provided in this UT news release.

Ron Kessler, a UM sociologist from 1979-1996 before moving to Harvard Medical School, has released some new results from a national survey on the prevalence of mental health disorders. During his years at Michigan, Ron collaborated on various projects with faculty, post-docs, and graduate students in psychology in the broad area of stress, social support, coping, and health.

Social Psychologists Who Spent Time at Both Michigan and Ohio State

Last weekend, I traveled to Ohio State University. I was there primarily for a conference on the teaching of statistics, but while there also gave a talk before the Group for Attitudes and Persuasion within the social psychology program and visited with faculty and graduate-student members of the group. I enjoy photographing college campuses, so I put together a photo essay of the Ohio State campus.

I thought it would be fitting to do a list of the "Ohio State-Michigan connection," enumerating social psychologists (and others in related disciplines) with formal ties to both universities (I have previously done UCLA-Michigan and Stanford-Michigan lists, which can be found in this blog's archives).

Considering the physical proximity of Michigan and Ohio State (such that an undergrad at one school might want to go to grad school at the other), both schools' membership in the Big Ten athletic conference, and the fact that both schools have long had thriving social psych programs, I would have expected a large list of people with both Buckeye and Wolverine ties. However, in my first cut at it, at least, the list is fairly small. As always, suggestions for additions to the list and any factual corrections are welcome. Here's the list (updated 6/2/05):

Ohio State undergraduate-UM graduate student

Bert Raven

Graduate degrees from both schools

Susan Cross (M.A. in Higher Education, Ohio State; Ph.D. in social psych, UM)

Ohio State graduate student-UM post doc

Roger Kirk (Baylor University, psychology/statistics)

Ohio State graduate student-UM faculty member

Monique Fleming (now at UCLA)
Joseph Priester (now at UCLA)
David Ronis (researcher in UM School of Nursing)
Denise Sekaquaptewa
Claude Steele (now at Stanford)

UM graduate student-Ohio State faculty member

Hal Arkes (quantitative)
Jon Krosnick (now at Stanford)
Tom Nelson (also a UM undergrad, Ph.D. in social psych, faculty position in political science)
Bill von Hippel (now at University of New South Wales)

I just received my Spring 2005 issue of the Michigan Alumnus magazine. One of the articles was entitled, "The Institute for Social Research: Interdisciplinary, International, Influential" (full text not available from the magazine's website).

The Institute, widely known as the ISR, was where nearly all the social psychology faculty and graduate students had their offices during the 1980s (and perhaps before). East Hall, which houses the psychology department and all its subdisciplinary components, opened some time in the early '90s.

Today, I would say, the ISR is best known for conducting at least four prominent national surveys: the Monitoring the Future (on high school seniors' drug use), National Election Study, Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and Consumer Sentiment surveys.

Although my primary research area for nearly the last 15 years has been adolescent and young-adult drinking, I mainly conducted laboratory experiments during my graduate school years (in the ISR's basement labs) and never had any connection to the Monitoring the Future project (the only 1980s-era student from the social psych grad program I can think of who worked on Monitoring the Future was Greg Diamond; you can see here where he has some publications from that work).

One of the undergraduate courses I teach at Texas Tech University is called Problems of Adolescence; I regularly refer to findings from the Monitoring the Future study in that class. In my other undergrad course, Research Methods, I draw upon various ISR studies as occasions warrant.

Some of the key areas covered in the Michigan Alumnus article (which was not very long) were:

*The potential applications of ISR research to public policy.

*ISR's role in helping develop social science research centers around the world.

*The long history of experimental/laboratory social research within ISR's Research Center for Group Dynamics.

*ISR's long history also in the field of longitudinal research.

Today, many UM social psych professors retain an ISR appointment, as seen on this list (not everyone on this list is a UM social psych professor; the social psych program is big, but not that big). Also, talks and other events continue to be held at ISR.

Although the ISR probably does not play as central a role in most social psych grad students' training as it once did, it is one of the many outstanding academic resources at UM.

One of the more unique, although to outsiders, obscure, aspects of going to school at the University of Michigan is how early the academic year ends. I have purposely chosen to write this entry today, because today happens to be the final day of regular instruction for the Winter 2005 semester at UM.

As noted in the linked academic calendar, UM's classes end today, Tuesday, April 19. Students have Wednesday, April 20 (as well as the weekend) as study days, then begin final exams Thursday, April 21. Although various commencement activities appear to take place between April 29-May 1, the big graduation is Saturday, April 30 in Michigan Stadium (aka "The Big House," due to its current seating capacity of 107,501).

I never got to participate in a graduation at The Big House. I defended my dissertation in August, 1989, and so had to come back for the December graduation at Crisler Arena. I remember a couple of other students, Monica Biernat (social psych) and Dori Frewald (individually designed program in environmental psych) also coming back for that graduation. Having come in from Houston, where I was on a post doc, I got a major cold during that visit back to Ann Arbor.

