View all articles in this issue
PSI CHI Distinguished Lecturer Series Q&A With the 2011 Regional Convention Speakers
Download this article for $1.00 (FREE for Members)
by Kelcie Sharp - University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Categories: Distinguished Lectures
Janet Shibley Hyde, PhD
University of Wisconsin–Madison
How did you become interested in psychology?
I started out at Oberlin College in Ohio as a chemistry major, but I wasn’t very
good at the labs. So I switched to mathematics. I didn’t take my first
psychology course until my junior year of college, and I fell in love. It was
too late at that point to change my major, so I took as many psychology courses
as I could and graduated with a degree in mathematics. I then went on to
graduate school in psychology at University of California, Berkeley.
Who was your mentor and how did he/she help your development as a psychologist?
During my undergraduate studies, I actually had two mentors. One was Celeste
McCollough, who taught my Introduction to Psychology class in 1967. She
was the first female faculty member I had had at that point. She was a fabulous
teacher, and I really identified with her.
My second mentor during my undergraduate studies was Norman Henderson.
I began
to work in the lab with him, doing mouse behavior genetics research. He took me
under his wing and taught me how to do lab research, wrote recommendation
letters for me, and more. I even still call him to ask him questions. Having an
undergraduate mentor is extremely important.
My mentor during graduate school at UC Berkeley was Bill Meredith, who was a
quantitative psychologist when I was there from 1969 to 1972. I had a great
experience with him, and he was very supportive.
What made you decide to teach?
I knew I wanted to teach from a pretty early age and decided to get my PhD to
teach college. Otherwise, I would have to be a high school teacher and deal with
discipline and hall passes. I was originally attracted to getting a PhD
specifically so that I could teach. I continue to love teaching and researching
equally.
At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I teach two undergraduate courses,
Psychology of Women and Human Sexuality. I love teaching them both. I care
enormously about both topics and wrote a textbook on each. I am completely
committed to conveying that information to students.
Do you have any tips for students planning to attend graduate school?
It’s really important to be involved in faculty members’ labs. You’ll need
letters of recommendation for your grad school applications. Working in labs
will also test the extent you love research. Some find it great, and others find
it boring. You don’t want to go to graduate school and find out you don’t like
doing research, so you need undergraduate experience with it.
It’s also important, as you search for graduate schools, to consider what you
want your degree to be in and beyond. There are many different degrees in
psychology that you can get. If you want a PhD, you need to find a department
with a mentor who matches your interests.
Being involved in your Psi Chi chapter gives you an advantage because it
provides leadership opportunities. As you proceed, it’s important to have
leadership skills. Psi Chi students also have the opportunity to get to know
their professors better.
How did you become interested in the study of women and gender in particular?
My interests migrated over time. I was first interested in mouse behavior
genetics studies. I actually did my dissertation in graduate school on this. I
was hired at Bowling Green State University to do that, too. But at that same
time, the [“second wave”] of theWomen’s Movement was getting active while I was
there, and I read a couple of classic books like Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics.
I found it compelling and relevant and then wanted to start a new course on the
psychology of women. This was one of the first courses like this in the nation,
and students flocked to it. I was interested, and they were interested. It was a
whole new area that had never been studied before and had really been ignored.
Where does your inspiration for your research come from?
My inspiration comes from multiple sources. Some are social and political
interests that are important to me. One was former President of Harvard
University Lawrence Summers’ speech about women not being as good at math as
men. I wanted to see if that was true. I got a grant from the National Science
Foundation and studied this. I mostly think about what is important to study,
instead of doing a fine-grained study. I wanted to study gender differences in
depression in adolescence because twice as many boys are depressed during
adolescence than girls. This can have terrible repercussions, so I wanted to do
something about it.
What kinds of results has your research had in terms of the media and society in
general?
feel like I keep chipping away at a problem but don’t ever completely solve it.
