Murray-Helson Award
The Murray-Helson Award, established in 1978, recognizes distinguished contributions to the study of individual lives and whole persons. The winner is selected by a joint committee that includes representatives from both ARP and the Personological Society and is invited to give the Henry A. Murray and Ravenna Helson Award Address at the biennial ARP conference.
The Murray and Helson tradition may be characterized as a style of intellectual leadership that has contributed outstanding work exhibiting several of the following characteristics:
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- Receptiveness to the value of bringing together a variety of disciplines, theoretical viewpoints, and research techniques.
- Use of conceptual tools that lend themselves to the integration of “the tough and tender” in personality research.
- A theoretical outlook that recognizes intrapsychic structure and the thematic unity of individual lives in the midst of phenotypic diversity.
- Interest in imagination and in biography, literature, and myth as psychological data.
- Interest in the biological, social, and cultural contexts of personality.
- Demonstrates intellectual leadership that has contributed outstanding work to the study of individual lives and the whole persons.
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2022 Winner: Kate McLean
Dr. Kate McLean, Full Professor at Western Washington University, has been awarded the 2022 Henry A. Murray and Ravenna Helson award for distinguished contributions to the study of individual lives and whole persons. Professor McLean will be honored at the biennial convention of the Association for Research in Personality in June 2023 where she will give an invited address.
The Henry A. Murray and Ravenna Helson, established in 1978, recognizes outstanding scientific and humanistic scholarship in the psychological study of individual human lives and carried out in the spirit of the demanding personological tradition of Henry A. Murray and Ravenna Helson. The award is named for Henry A. Murray and Ravenna Helson, pioneering personality psychologists. Henry A. Murray is probably best known for the 1938 volume, Explorations in Personality. In Explorations and in the seminal papers Murray wrote in the three decades that followed, Murray envisioned a broad-based, integrative approach to studying human lives in their biological and cultural contexts, bringing together psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, the biological and the medical sciences, and even literary studies under the banner of what Murray called personology. As it has developed since Murray’s time, the personological tradition in the psychological and social sciences emphasizes the complex interplay between biology and culture in shaping human behavior, the inherent unity and synthesizing power of individual personality, the development of personality across the life course, the blending of nomothetic and idiographic approaches to examining human personality, and the role of imagination, narrative, biography, and myth in the study of lives. As articulated below, Dr. McLean’s accomplishments as a scholar exemplify these themes.
Dr. McLean received her PhD in 2004 from the University of California, Santa Cruz under the mentorship of Dr. Avril Thorne, a leader in the field of personology and a past recipient of the Henry A. Murray and Ravenna Helson. Dr. McLean’s theoretical and empirical focus on narrative identity development and life stories is fully in line with Murray and Helson’s’s tradition of studying the whole person. Indeed, the very concept of narrative identity speaks to the central psychological challenge of developing an internally coherent and meaningful story of self that connects past, present and future and provides a sense of unity, continuity and purpose over time within an individual life. Dr. McLean’s work has addressed fundamental and novel theoretical issues pertaining to how narrative identity develops, and her empirical work has examined adolescence, emerging adulthood, and middle-age, identifying developmental themes and processes as well as coherent patterns of stability and change over time in the “intrapsychic structure” that is narrative identity. Fundamental to all of this work is the coding/analysis of how individuals engage in meaning-making within their personal narratives and life stories – a fundamentally intrapsychic process that creates an internal sense of unity and continuity amidst life’s diversity. Dr. McLean’s work has also addressed the important role of integration in narrative identity development, highlighting how different identity content domains intersect with one another and with developmental processes, work that highlights the importance of an integrative, whole-person perspective and is exemplary of the Murray and Helson tradition. In addition to this focus on developmental continuity in individual lives, Dr. McLean’s work is rooted in personality and social psychology and seeks to understand important variations in narrative identity through this lens, focusing on how differences within and between people arise from individual, social and cultural influences.
Dr. McLean’s most groundbreaking and important theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of personality psychology are in the areas of how social and cultural contexts shape the development, expression, and negotiation of narrative identity. An early series of papers focused on the immediate, interpersonal context and showed how personal narratives do not come about and exist in a vacuum but are fundamentally shaped by telling them to others — who is listening and how they listen. In an early seminal piece, a sole-authored article in Developmental Psychology, she showed how meaning-making in self-defining memories was related to whom the memory was told and for what purpose, importantly differentiating the roles of parent and peer audiences for narrative identity development in adolescence. This line of research contributed to an important theoretical piece published in Personality and Social Psychology Review in 2007, in which Dr. McLean and colleagues argued that narrative identity develops through a reciprocal process of “selves creating stories creating selves”, through ongoing social interactions taking place in various contexts throughout development. This model acknowledges both continuity and change over time in relation to dynamic social processes that contribute to how we form and transform self-defining meaning through dialogue. This work further culminated with a well-received and important book that Dr. McLean published in Oxford University Press in 2016 entitled, The Co-Authored Self: Family Stories and the Construction of Personal Identity. Across all of this work, the methodological richness of mixed-methods – which Murray referred to as the “tough and the tender” in personality research – abounds, with expertly integrated quantitative and qualitative analysis used in complementary and powerful ways.
In sum, Dr. McLean has been a leader in the field and intellectual powerhouse of her generation of scholars working on identity development and at the intersections of personality, developmental, and social psychology. Her interdisciplinary study of the whole person with use of idiographic and nomothetic methods advances Murray’s vision of psychological assessment in ways that will help guide the future of the field for generations to come.
List of Award Winners
2020 Brian Little
2018 Phebe Cramer
2016 Oliver C. Schultheiss
2014 Dean Keith Simonton
2013 Paul Wink
2012 Brent Roberts
2011 Michelle Fine
2010 Jefferson Singer
2009 Avril Thorne
2008 Robert Emmons
2007 Daniel Ogilvie
2006 Bertram Cohler
2005 Eric Klinger
2004 Salvadore Maddi
2003 Carol Ryff
2002 David Winter
2001 Seymour Epstein
2000 Steve West
1999 Robert White
1998 David McClelland
1997 Irving Alexander
1996 Edwin Schneidman
1995 Abigail Stewart
1994 Ted Sarbin
1993 Ruthellen Josselson
1992 M. Brewster Smith
1991 Jane Loevinger
1990 Sylvan Tomkins
1989 Dan McAdams
1988 Rae Carlson
1987 Alan Elms
1986 William Runyan
1985 Jack Block
1984 Ravenna Helson
1982 Suzanne Kobasa
1980 Donald MacKinnon
1979 Nevitt Sanford