At Texas Tech University, where I'm currently on the faculty, we don't end classes until May 3.

One way that UM gets to have its second semester end early is by starting early, January 5, this year (Texas Tech started only a week later, January 12, so there's got to be more to it than the starting date). UM is also known for its early spring break, usually beginning in late February.

Within the state of Michigan, at least, word gets around about UM's early end to school. As seen in this newsletter from Michigan Technological University, where there was a proposal a few years ago to cut back from 15-week to 14-week semesters, "...MTU students complain[ed] that students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, which has 13-1/2-week semesters, get a jump on summer jobs because their semester ends two weeks earlier."

I certainly enjoyed the early end to the second semester and the early start to summer. After the cold winters, it's nice to have some extra time to be outdoors, and the timing of the semester end allows more opportunity to travel during the summer.

One of my favorite things to do in the spring was to field a co-ed intramural (IM) volleyball team of social psychology graduate students (and also organizational psych students). We didn't have a team my first spring (1985), but did in '86, '87, '88, and '89.

Southern California is the hotbed of U.S. volleyball, where people grow up playing on the beach. Besides myself, others in the Michigan social psych program hailing from this region, who played one or more years on the IM team, included post doc Pete Ditto and grad student Kari Edwards. Org psych grad student Susan Hatter was from L.A. and had played volleyball for Swarthmore (Pennsylvania) as an undergrad. Social psych grad student Eric Lang was from even further west, Hawaii.

Some of the social psych grad students from the Midwest were also good. I remember seeing Paula Niedenthal, who went to undergrad college at Wisconsin, playing volleyball one year at the social psych program's beginning-of-the-school-year picnic and I knew I had to recruit her for the team. Steve Spencer, who came from Hope College in western Michigan, lent some height to the team; Steve's wife Shelly appeared to be an experienced, well-trained volleyball player and was a major asset the years she played.

Two additional organizational psych grad students who joined in with us were Philippe Byosiere and Helen Robillard.

(I hope I'm not omitting anyone; I'll certainly update this entry to add anyone I missed.)

Our games were played in the Intramural Building, a nice walk south several blocks from the heart of central campus on State St., then off on a side street.

Our games were always played on midweek evenings and afterwards, we frequently went to the Cottage Inn on William St. (near the Institute for Social Research, where we had our social psych offices) for pizza and whatever one's favorite beverage was.

In the early years of the team, we used to practice on weekends, but as time went on and we all got busier, we stopped doing so. I don't remember exactly what our records were in the IM competition, but I think we probably won at least as often as we lost.

Naturally, teams had to use three men and three women at all times. An additional rule was that, if a team used its full complement of three hits during a given possession (to try to dig, set, and spike the ball), a female player had to contact the ball at least once. One year, in honor of this rule, we named our team "She's Gotta Hit It," a play on a Spike Lee movie title from the same era, She's Gotta Have It.

Volleyball is probably as team-oriented a sport as any. Unlike in basketball, football, soccer, and hockey, where individual players can hold the ball (or puck) for several seconds at a time, volleyball players must perpetually and instantaneously direct the ball to a teammate (or hit it over the net). More so than in these other sports, volleyball players must have a constant awareness of their teammates' locations, creating an enhanced level of interdependence. In retrospect, it seems fitting for a team of social and organizational psychologists to gravitate to volleyball.

According to this month's issue of the Ann Arbor Obserser, tonight is the 20th Anniversary Concert of the Chenille Sisters. The event is being held at The Ark in Ann Arbor.

The Chenille Sisters -- Cheryl Dawdy, Connie Huber, and Grace Morand -- used to play at free entertainment events in town, such as Top of the Park and the Ann Arbor Art Fairs. I first saw them play in the summer of either 1986 or '87. They were definitely a group I and a number of fellow graduate students enjoyed going to see.

The Observer characterizes the group as possessing an "unbeatable combination of breaktakingly precise and resonant vocal harmonies, a comic wit that's both corny and subversive, and a delightfully eclectic repertoire of original songs mixed with jazz, swing, folk, and blues standards."

A recent profile article in the Ann Arbor News contends that "...it would be tough to identify a local performer or group that has reached as many people or been as successful during the past 20 years as the Chenille Sisters."

That about sums it up!

I just found a pretty thorough list of funny folk songs and there's a pretty healthy-sized section on the Chenille Sisters.

Their song "Walk Like a Beautician" is a parody of the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian." One of the Chenille Sisters' members, Grace, is indeed a hair stylist, as noted in the Ann Arbor News article linked above. The Chenilles' version uses scissors (the sound of the two blades hitting each other at the end of each cutting motion) as a percussion instrument. Further, the part that the Bangles sing "Way-Oh, Way-Oh," the Chenilles sing, "Wave-Oh, Wave-Oh... Permanent Wave-Oh."

The Chenille Sisters also did a mid-90s PBS special that I watched while living in Buffalo, New York.