My study of math differences between genders has gotten a lot of media
attention, but I really want the word to get out to teachers and parents because
they are the gatekeepers. They are the ones who encourage or discourage girls to
do math. I’ve had people contact me, telling me that my research has changed how
they think about things. Our culture, though, continues to encourage
stereotypes, and we need to chip away at that before we can solve all the
problems. I feel like I’ve made contributions toward solving the problems.
Specifically, Seventeen magazine in the past has told girls that appearance is
the most important thing. That won’t help them become physicists, though. Now,
Seventeen is trying harder to publish articles that will really help girls. The
concern with movies and videos is the sexualization of girls and women. Boys and
girls watch them and see girls as sex objects. This is incompatible with getting
a career in math or science. It distracts girls. I am hoping that the end of
these stereotypes will come soon and that people will get tired of the
over-the-top television shows and movies.
What studies will we see from you in the future?
There is no doubt that there will be more meta-analyses from me. There are many
other important questions that need a conclusion, such as the question of gender
differences in depression in adolescence. I am working on this with genetic data
and connections to stress.
Janet Shibley Hyde is the Helen Thompson Woolley Professor of Psychology and
Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin. The author of two
textbooks, Half the Human Experience: The Psychology of Women and Understanding
Human Sexuality, she regularly teaches undergraduate courses in both the
psychology of women and human sexuality. One of her research passions is using
meta-analysis to analyze research on psychological gender differences. The other
is discovering the causes of the emergence of the gender difference in
depression in adolescence. She has won numerous awards for her research,
including the Heritage Award from the Society for the Psychology of Women, for
lifetime contributions to research.
Elizabeth Loftus, PhD
University of California, Irvine
How did you become interested in psychology?
I started out as an undergraduate at University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA), majoring in mathematics. I actually loved mathematics in high school,
especially algebra and geometry. I didn’t feel quite so warm and fuzzy about
taking calculus, though, but I still loved parts of mathematics, so I planned to
stick with it. I needed elective courses, so I took an introduction to
psychology course from Allen Parducci at UCLA and absolutely loved it. I began
to take all my electives in psychology. I actually finished my undergraduate
studies with degrees in both mathematics and psychology. I then decided to go on
to graduate school in psychology and chose Stanford University because of their
mathematical psychology program, which sounded perfect for me. However, I soon
discovered that I wasn’t as interested in mathematical psychology as I thought I
would be and developed an interest in the study of memory.
Do you have tips for students planning to attend graduate school?
Students need to be working with professors. Many people will go to graduate
school and be set on one area of research. But if no one is interested in that
topic at your school, then you won’t get as much attention and training from
your professors. Because of this, try to work on a project that really interests
a faculty member at your school. Look for another school where a professor is
working on the topic and go there to work with that professor. Students should
try to be more open to topics of interest to faculty members, so they can marry
some ideas between their interests and those of their professors. Many faculty
members are going to give students more time if they’re interested in the same
issues.
What advice would you give students who are interested in becoming a therapist?
How can they be ethically responsible?
There are many clinical psychology programs at universities around the country,
where students can get good training to be a therapist. Try to be aware that
there was a major controversy that was raging in the ‘90s and 2000s about
repressed memories. It is worth learning about that controversy so that mistakes
aren’t repeated.
How did you become interested in the study of memory?
I was first drawn to doing semantic memory studies with my former professor
Jonathan Freedman while I was in graduate school and continued to publish on
this after graduate school. After a few years of studying semantic memory, I
decided I really wanted to do work that had more obvious social relevance and
practical application. I had a bit of expertise with memory, and I hit upon the
idea of studying witnesses, crimes, and other legally relevant ideas. Eyewitness
testimony work ended up as my focus and still is today.
What are common misconceptions of memory?
There are surveys that reveal many misconceptions people have in terms of
memory. Many people believe that traumatic memories are registered in the brain
like a video recorder, but scientists don’t think so. There is also a belief by
the general public that the correlation between confidence and accuracy is very
strong, which is not necessarily true. Many people think that massive oppression
of horrific experiences is routine, when there is no credible scientific
evidence of this. These are a few misconceptions of the workings of memory that
segments of the population harbor, and that’s why we are on the lookout for ways
to make decisions on accurate workings of memories.
