2025 Award Recipients
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Northeastern University
Lisa Feldman Barrett has revolutionized the science of emotion in psychology and neuroscience. A University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University and past president of APS (2019-2020), Barrett holds appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry and Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she also serves as Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior. Barrett has contributed fundamental methodological, experimental, and theoretical innovations to our understanding of the nature of emotion. She integrates biological, social, and cultural perspectives; challenges the conventional scientific wisdom that emotions are universal patterns triggered by dedicated neural circuits; and instead quantifies emotions as flexible, relational categories filled with variety. Barrett and her collaborators study people across their lifespan in both urban and small-scale, Indigenous cultures. Her discoveries and insights have inspired psychological science and neuroscience beyond emotion and have impacted scholarship in history, philosophy, law, and engineering. Barrett is appreciated for her rigorous, creative and inclusive approach to science and for her generous and dedicated mentorship. She is also known for enthusiastically engaging with scientific adversaries in the service of scientific discovery.
Randall W. Engle
Georgia Institute of Technology
Randall Engle is responsible for developing the concept of working memory into its modern form. A professor of psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he was one of the first scientists to unite experimental cognitive psychology with psychometric testing and individual differences. Engle and his students reported that individual differences in working-memory capacity predicted performance on a huge number of cognitive tasks, including reading and listening comprehension, writing ability, learning complex materials, and problem solving. He developed a number of tasks to assess working memory span and gave these tasks away, putting them on his website and writing articles with his students that provided a user’s manual. Government agencies and corporations have tapped Engle’s work in employee selection because the measures, which are strongly related to assessments of fluid intelligence, show no gender or race biases. Engle also served for a decade as editor of Current Directions in Psychological Science. Through all of this generous work, Engle integrated findings from various psychological fields to understand emotion, physical and mental health, work productivity, and social relationships.
Arie Kruglanski
University of Maryland College Park
Arie Kruglanski’s work on lay epistemics, goal systems, and significant quest theories present among the most general and elegant theoretical frameworks in social psychology. A distinguished professor at the University of Maryland College Park, he has made a major contribution to the understanding that human reasoning is a motivated social-psychological phenomenon and that motivation is a cognitive activity. Kruglanski’s theories have inspired empirical research in various domains of psychology and have led to the development of scales that measure the need for cognitive closure and significance quest. Kruglanski has tested the applicability of his theories to a wide variety of major psychological phenomena, including persuasion, hypothesis testing, decision making, and categorization. His lab explores violent extremism, political activism, love, aggression, coping with uncertainty, and closed mindedness. His innovative research uses a variety of methods, including lab experiments, neuroscience techniques, computer modeling, text analyses, and surveys. Kruglanski’s scholarship has forever altered the landscape of motivational science.