I hope to be able to see the Chenilles perform again in the future, either some time when I visit Ann Arbor or in another city.

Congratulations to the ladies!

1980s Visiting Professors in Social Psychology

During the five years (give or take) of graduate school needed to complete the Ph.D. and amass enough publications to be competitive on the job market, students in the UM social psychology program can draw upon a number of resources. These include the faculty in social psychology and other disciplines, fellow students, and the "intellectual infrastructure" on campus (e.g., research centers, libraries).

Professors from other universities who spend a semester or year at UM are additional assets to the program. Ideally, the arrival of visiting professors will initiate a mutual cross-fertilization of research ideas and skills, benefiting both the visitor and host institution.

During my five years (1984-1989) as a graduate student in the UM social psych program, we had at least six prominent social-personality psychologists serve as visiting professors. They are listed below in roughly chronological order (note, I have updated the entries, based on feedback by two of the former visiting professors; the new information is shown in italics):

Alice Isen spent the entire 1984-85 year at Michigan. For over 30 years (including the time she was at Michigan), she has studied how being in a positive mood influences an individual's behavior and cognition. Research on affect and cognition was a key part of the UM social psych program in the 1980s, with Bob Zajonc and many students working in that area. Alice's presence strengthened the program's research portfolio on affect, both by bringing in additional perspectives and increasing the opportunity for graduate students to conduct research on the topic.

The one student, I recall, who worked closely with Alice was Greg Diamond. The following publication is a product of this collaboration:

Isen, A.M., & Diamond, G.A. (1989). Affect and automaticity. In J. Uleman & J. Bargh (Eds.) Unintended Thought (pp. 124-152). NY: Guilford.

Alice later notified me that:

While I was at Michigan, I also worked with Paula Niedenthal and Nancy Cantor, producing the following paper:

Isen, A.M., Niedenthal, P., and Cantor, N. (1992). The influence of positive affect on social categorization. Motivation and Emotion, 16, 65-78.

Susan Fiske spent the Fall '84 semester at UM. I remember Susan appearing before our little informal first-year social psych grad-student seminar to talk about her research (I was also part of the team to meet with Susan in advance of her presentation). Her book (with Shelley Taylor) Social Cognition came out that year.

After 20 years, it's hard for me to remember the details of what Susan discussed (both at the preparatory meeting and with the full group), but I recall some type of "piecemeal" processing model she was working on (see the list of publications from that era on her vita, which is linked to the beginning of the previous paragraph). I can't remember if this was related or not, but Susan discussed primacy effects in person perception, including Asch's "change of meaning" theory. Susan also studied political psychology, publishing some articles with UM's Don Kinder.

Suzanne Thompson visited in the Winter 1985 semester. She is probably most identified with health psychology, stress and coping, and perceptions of control. Suzanne's vita (see link at beginning of this paragraph) contains the following publication:

Davis, C. G., Lehman, D. R., Wortman, C. B., Silver, R. C., & Thompson, S. C. (1995). The undoing of traumatic life events. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 109-124.

Although the publication date of this article is a decade after Suzanne's semester as a visiting professor, it's at least conceivable that this collaboration stems from her time in Ann Arbor (Camille Wortman was a UM professor at the time and Darrin Lehman was a graduate student; Roxy Silver, a student of Camille's from back at Northwestern, later was a visiting researcher at UM's Institute for Social Research).

Suzanne received her Ph.D. at UCLA, working with Hal Kelley and Shelley Taylor (it's hard to get better training than that!). Suzanne gave a Group Dynamics Seminar at UM on attributions of intentionality, which may have derived from her work with Kelley. In fact, I still have the handout from that talk, which took place on March 26, 1985.

Bill Graziano, whose academic interests fall at the intersection of social, personality, and developmental psychology, was a visiting professor of developmental psych during at least the Winter 1985 semester, if not the full 1984-85 academic year. Based at the University of Georgia at the time, Bill later spent many years on the faculty at Texas A&M University. After my arrival in 1997 as a faculty member at Texas Tech University, Bill and I were able to renew our acquaintanceship at SPIT (Social Psychologists in Texas) conferences.

As can be seen from the link to Bill's current homepage at the beginning of the previous paragraph, he now chairs the Department of Child Development and Family Studies at Purdue University. I am in a similar department at Texas Tech, Human Development and Family Studies. Largely as a result of our being in the same kind of department, I have been seeing Bill increasingly at conferences of organizations such as the Society for Research in Child Development, National Council on Family Relations, and International Association for Relationship Research.

Bernie Weiner, himself a UM Ph.D. and for many years a professor at UCLA, came back to his graduate alma mater as a visitor during the Winter 1987 semester. Since I had received my bachelor's degree from UCLA, I quickly introduced myself to Bernie upon his return to Michigan. I always visit UCLA when I go home to see my family in Los Angeles and often run into Bernie, either in the UCLA psychology department (Franz Hall) or at Pauley Pavilion, home of Bruin basketball.