Who is most susceptible to manufactured memories?
Some recent work with Chinese collaborators has shown that people who score high
on standard tests of intelligence are more resistant to memories being tampered
with. People with self-reported lapses in memory are more susceptible to memory
contamination, meaning people who frequently can’t remember if they did
something today or just thought about doing that thing.
What procedures have you used to plant memories?
Some other researchers have used memories that could have been horrific like
being attacked by a vicious animal or nearly drowning and having to be rescued
by a lifeguard. I believe it seems obvious if these experiences had happened
that they would have been traumatic. In my research, we’re not planting
innocuous memories.
The first procedure that we developed was the lost-in-the-mall procedure. This
method we used to get participants to believe they were lost in a shopping mall
as a child, frightened, and rescued by an elderly person. We talked to family
members of the adult subjects and then told the adult subjects that we had
learned something that happened to them as a child. We presented three true
experiences from their actual lives and made up a fourth experience about being
lost in a mall and rescued. We would question these people on several occasions,
and a quarter of the subjects fell for the made-up experience. This method
presents a fairly strong form of suggestion.
We can also get people to develop false methods through guided imagination and
false feedback. We gather a lot of data from subjects about their personality,
thoughts about food, etc. We then tell them we have a computerized personal
profile generated by our computer that determined that certain things happened
to them as a child based on the information they provided. We show them a list
of completely made-up things that the computer says happened to them as children
like getting sick from eating a hard-boiled egg. These made-up experiences,
however, were embedded in a list of general experiences that are true for most
kids. We tell them to think about this (made-up) experience or imagine how it
might have happened if they can’t remember. Because they did this questionnaire,
the feedback they are given would seem credible to them. These false feedback
procedures can make people believe they had experiences that they did not have.
Of course, we debrief our subjects at the end of the experiment, which proper
experimentation typically requires.
What contributions has your research made in the legal world?
In terms of the legal world, many terrific psychological scientists are working
on problems of eyewitness testimony, or when people are witness to a crime and
have to go to court. There are hundreds or even thousands of cases of wrongful
convictions, and the major cause is faulty eyewitness testimony. We use science,
in conjunction with new developments in DNA, to show actual innocence of those
previously convicted to put the spotlight on this problem. What these studies
have led to is suggestions of how law enforcement should handle every phase of a
conviction or arrest. A document for eyewitnesses has been devised by law
enforcement to handle questioning, showing a line-up, and every other phase of
the process. That’s one very tangible contribution my research has made to the
psychological science. In another domain, the research others and I have done
also put a spotlight on sets of beliefs that are harming people rather than
helping them. One example is in the area of so-called “repressed memories.”
What will we see from you in the future?
With some of my graduate students, we will be publishing research on whether
it’s harder or easier to plant positive or negative memories. We will also be
researching memory distortion and the difference between a personal false memory
of something that happened to you versus when you perpetrated in the memory. We
are also studying individual differences of who is more likely to be susceptible
to memory tampering. There is so much more to learn, which is a good thing since
it keeps curious psychologists busy.
I am very excited about finding ways to do false memory studies online. We can
collect data so much more easily and get very promising results of false
memories being produced in the mind of a subject who doesn’t even have to come
to our lab. We are converting our procedures to online running and analysis.
Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, is Distinguished Professor at the University of
California–Irvine. She holds faculty positions in three departments (Psychology
& Social Behavior; Criminology, Law & Society; and Cognitive Sciences), and in
the School of Law, and is also a Fellow of the Center for the Neurobiology of
Learning and Memory. She received her PhD in psychology from Stanford
University. Since then, she has published 22 books (including the award winning
Eyewitness Testimony) and close to 500 scientific articles. Loftus’s research of
the last 30 years has focused on the malleability of human memory. She has been
recognized for this research with six honorary doctorates (from universities in
the U.S., Sweden, the Netherlands, Israel, and Britain). She was elected to the
Royal Society of Edinburgh, the American Philosophical Society, and the National
Academy of Sciences. She is past president of the Association for Psychological
Science, the Western Psychological Association, and the American Psychology-Law
Society. Perhaps one of the most unusual signs of recognition of the impact of
Loftus’s research came in a study published by the Review of General Psychology.
