by Hilary Sigler ‘15
Since 1997, the American Psychological Foundation has given the Arthur W. Staats Lecture Award for Unifying Psychology to an individual who has displayed an outstanding knowledge in the subject matter of unifying within the field of psychology. The Arthur W. Staats Award was named after the father of Peter Staats, Ph.D., who, like his father, is an achieved psychologist.
This year, the University of West Georgia has the pleasure to announce that Dr. Lisa Osbeck, professor of psychology, will be accepting this year’s Arthur W. Staats Award at the American Psychological Foundation Conference this August in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Osbeck will obtain the award this year, and will then deliver her lecture the following year.
“I will more than likely be speaking about the values within psychological science,” said Osbeck. “I have a new book contract that is discussing that subject.”
Each year, the selected lecturer will speak over a body of work that has held great significance for many fields of psychology or has the potential to have unifying power within the discipline of psychology as a whole.
“They give the Arthur Staats Award to someone whose work has the potential to offer a way to unify the discipline in some way,” said Dr. Osbeck. “The American Psychological Association is divided into about 50 divisions called interest groups. This is an award from Division One, which is the oldest division; it is the division of general psychology.”
Division One of the American Psychological Association is represents the Society of General Psychology. This division focuses on establishing effective communication among each of the diverse branches of psychology. This division is responsible for encouraging members to incorporate several diverse perspectives from psychology’s subdisciplines into their research, theory, and practice.
Dr. Osbeck has been a professor at UWG for the past 15 years. Among other psychology courses, she typically teaches History and Philosophy of Psychology and Theories of Personalities.
“I put a big emphasis on getting my students to take different points of view and then compare those ideas. This gives them the ability to address those so that they see that there are different ways to address a given question and to try to understand the kind of inherent logic of the values of each theoretical position.”
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