Reuben Baron, now a Professor Emeritus at the University of Connecticut, visited UM in Fall 1988 (as he updated me). Reuben received his Ph.D. from NYU (not at Michigan, as I originally wrote). However, he spent a post-doctoral year with Herb Kelman at Michigan in 1962-63. Reuben's son Michael was in school at UM in 1988; I had Michael in the small section of intro psych that I taught.

I remember that Reuben, who described himself as a "neo-Gibsonian," and James Hilton, a traditional person-perception/self-fulfilling prophecy scholar, had some extended talks about perception and the nature of stimuli; they even gave a joint presentation on this topic.

In recent years, Reuben has applied his interest in perception in another direction, namely art. He is a curator and art critic. As seen in this art review that he co-wrote, Reuben continues to draw upon social psychological research.

He also manages to keep a hand in social psychology. He is carrying out NSF-sponsored research on cooperation as well as being a co-editor (with Eagly and Hamilton) and chapter author of a Festscrift volume dedicated to the work of Herb Kelman, The Social Psychology of Group Identity and Social Conflict (2004, APA Press).

All told, the six visiting professors all brought their considerable expertise to UM and complemented existing research areas. There is no question they enriched the students' graduate education. I hope the visitors feel they benefited, as well, from their Michigan experiences. I continue to stay in touch with many of these professors, at least via occasional exchanges of e-mail or by running into them at conferences.

Social Psychologists Who Spent Time at Both Michigan and Stanford

In my June 5, 2004 entry (June 2004 archives), I presented a list of all known social psychologists (and individuals in related fields) having ties to both the University of Michigan and UCLA (I thank many colleagues for helping augment my list).

I now present the second installment of the series, this time focusing on overlap between Michigan and Stanford. And, as you'll see in the list below, there's a lot of it. Virtually all of the connections with which I've come up are at the graduate-student level and higher (e.g., post-doctoral fellowship, faculty). I'd have to think there are additional people, beyond the few I have, who went to Michigan or Stanford as an undergraduate, then went to the other school in some later capacity. Please let me know of such individuals (or any other people I'm missing at any level).

Here, now, is the list (updated as of February 10, 2006):

Stanford undergraduate-UM graduate student

Geoff Fong

Stanford undergraduate-UM faculty member

Donald Kinder (trained as a social psychologist, on the political science faculty)
Laura Klem (Senior Research Associate, Center for Statistical Consultation and Research)
Lorraine Gutierrez (joint social work/psychology; also attended grad school at Michigan)

UM undergraduate-Stanford post doc

John (Jack) Mayer

UM undergraduate-Stanford faculty member

Barbara Gans Tversky (cognitive psych; also attended grad school at Michigan)

Stanford graduate student-UM faculty member

Angus Campbell
Nancy Cantor (now Chancellor at Syracuse University)
Barbara Fredrickson
Susan Gelman (developmental psych)
Rich Gonzalez
John Hagen (developmental psych)
Barbara Smuts (biopsychology)
Harold Stevenson (developmental psych, emeritus)

UM graduate student-Stanford post doc

Christy Miller Buchanan (developmental psych)
Julie Garcia (post doc upcoming)
Joseph Mikels
Daryl Wout
Elissa Wurf

UM graduate student-Stanford faculty member

Daryl Bem (now at Cornell)
Sandra Bem (now at Cornell)
Jon Krosnick (social psych Ph.D., faculty appointments in communication, political science, and psychology)
Eleanor Maccoby (developmental psych)
Michael Morris (business, now at Columbia University)
Robert Roeser (ed psych, currently W.T. Grant scholar)
Larissa Tiedens (business)
Amos Tversky (deceased)

Faculty at both Stanford and UM

Phoebe Ellsworth (also received Ph.D. from Stanford)
Leon Festinger (deceased)
Hazel Markus (also received Ph.D. from Michigan)
Susan Nolen-Hoeksema (clinical psych, now at Yale)
Edward E. Smith (cognitive science; also received Ph.D. from Michigan)
Claude Steele
Bob Zajonc (also received undergraduate degree and Ph.D. from Michigan)

Miscellaneous

Phil Converse (former director of both UM's Institute for Social Research and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, which, though not officially affiliated with Stanford, is on Stanford property)

I want to thank the following people for their comments and for suggesting individuals for the list, beyond those I had initially put up: David Buss, Barbara Fredrickson, Julie Garcia, Jon Krosnick, Mark Lepper, John (Jack) Mayer, Jennifer Overbeck, Steve Peck, David Sears, and Christian Waugh.

I'll continue doing these Michigan/other school linkages. Please send me your suggestions of schools to link with Michigan!

It was just recently announced that James Jackson will become the new director of the UM's Institute for Social Research (ISR). The news release gives a pretty extensive summary of his career history and achievements, so I won't repeat it.