The study identified the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, and
not surprisingly Freud, Skinner, and Piaget are at the top of that list. Loftus
was #58, and the top ranked woman on the list.
Hall “Skip” Beck, PhD
Appalachian State University (NC)
How did you become interested in psychology?
I happened to take a class as an undergraduate and found the subject fascinating.
What intrigued me was the idea that you could use the scientific method to
address a lot of questions I’d never considered before—how people process
information, how we learn, and which therapies are effective. I started to
consider the world’s great questions and how they were amendable to psychology.
I began thinking about the environment and how to get people to behave in a way
that is beneficial to humans and the planet. How can we use psychology to get
more equal distribution of food? How do we teach people to behave in responsible
ways in terms of family planning and modify the education system so that our
children experience a more enlightened world? All these issues came to me in my
first psychology class.
Who was your mentor and how did he/she help your development as a psychologist?
I really had two mentors. While I was getting my master’s degree at East Carolina
University, my mentor was Jim Higgins. I didn’t know if I had what it took to be
a behavioral scientist. It wasn’t that I was lacking in confidence; I just
didn’t understand what skills were involved. Jim gave me faith that I would be
able to make a contribution to the field. While working on my dissertation at
University of North Carolina, Greensboro, my mentor was John Seta, who is a
social psychologist. From him, I learned what a joy it is to be engaged in the
scientific process and how to frame questions in a scientific fashion and pursue
them.
I owe both of those guys an awful lot. One other thing I learned from them was
that when you get a doctorate, there’s a sense of obligation. Your duty is to
polish psychology and pass it along to the next generation better than you found
it. My mentors took psychology and added to the knowledgebase, and they handed
it me. That’s something I think of every day.
Do you have any tips for students planning to attend graduate school?
The best thing to do in terms of applying is to follow the guidance of a
professor you trust because applying to graduate school is a much more complex
endeavor than applying to an undergraduate program. You should knock on
someone’s door and say, “I need help.” Find a professor to show you what schools
are looking for.
You need a professor to check your letter of intent to see if
you’re addressing issues that are pertinent to those who decide upon your
application. You need to be told what experiences people look for and value. A
dynamite letter of intent can go a long way.
You must demonstrate that you are somebody who did more than just go to class and
get good grades. You have to show promise and know how to present yourself.
Professors are looking to get the best people who will have chemistry with them
and who will fit into their labs. You need to be told how the GRE is evaluated
and how to assess the likelihood of getting into a particular program before you
apply. Many students fail to get into graduate programs because they did not
apply in a wise fashion. That should never happen. Unfortunately, you don’t know
the rules of the game until you are past the application process.
One of the things you need is lab experience. Volunteer in a lab because most
people who train psychologists are researchers and are looking for somebody who
has interest in research. Target a professor at a graduate school—give them a
call and discuss their research. It’s harder for them to turn down a person they
know than a piece of paper. It’s all part of playing the game in the right way.
If you don’t get accepted at first, don’t give up. Try to make an objective
assessment of what could make you more attractive to graduate programs.
Volunteer in labs after graduating because it shows motivation and dedication.
If you have a 3.0 GPA, and you apply wisely, there is a strong chance that there
is a graduate program for you.
What kinds of research did you do while you worked in the army research labs and
how did it benefit you?
During a 10-12 year period, I worked on three main projects. One focused on
increasing the efficiency of military teams. Another was evaluating the
performance of soldiers in new weapons systems and determining whether a soldier
could perform certain tasks effectively.
