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IPSR Programs & History
Programs
The Institute of Personality and Social Research is a world-wide center of research on personality and social processes.
IPSR currently has active programs of research, scholarship, and training in five areas:
a) Personality (personality assessment in human and infrahuman species, personality development, implications of personality for performance and creativity);
b) Emotion and Affect (emotional expression and physiology, emotion in social contexts, measurement of emotion);
c) Culture (cultural influences on fundamental psychological processes of cognition, emotion, and personality);
d) Health (stress, symptoms, and disease, coping with chronic illness, health systems); and
e) Social processes (intimate relationships, organizational behavior, environmental psychology, political psychology).
In each area, emphasis is given to studying phenomena at multiple levels of analysis, including the biological, the individual, and the contextual.
History
Director Donald W. MacKinnon
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IPSR was founded in 1949 under Director Donald W. MacKinnon and
Associate Director Nevitt Sanford. At that time IPSR was called IPAR: the
Institute of Personality Assessment and Research. The Institute's roots
can be traced back to Henry Murray's Psychological Clinic at Harvard in
the 1930s (where both MacKinnon and Sanford had been trained) and to the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) personnel assessment centers that
were established during World War II (MacKinnon directed one of these
centers). Subsequent Directors of IPSR include: Richard S. Crutchfield,
Harrison G. Gough, Kenneth H. Craik, and Philip Tetlock, as well as
several interim directors. Currently Robert W. Levenson is Director of
the Insititute. The goal of the Institute was to apply personality
assessment to the study of fundamental theoretical and substantive
issues in psychology and human behavior.
From its inception, the Institute was a home for visiting and resident
scholars and a center for research. Early studies conducted at the
Institute were dedicated to such topics as professional promise and
high-level performance, aesthetics and creativity, personal soundness,
adult development, life histories, and leadership. In addition to
illuminating the theoretical and empirical issues in each of these
areas, studies led to the development of new measures and procedures for
assessing the similarities and differences among individuals. One of the
defining features of IPSR's work has always been the view that to
understand personality fully you have to view the individual in a number
of different situations. This was accomplished through intensive
multi-day assessments, which included administration of extensive
self-report inventories, procedures that enabled careful observation of
behavior in structured and unstructured situations, and detailed
in-depth interviews.
Over time, the Institute's focus expanded. New projects were launched
that studied environmental psychology, art and psychology, culture,
development of personality, and psychobiographical case studies.
Cooperative endeavors with foreign research centers were undertaken that
involved exchange of scholars in a range of fields. As part of the
international focus, efforts were undertaken to translate a number of
personality inventories that had been developed at the Institute into
other languages.
In 1992, the Institute expanded again to include the study of social
processes, a natural extension given that individual differences are
primarily expressed in and gain meaning from social contexts. Reflecting
this change, the Institute changed its name to the Institute of
Personality and Social Research. This expansion has attracted new
programs, new energies, and new members to the Institute.
During the 2002-2003 academic year, Robert W. Levenson finished his
five-year term as Director of IPSR and, after a one-year sabbatical
during which Sheldon Zedeck served as interim director, began his second
five-year term. IPSR currently unites a distinguished membership from a
broad range of disciplines including business, neuroscience, psychology,
public health, public policy, and social welfare. Members come from the
University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, and San Francisco,
and from Stanford University.
Institute of Personality and Social Research (IPSR)
4143 Tolman Hall, MC 5050, Berkeley, CA 94720-5050 USA
Email  | Phone: 510-642-5050 | Fax: 510-643-9334
Copyright 2006-2007 The Regents of the University of California
This page last updated 10/13/06
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