James was the social psychology area chair when my cohort entered the graduate program in Fall 1984. In that capacity, James presided over our first-year students' introductory seminar, helping socialize us into the program and the field. I always found him very enthusiastic and very helpful.

Congratulations to James!

Mark Blumenthal, who operates the website Mystery Pollster (and who, as noted in my October 18, 2004 entry, did his undergraduate work at UM; click for October 2004 archives) recently reviewed polling data on President Bush's Social Security proposals. In my opinion, Mark's is the webpage of record for explaining the mechanics of polling to a general audience.

In analyzing recent polls on Social Security, Mark invokes the concept of "non-attitudes," coined by Phil Converse. "Non-attitudes" refer to opinions that are spontaneously generated by respondents who want to create the impression they are well-informed. Converse, though best known in political science circles, received his training as a social psychologist.

For nearly the entire time that my cohort and I were in graduate school at Michigan, Converse was the director of the Institute for Social Research, where social psychology faculty and student offices were located at the time. Converse then moved in 1989 to become director of Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a position he held until 1994.

Converse is today listed as a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Michigan.

In at least two of the graduate courses I took at UM -- Hazel Markus's on advanced social psychology and Don Kinder's on public opinion -- we covered Converse's work.

Today marks the exact one-year anniversary of the launching of this website. During the first year, I wrote 46 entries, close to my goal of weekly postings (the most recent writings are shown further down on this page, whereas older ones are automatically moved to the archives, which can be accessed via headings over to the right, midway down). This website has helped put me back in contact with several classmates and professors from my Michigan days. I've enjoyed working on the website and I hope you have enjoyed reading it.

I will, of course, continue to post writings. However, to really keep this page fresh and vibrant, I would like to invite all of you out there who have any sort of connection to the Michigan social psych program to supply me with "guest commentator" write-ups.

You can discuss anything, including your favorite research projects, professors, courses, parts of campus, Ann Arbor establishments, etc. If you had to boil down your favorite or most significant UM experience, what would it be?

You can just e-mail me some text (a link to my Texas Tech faculty webpage, which has an e-mail link, is available in the upper right of this page) and I'll put it up. I really want to make this website an historical repository (an electronic yearbook or scrapbook, if you will) and having multiple contributors will help immensely.

I hope to continue with this website for a very long time and, as always, Go Blue!

One aspect of life at the University of Michigan people who go there know they'll have to put up with is the cold winter weather. In thinking about the coldest days I could remember, I'm highly confident that the most severe weather occurred exactly 20 years ago to this day.

January 20, 1985 was a Sunday, a Super Bowl Sunday, in fact. It was also, of course, a presidential inauguration day, for Reagan's second term (more on that later). The combination of these two major national events makes the date very memorable.

The Ann Arbor weather that day, as I recall, was around -40°F with the wind chill factor. And windy it was! Being out in that weather was literally painful to my exposed skin.

Two grad students hosted a Super Bowl party at their apartment. I lived in the graduate dorms on North Campus that year (my first year) and the party was at an apartment complex south of campus near the Briarwood Mall, so I got a ride from someone.

Other than walking for a few minutes at a time between residences and the car, I was indoors all day, but even the relatively short periods outside were highly memorable.

The bitter cold spell was not limited to the state of Michigan or even the Midwest. In fact, it went as far east and south as Washington, DC, where the inauguration was taking place. As described in a history of the second Reagan inauguration:

"Because January 20, 1985 fell on a Sunday, the public Inauguration ceremony was scheduled for Monday, January 21, 1985. Reagan was sworn in privately on January 20. Owing to record cold temperatures on January 21, 1985, however, the public Inauguration ceremony was moved indoors to the Rotunda, and became a semiprivate ceremony."

For the record, the DC temperature was reported to range from -10°F to -20°F wind chill.

For my remaining years of graduate school (ending in 1989), I lived in apartments in the Central Campus area, where virtually everywhere one would want to go was within short walking distance. During these latter years, I remember two or three other occasions where I thought, "Wow, this is really cold!," but these did not match the intensity of January 20, 1985.

I remember being told once that, ostensibly because such a high percentage of the people who need to be on campus (i.e., faculty, staff, and students) live within walking distance of the university, UM has never once cancelled classes due to inclement weather. That may be an overstatement, but I don't recall any cancellations during my five years.

I just checked the Weather Channel's Ann Arbor data (see link in upper right-hand corner) and for the present January (2005) to date, the average high temperature has been 30°F. This confirms my impression that the Super Bowl/Inauguration weekend 20 years ago was unusually cold.

Lastly, I want to add that while the weather may deter some people from going to UM, I was one of three Californians in my entering social psychology graduate cohort and there were additional Californians in other years (and even one person from Hawaii, Eric Lang).

Within social psychology, most observers would consider the top three empirical research journals to be the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (JESP). Unlike medical journals that sometimes have one-word names such as Eye, Pain, and Thorax, social psychology journals have long names that necessitate the use of the aforementioned abbreviations in our conversations.