My third and most interesting project was trying to decrease deaths from friendly
fire. Fratricide has been with us throughout military history; 10-25% of
American military fatalities since the beginning of the 20th century have been
from friendly fire. What we’re trying to do is develop procedures that would
decrease the likelihood of firing on your own. Psychology has a lot to bring to
those issues. What we’re talking about is targeting decisions. Someone looks up
on a hill, sees a vehicle, and must decide to shoot or not shoot. It’s about
misidentification. Because of severe time pressures, mistakes can easily be
made.
This work taught me that research skills are transferable. I would come in and
they would say, “Here’s a problem. Can you figure out how to construct studies
to solve these problems?” Once I learned the literature, I could take research
skills from other areas and apply them to these problems. Many behavioral
problems can be examined once you acquire research training. It’s scientific
puzzle solving.
What made you decide to teach?
When I was working on my master’s, I had the chance to earn money through
teaching, and I didn’t have any money, so that made teaching attractive. Then, I
discovered it was fulfilling. I had never envisioned being a college professor.
Before this, I thought I would teach severely mentally challenged people
self-care and social skills. But in the course of getting my master’s, I got
excited about teaching. It is like sharing something with a friend except this
is a big group of friends. I was hooked! It quickly became apparent, though,
that I needed to get my PhD if I wanted to continue teaching.
How did you become interested/ involved in finding Little Albert?
Some of my students came to my office and wanted me to lead a quest to find
Little Albert. I initially thought it was the worst idea I had heard in years.
How many babies missing for 90 years are going to be discovered? Also, many
diligent investigators had searched, but there was nothing anyone knew about him
after he left Johns Hopkins. I didn’t think we had any chance of finding Albert.
But, when you do research and you pursue a dream, you often find things of value
you don’t expect to find. These students were really emotionally involved before
we began. It was the first meaningful research experience for many of them in
their lives.
I decided that we’d do what we could to learn about Watson’s infant studies. A
part of that was the question of Albert’s identity, and that’s how we got
started. The Albert project took the students beyond lectures and textbooks and
really got them involved in their field. That was really the most important
thing that came out of the Albert question. Looking for Albert was like using a
lantern to follow a path. We followed the clues of what we knew about Albert,
and we started learning more about the infant studies. Then, it all came
together, and Albert suddenly turned and we could see his face.
Why do you think it is important to involve students in your research?
A good lab is like a good friendship—it’s symbiotic! In my lab, everybody gives
and receives. When you come in, you may start off as a data collector,
furnishing information for studies, and, in turn, you learn. You develop skills
and get involved with the underlying concepts. Professors need to get students
involved in lab work because this is where the new generation of psychologists
is being formed. For many students, lab experience is the most significant thing
that they will carry from their undergraduate careers. To me, the lab is the
most important teaching experience I have. Research experience is certainly one
of the main things that will get your students into graduate schools. It
demonstrates that students have a passion for the field.
What will we see from you in the future?
We just finished a new paper on Watson and Albert. I did not plan this paper, but
some colleagues made what I believe to be some rather extraordinary discoveries.
Also, we’re doing more on college student retention. Schools are concerned with
retention, but often the way they go about handling it has not been guided by
science.
I’m also doing more with friendly fire research. What we’re trying to do is see
if, on various tasks, we can tell if a person is going to make a mistake before
they make it. People will perform various tasks, and as they perform these
tasks, we’ll monitor where their eyes are moving. If we see a pattern that eye
movements follow when someone is right and when someone is wrong, then perhaps
by looking at eye movements, we can predict whether he or she is about to make a
mistake.
It’s exciting because usually we learn through consequences. The problem with
experiencing consequences is that sometimes they’re pretty awful. We would like
to see if these negative consequences that people experience could be avoided by
studying eye movement. This may seem futuristic, but that is what psychological
scientists do. We are making the future.
