February 28th 2015.

Edward Deci and Kenneth Sheldon, two SDT faculty members, were honored at The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference on February 27th in Long Beach, CA for their scientific work and achievements in the field of social and personality psychology.

At this event, Edward Deci, Professor of Psychology and Helen F. & Fred H. Gowen Professor in the Social Science at the University of Rochester, was awarded the “2014 Distinguished Scholar Award.”  This award, given to only one scholar each year, recognizes the “broad scope and potentially integrative nature of scholarship in personality and social psychology. It honors a scholar who has made distinctively valuable research contributions across his or her career in areas that expand the core of social and personality research and/or integrates different topics in the discipline in significant ways. The award was established to recognize the breadth of personality and social psychology and ensure that SPSP recognizes distinguished scholarly contributions beyond the prototypic topic areas.”

Kenneth Sheldon, Professor of Psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, was awarded The Carol and Ed Diener Award in Personality Psychology.  This award is designed to recognize a scholar (approximately 15-25 years from their first tenure-track appointment) whose work has added substantially to the body of knowledge to the personality field and/or brings together personality psychology and social psychology.