Just as January marks the start of a new year, it also marks the beginning of a new annual volume for most academic journals, at least those that publish monthly (some journals publish two or more volumes a year, but one of them would often start in January). The beginning of a new publishing year provides a nice opportunity to note the 1980s-era University of Michigan social psych Ph.D.'s serving in editorial roles for these three social/personality journals.

Most journals in the field tend to have the same editorial structure. Each journal has an editor, a small set of associate editors, and a pretty large board of consulting editors. When an author submits a manuscript to a journal to be considered for publication, the editor will either oversee the review process for that manuscript him/herself or transfer it to an associate editor to oversee. The editor/associate editor will generally send the manuscript to around 3-5 reviewers (from among the consulting editors and experts not on the board, the latter being known as "ad hoc reviewers"). The editor/associate editor overseeing the review of a given manuscript will then integrate the reviewers' evaluative comments along with his/her own independent judgment, leading to an editorial decision of accept, revise-and-resubmit, or reject (immediate acceptances are extremely rare).

At this moment, there is at least one UM Ph.D. grad serving as an associate editor at all three of the social/personality journals listed above. JPSP is such a large journal that it is divided into three subsections: Attitudes and Social Cognition, Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes, and Personality Processes and Individual Differences. Monica Biernat serves as an associate editor for the Attitudes and Social Cognition section of JPSP (this latter link takes you to lists of the editorial teams for all three JPSP sections).

PSPB's list of associate editors includes two Michigan grads, Paula Niedenthal and Bill von Hippel.

Finally, Steve Spencer is an associate editor for JESP.

In looking at the larger category of consulting editors for these journals (available via the above links), the Michigan alums (and post docs) listed are too numerous to mention. I particularly applaud the associate editors, however. I have only served as a reviewer (both as a consulting editor for JPSP in previous years and as an ad hoc reviewer for many journals), and simply reviewing a manuscript is a lot of work. I'd imagine that the effort must be magnified considerably for an associate editor or editor.

Happy new year to everybody! Later today, Michigan will be playing in the Rose Bowl against the University of Texas. As I've noted in previous postings, I've lost considerable interest in football over the years, due to the violence and injuries of the sport. Football is, however, an enormous part of the fabric of the University of Michigan, so I think at least a brief mention of the Wolverines' bowl-game history is warranted. Further, this provides me an opportunity to recommend a major book that came out a few years ago on the role of athletics in university life.

First, regarding today's game, this will be Michigan's 19th appearance in the Rose Bowl, played in Pasadena, California (I found a web document on Michigan's history of bowl appearances, which is up to date through January 1, 2003; the Wolverines have also earned trips to the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day of 2004 and 2005). In fact, dating from when a previous policy forbidding the Big Ten from sending teams to any other bowl besides the Rose Bowl was eliminated in the mid-1970s, Michigan has made it to a bowl game for 30 straight seasons. And these bowl appearances have often been of the prestigious New Year's Day variety.

Based upon an unscientific survey I recently conducted of family members with Michigan ties, there seems to be somewhat less enthusiasm for the Wolverines' Rose Bowl game this year than in previous ones. This probably stems in large part from the fact Michigan lost its traditional regular-season finale to Ohio State and made the Rose Bowl only through losses by key Big Ten rivals.

Further, the Rose Bowl has traditionally pitted the champions of the Big Ten and Pacific Ten conferences. However, this year, Pac Ten champion USC is playing in the Orange Bowl, under a relatively new provision that if a Big Ten or Pac Ten team is ranked in the top two nationally heading into the bowls, then traditional conference linkages to particular bowls can be overridden to let the top two teams play for the national championship. As a result, Michigan is playing a non-Pac Ten opponent, in the Texas Longhorns. Just as a matter of novelty, I would think the Texas team and its fans would be more fired up for the game than their Michigan counterparts. However, once the game starts, Michigan should be fired up, too (if the players weren't already).

As I suggested above, football is a major part of UM's identity, both to the external public and to people associated with the school. What else can be said about a university whose home games consistently draw over 100,000 fans per game? How should we feel, both at Michigan and elsewhere, about the huge role of athletics in university life, with tens of millions of dollars being used to build palatial sports facilities, coaches at big-name schools making salaries perhaps 10 or 20 (or more) times those of faculty members, and schools' lowering their admissions requirements for athletes (relative to students at large at the same institutions)?

As someone who is both a sports fan and one who cares deeply about universities' academic missions, I have been concerned about this issue for a long time and have sought out information on the topic. One source I would highly recommend is the 2001 book The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, by James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen.

Shulman and Bowen begin by reviewing mission statements from some select universities and asking, "How, then, does intercollegiate athletics relate to such missions?" (p. 3). The authors then present an enormous research study of three generations of alumni (some of whom were athletes) at 30 academically selective universities, including the University of Michigan. From admissions to academic performance while in college to post-college achievements, the book provides statistical analyses on virtually every kind of comparison imaginable -- high-profile sport-, low-profile sport-, and non-athletes; participants in men's and women's sports; and alumni from different generations. The appendices have a lot of further information, including athletic budgets from the schools in the study.