Hall “Skip” Beck received his PhD from the University of North Carolina,
Greensboro in 1983, specializing in social psychology. He accepted a position in
the Psychology Department at Appalachian State University in 1984 and is still
happily at that university. For the past decade, most of Dr. Beck’s research has
focused upon improving student retention; he is a codeveloper of the College
Persistence Questionnaire. His other main area of inquiry is humancomputer
interaction, especially the use of automated devices to reduce fratricide in the
military. The search for Little Albert began as a lark, but soon became a
passion, taking Dr. Beck and his students on a historical journey to John B.
Watson’s infant laboratory.
Joseph R. Ferrari, PhD
DePaul University (IL)
How did you become interested in psychology?
I took a psychology class at my high school as a senior back in 1973. As part of
the class, the teacher gave us the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(MMPI) to administer to our relatives. It really got me interested in
psychology. When I went to St. Francis College for my undergraduate studies,
however, I wanted to go into theater, but I knew careers are less available. I
chose to major in psychology and still did acting on the side.
I then chose to go on to graduate school but did not get into any PhD programs. I
decided to go into a master’s program instead. At this time, I wanted to be a
school psychologist until I began teaching at a community college near Cortland,
NY, where I fell in love with teaching. I decided to continue teaching, and
after a three-year post at a private junior college (teaching 23 classes a
year!), I went back to graduate school to earn a second master’s and my PhD.
Who was your mentor?
In graduate school, I did not have a mentor. However, while I was teaching at
Elizabeth Seton College (now Iona College), I met Dr. Lenny Jason, who acted as
a professional mentor for me. He told me that I needed to get published and get
a PhD. He told me, “No one will take you seriously if you don’t.” Ten years
later, he told me I needed to learn how to write grants and that if I came to
DePaul University, where he worked, he would teach me how.
How did your mentor help your development as a psychologist?
All of the professors I worked with in graduate school and after showed me how to
do the science aspect of psychology. Dr. Jason at DePaul taught me how to write
grants and become involved in professional associations. But most of my mentors
were “engaged teachers,” who taught me how to teach when I was working at the
community college.
What is your favorite course you teach at DePaul?
I love teaching Introduction to Psychology. I’ve been teaching this course at 2
and 4-year public and private colleges (including night and weekend classes) to
a variety of students of all ages for the last 30 years. I think it is a great
course to teach. I really prefer teaching undergraduates because they are hungry
and want to know more.
Do you have any tips for students finishing their undergraduate studies who are
trying to decide what their next step should be?
Publish! And consider where you publish, too.
Also, be an officer in your Psi Chi
chapter because a couple of my studies (with Dr. Drew Appleby, IUPUI) funded by
a Thelma Hunt Award show Psi Chi officers are more likely to get accepted into
master’s and PhD programs. In fact, try to become the president because the
research indicated that PhD psychology majors were often their chapter’s
president. Make sure your officer role in Psi Chi is in your personal statement
for graduate school. Mention you were an officer and what skills you learned
from this position.
When choosing a research area to study, try going into an area where no one else
is doing work. Don’t study yourself! If you get an answer to a question in
class, go after it. Take the risk and stand by it. Try something different.
How did you become interested in procrastination in particular?
When I was in my doctoral program, I was in a research social psych seminar on
self-defeating behavior, where I raised my hand and said that procrastination
sounds like a self-defeating behavior. My professor said there were probably
studies on that, so I wrote it down and ran to the library to look it up. I
found 200 things on procrastination, but they were all on how to counsel
students who procrastinate or even writers’ block. There was no good science on
it or any cures. I then decided to make this my research focus, with many
collaborators, for over 25 years.
Why do you think so many people are procrastinators? Are there aspects of society
that encourage procrastination?
It should be noted that 20% of adult men and women are chronic procrastinators.
This rate is higher than depression, phobias, behavioral disorders, and
substance abuse. And, it is not just in the United States; it is also England,
Australia, Canada, Peru, Venezuela, Spain, Italy, Austria, Poland, Turkey, Saudi
Arabia, and more. Data also shows that 75% of college students are
procrastinators, but this is entirely different. But academic procrastination is
not chronic procrastination. College students put off studying and writing
papers, but if their boss says to be at work, they are there.