Lastly, and tying this all back to Michigan social psychology, two former UM professors are mentioned in the book. Nancy Cantor, who as discussed in my February 20, 2004 entry (February 2004 archives), is now the Chancellor at Syracuse University, gave one of the testimonial blurbs on the back of the book and had some of her research cited inside. Also, the research of Claude Steele, who moved from Michigan to Stanford over a decade ago, is featured in the book.

As December and the holiday season got underway, I began to think about traditions in the UM/Ann Arbor community at this time of year. Given that most people probably leave Ann Arbor for the holidays (often for warmer climes), I could not come up with a lot. One tradition that quickly came to mind, however, was the Galens Tag Days. This event is conducted by UM medical students every December to raise money for children's groups generally, with an historic focus on children in medical settings. Then, several days into December when my Ann Arbor Observer magazine arrived, the cover illustration featured a Galens volunteer, so I knew I was on the right track.

The campaign is named after Galen, an ancient Greek physician. The Tag Days date back to 1927. According to an article in the publication Medicine at Michigan:

"Funds from the first drive were used for a December party for the children in University Hospital, and a portion was saved to found the Galens Workshop the next spring.

The Workshop, which still exists, offers pediatric patients the opportunity to be more 'kid' than patient. Held on the eighth floor of Mott Hospital since the mid-1960s, the Workshop offers events ranging from art projects to Halloween costumes, from parades to parties, from face painting to visits by Michigan collegiate athletes."

As described in the same article:

"The appearance of Galens members in their red ponchos, standing on Ann Arbor street corners with their buckets on the first weekend in December, is a familiar sight to local residents. 'It’s Galens time again,' people say, either preparing to drop coins or paper bills into the buckets or flashing a tag to show they already did. The trademark red and green tags can be seen on almost every winter coat in town that weekend, proud symbols of wanting to help the children of Washtenaw County."

I can't remember if I used to put my tags on my winter jacket or on my backpack.

According to an article in the Michigan Daily (student newspaper):

"The funds granted to Mott are used toward the Child Life Program, which provides activities for children in the hospital and helps them cope with their illness. 'We do it during holiday time because it's a giving time, but it is not holiday-oriented. The money funds activities throughout the year for the children,' said [medical student Paul] Pfeiffer."

As I've mentioned in some of my earlier postings, I'm a faculty member in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Texas Tech University. I remember from a few years back that an undergraduate I had in class wanted to become a child life specialist.

In concluding, I just want to wish everyone inside (and outside) the UM community a happy holiday season!

Yesterday was Texas Tech University's commencement ceremony for the fall semester. As a faculty member at the university, I regularly attend the graduations. The commencement speaker was writer Thomas Mallon, a former English professor at Texas Tech and at Vassar and currently a presidential appointee to a panel within the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The message I extracted from Mallon's talk involved the importance and value of preserving artifacts of one's past, so that one could look back on these items and interpret the memories associated with them from new perspectives. Two examples given by Mallon were his old Little League jersey his mother had saved for 30 years (which made him reflect upon how different the times were when he was a child, as opposed to the present) and a box of hundreds of cancelled checks written decades earlier by his deceased father (which drove home all that his father had done for the family).

Preservation of the past, both of individuals and of communities, has been a steady theme in Mallon's career. Roughly 20 years ago, as I learned from some web research I just did, he wrote a book entitled A Book of One's Own, examining diary writing and famous historical practitioners of it. Currently, his work within NEH involves a major project to digitize newspapers (not just, as he pointed out, those from big cities, but from small- and medium-sized ones, as well) going far back in history, thus increasing their availability to citizens. As Mallon noted, it is communities, as well as families, that say a lot about the fabric of our lives.

Naturally, I view this retrospective Michigan social psychology website in a similar light. I sometimes refer to it as an "electronic scrapbook." As I've alluded to in some of my earlier postings, however, I also have retained physical artifacts of my Michigan education, primarily my course notebooks.

I certainly do not believe people should live their lives exclusively in the past. I nevertheless found it validating to hear a speaker encourage the young, newly minted college graduates (and faculty, administrators, and parents) to preserve their personal histories. Who knows? Maybe 20 years from now, one of the Texas Tech graduates from this past weekend will create a website similar to mine, looking back on his or her years as a Red Raider.

Bonnie Barber, whom I've known since we were both undergraduates at UCLA (and then later both graduate students at Michigan), is now at Murdoch University in Australia. Her new faculty webpage can be accessed by clicking here. A developmental psychologist, Bonnie previously served on the faculty at Penn State and University of Arizona. To Bonnie's friends and colleagues in the United States, this gives a whole new meaning to the song lyric, "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean."