Keep in mind that society promotes procrastination. I think what society needs is
to look at prevention—how to prevent problems before they escalate. We
procrastinate, and then problems become large. For instance, AIDS could have
been nipped in the bud if we had captured it earlier.
Other examples are Christmas shopping and filing for tax day. People are rewarded
for going shopping on Christmas Eve because they get a discount on Christmas
Eve, more than at Thanksgiving. With tax day, if you owe money, you should pay
early, and the government should give you a percentage off, lowering it every
day closer to the last day. We don’t give the early bird the worm anymore. We
need to reward people for being early.
How has technology, such as social media and email, affected our procrastination
and self-regulation?
People say to me, “Technology is making me procrastinate.” But, technology has
always been there; it’s neutral. The snooze button has been around since the
1950s! It is all about how we use technology. They are tools. There is
technology available for not procrastinating that can limit your access to
email. Technology can be a curse or cure.
What are common misconceptions about procrastination?
I like to say everybody procrastinates but not everyone is a procrastinator.
Chronic procrastination is not about time or time management. To tell a chronic
procrastinator to just do it is like telling a clinically depressed person to
cheer up. They are great excuse-makers, and it is never their fault.
Chronic procrastination is not genetic. Parents who are procrastinators can have
kids who are not, or vice versa. We learn to be who we are and can unlearn it,
too. You can teach an old dog new tricks.
What are the key steps to overcoming chronic procrastination?
Start by taking ownership of your delays. It is not about time; it is about
managing our lives. Life is too short. Why not do all that you can as long as
you can to improve your life and that of others? You can whine and complain or
just do and do it well. Aim for a goal of 80%, and it is success. It is okay if
you fail. Perfection is pure fiction like I say in my new book, Still
Procrastinating? The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done. Go for as much as you
can. Make a difference in some way.
You say, “Everybody procrastinates but not everyone is a procrastinator.” Are
there times when you struggle with it, too?
I am not a chronic procrastinator. I hope my career achievements reflect that I
get things done. There is truth in the expression “If you want something done,
ask a busy person” because that person values his/her time and that of others.
Still, I occasionally procrastinate, such as having to cut the grass, but
luckily I have a son who does that.
Joseph (Joe) R. Ferrari, PhD, is Professor of
Psychology and Vincent DePaul Distinguished Professor plus Director of the MS in
General Psychology program at DePaul University, Chicago, IL. He was founding
director of the PhD program in Community Psychology. Joe is a Fellow in the
Association for Psychological Science, American Psychological Association,
Eastern and Midwestern Psychological Associations, and the Society for Community
Research and Action. DePaul awarded him in 2001 the Excellence in Research and
in 2009 the Excellence in Public Service awards.
Dr. Ferrari is the author of 232 scholarly research articles, 15 scholarly
books, and 488 professional conference presentations. His research interests
include community volunteerism/service, sense of community, and addiction
recovery. Within social-personality, Dr. Ferrari is considered the international
research expert on the study of procrastination because of his work and his new
2010 book, Still Procrastinating? The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done
(J. Wiley & Sons, Publisher).
Dr. Ferrari was featured in USA Today, New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
London Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Cranes Business, Money, Forbes,
Fitness, Self, Women’s Health, Men’s Health, Good Housekeeping, ELLE,
Cosmopolitan, Psychology Today, Scientific America, and NPR, ABC, and CBS
radio, as well as local and national TV, such as ABC/NEWS– Good Morning
America and several PBS shows (WTTW).
Summer 2011 issue of Eye on Psi Chi (Vol. 15, No. 4, p. 26), published
by Psi Chi, The International Honor Society in Psychology (Chattanooga, TN). Copyright,
2011, Psi Chi, The International Honor Society in Psychology. All rights reserved.