Gretchen Lopez, a Michigan social psych Ph.D. who was at UM in the late 1980s and early 90s, has just been named as a Faculty Associate for Diversity at Syracuse University. As described in a Syracuse news release, it appears that Gretchen will be participating in a number of campus initiatives.

Gretchen has been studying intergroup relations for many years and, as noted in her profile on the Social Psychology Network, has continued to publish extensively in this area. Gretchen also co-edited a 2004 issue of the Journal of Social Issues (along with fellow UM Ph.D.'s Sabrina Zirkel and Lisa Brown) on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

With the airing today of the Jeopardy show (filmed in September) on which Ken Jennings had his winning streak snapped at 74, I feel compelled to point out that among the all-time Jeopardy greats is Chuck Forrest, who appeared on Jeopardy while attending the University of Michigan Law School in the mid-1980s (1985 or '86, if I had to guess).

I suspect that relatively few people nationally -- outside of the hardest of hardcore Jeopardy fans -- would have heard of Chuck or would remember him if they had seen him play. In addition to the passage of time, another likely factor preventing Chuck from achieving the kind of status reached by Jennings is that during Chuck's run (and indeed for most of Jeopardy's history), contestants had to leave after five consecutive wins. Also, of course, there was no Internet during Chuck's run, so that websites celebrating Jennings's streak (such as Andy Saunders's compilation of Jennings-related statistics) could not have helped fuel a similar Jeopardy mania for Chuck.

As noted in the web document linked above to Chuck's highlighted name, he was the show's all-time leading money winner at one point, amassing over $100,000. That, of course, pales in comparison to Jennings's final cumulative total of $2,520,700. However, in addition to Jennings's not having any limit on the number of shows on which he could appear, dollar values for the Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy rounds were doubled within the last couple of years.

Don't get me wrong. For Jennings -- or anyone else, for that matter -- to win 74 straight games is an enormous, mind-boggling feat. No question about it. The point I want to make, however, is that the five-show limit of yesteryear did not allow Forrest and other previous greats the opportunity to see how astronomically far they could potentially take their winning streaks.

I never knew Chuck Forrest during the time we were both at Michigan. However, given the extensive media coverage he was receiving at the time (locally, at least), he almost certainly would have been very well known in the UM/Ann Arbor community. And now, at a time when Ken Jennings and Jeopardy are being lauded nationally (with no less than tonight's ABC Nightline being devoted to the show), I feel a welling up of Maize and Blue pride for a Jeopardy giant of two decades ago.

The recently arrived issue of the Michigan Alumnus magazine included some poll results taken from online surveys at the UM Alumni Association website. I don't know how representative the samples were compared to random cross-sections of Wolverine alums, but the findings comport with what I would have expected.

One question asked about the alums' favorite season of the year in Ann Arbor. Not surprisingly, fall (81%) won overwhelmingly. On most college campuses around the nation, each fall brings the "buzz" of a new academic year, students returning to campus (or first arriving), pleasantly cool autumn temperatures, and (if you're a fan) the start of the college football season. At Michigan, this means action at the "Big House" (the 100,000-plus-seat Michigan Stadium).

In addition to these aspects of fall that are pretty uniform around the country, there are, of course, aspects that are unique (or relatively unique) to Ann Arbor. First on my list are the fall colors, which are more pronounced in some regions of the country than in others (and virtually non-existent in some). I found an excellent slide-show on the web of Ann Arbor fall colors at a site called "Phlog" (above each photo, there's a heading that says "next >>" that you can click to advance the slides; the heading may be hard to see on some screens). Having grown up in Los Angeles, which has little change of season, the Michigan fall colors were a major treat (now if we could do something about those winter temperatures...).

Another poll question inquired into alums' favorite UM sport. Naturally, football (74%) was a runaway winner. The second-place finisher -- ice hockey, with 21% -- may be a surprise to some, given that men's basketball is usually among the top two favorite sports on a college campus (the generic "basketball" finished third among Wolverine grads with 4%). Michigan's hockey program is, however, the most successful one historically in the nation. Also, whether by rules, custom, or some combination of both, college hockey (like that in the Olympics) has remained a game of speed and finesse, avoiding the gratuitous violence characteristic of professional hockey.

Talking about gratuitous violence, this Saturday is the annual Michigan-Ohio State football game, considered by some the greatest rivalry in college football. Though they have been away from the sidelines for quite some time, the rivalry almost certainly would be embodied in many people's minds in the coaching match-up of UM's Bo Schembechler and OSU's Woody Hayes. Schembechler retired as Wolverines' coach shortly after I finished up at Michigan.

Though football was one of my favorite sports for many years, starting around 1993 I decided that the sport's violence and injuries overshadowed the athleticism, in my mind. I have not attended a football game for over a decade. If I'm at home and one of the schools with which I'm affiliated is playing on TV, I may peek in a little for short stretches. That's probably what I'll end up doing on Saturday.