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I Study What I Stink At:

Lessons Learned from
a Career in Psychology
Robert J. Sternberg
Ofce of the President, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming 82071;
email: Robert.sternberg@uwyo.edu
Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2014. 65:116
Keywords
First published online as a Review in Advance on

September 18, 2013
intelligence, creativity, wisdom, leadership, love
The Annual Review of Psychology is online at

http://psych.annualreviews.org
Abstract
This articles doi:

10.1146/annurev-psych-052913-074851
c 2014 by Annual Reviews.
Copyright
All rights reserved
I describe what I have learned from a rather long career in psychology. My

goal is to aid those younger than I to learn from my experience and avoid my
mistakes. I discuss topics such as the damage that self-fullling prophecies
can do, the importance of resilience, the need to overcome fear of failure, the
importance of being exible in ones goals and changing them as needed, the
relevance of professional ethics, and the need to be wise and not just smart. In
the end, we and our work are forgotten very quickly and one should realize
that, after retirement, it likely will be ones family, not ones professional
network, that provides ones main source of support and comfort.
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Contents

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
ELEMENTARY AND JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE COLLEGE YEARS AT YALE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL YEARS AT STANFORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE FACULTY YEARS AT YALE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE DEANSHIP YEARS AT TUFTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE PROVOSTSHIP YEARS AT OKLAHOMA STATE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE PRESIDENCY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
FINAL THOUGHTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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INTRODUCTION
I study what I stink at. After 38 years, 1,500 publications, 50 grants, and 13 honorary doctorates
in the eld, I have learned a lot of lessons from my research, teaching, and writing, and I hope
this article will be useful to those at an earlier stage in career than I who might prot in some way
from these lessons. Most of the lessons I learned were from my numerous failures.
My goal in this article is not to review my research per se, which I have written about elsewhere
over the years of my career (Sternberg 1977, 1985, 1990, 1997b,c, 1998a,b, 2003, 2010; Sternberg
et al. 2000, 2011; Sternberg & Lubart 1995). Although I briey review the trend of my research,
my goal rather is to discuss my experience of being in the eld and what I have learned from that
experience.
I have found the pursuit of psychology just the best way to understand much of what I have
tried to do in my life that has not worked out particularly well. Quite simply, in my career, I have
generally gotten inspiration by studying things in which I failed. I started studying and writing
about intelligence because I did poorly on IQ tests as a child; I started thinking about creativity at
a point in my career when I ran out of ideas; I started writing about love when my love life was not
doing well; I wrote about thinking styles because of experiences I had had where my way of thinking
and learning seemed not to match teachers expectations; I started studying wisdom because I had
given bad advice to a student; I started studying leadership because I most unfairly and grievously
lost the election in grade 5 for the vice-presidency of the student council to a kid whose speech
was far worse than mine (so I thought); and so forth. Studying my failures has worked for me. I
never studied the things I found to be easy, such as writing. I would have made no progress at all
in studying those things because I had no insight into what made them hard for others.
If there is a message in this article, it is this: Over the years, I discovered many challenges
in my work. The greatest challenge by far has not been in doing research, teaching, or doing
administration, but rather in showing resiliency in the face of negative feedback and conquering
the fear of failure. If I look back at the students from my Stanford PhD graduate times, it is evident
that the ones who succeeded often succeeded by sheer perseverance as much as by anything else.
ELEMENTARY AND JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

I had just nished rst gradeI would have been 7 years old. I was walking home when an
older student accosted me and asked me if I had been promoted. I did not know what the word
promoted meant. But I did not want the student to know I didnt know. So I said that, no, I had
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not been promoted. He said he was sorry to hear it. When I got home, I asked my mother what
the word meant. I found out, and also found out that I had indeed been promoted. Important
lesson: If you dont understand a question, or dont know the answer, dont fake it. Youre better
off just admitting your ignorance.
My rst published article was when I was in sixth grade, when I was 12: It was a review of
Tom Sawyer for a weekly newspaper for elementary school students called My Weekly Reader. The
newspaper was circulated all over the United States. Ironically, this earliest piece was probably the
most widely circulated piece I have ever written. I learned a lesson from this experience, namely,
that even a 12-year-old can do something that is circulated nationally. It made me aware that the
world upon which I could have some inuence was not limited to Maplewood, New Jersey, or
even to the state of New Jersey, which at the time seemed to be most of the world. Kids need
to realize that they can speak with a voice that extends way beyond the environments they have
experienced.
But my main interest in elementary school was not in literature but rather in psychology. As a
child in the early grades, I failed miserably on IQ tests. In the late 1950s, when I went to elementary
school, the authorities (at least where I lived) would give IQ tests every couple of years. Im not
sure why. The school psychologist who would come in to administer the tests scared the bejesus
out of me. I dont know exactly why. I just thought she looked scary. Perhaps anyone giving such
tests would scare me. But as soon as she entered the classroom, I had acquired a conditioned
response that resulted in my freezing up. I remember that when taking the tests other children
would be turning the page while I still would be on the rst problem. Of course I did poorly on
the tests. As a result, my teachers in my early elementary school years thought I was stupid; I
thought I was stupid; my teachers were happy that they had me pegged as stupid; I was happy that
they were happy; and everyone was pretty happy about the whole thing. But each year in early
elementary school I did a little worse than I did the previous year.
Then, in fourth grade, I had a teacher, Mrs. Alexa, who, for whatever reason, thought there
was more to a child, and to me, than just an IQ score. She made clear to me she expected more of
methat she expected me to become an A student. I really liked Mrs. Alexa. I recall thinking at
the time that it was too bad she was so much older than I wasand married. In any case, I wanted
to please her, and to my own astonishment, I became an A student. I learned what so many had
learned before me, the power of self-fullling prophecies (Rosenthal & Jacobson 1968).
Years later, I was invited back to speak at my elementary school in Maplewood. They knew of
Mrs. Alexa because I had dedicated my book Successful Intelligence (Sternberg 1997b) to her. But
Mrs. Alexa was long gone from the school and community. The administrators tried to nd her
without success. Then, one of the administrators had the bright idea to let her teenage son try to
nd Mrs. Alexa on the Internet. He succeeded in a matter of minutes, I was told. She was living
in New Hampshire. She was invited to come to the event where I would speak, and she accepted.
I went to see her in New Hampshire before the event. I didnt recognize her, and it was pretty
obvious she didnt remember me, although she said she thought she might. But it was nice to see
her, in any case. At least, Im pretty sure it was she.
When I was in sixth grade, someone came into my classroom and took me out. The purpose,
it turned out, was to take me back to a fth-grade classroom to take that years IQ test with
the fth-graders. Apparently, they thought the sixth-grade test would be too hard for me. This
maneuver on their part had an unexpected consequence, at least for me. Whereas I was petried
when I took the IQ test in the company of my classmates, I found I was much less nervous in
the company of fth-graders, who to me were babies. I, after all, was a sixth-grader, soon to be
graduated from elementary school. So I took the test without test anxiety, and oddly enough, after
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that one success experience, I never was nervous again taking standardized tests. I learned that
even with one success experience, one can overcome deeply seated anxieties.
My rst major research project was in grade 7, when I was 13. I wanted to understand why
I did so poorly on IQ tests. My rst research on the topic actually was for my seventh-grade
science project. The project involved my creating my own (rather pedestrian) intelligence test.
The test, which I called the Sternberg Test of Mental Abilities [Im sure youve heard of the test,
well-known (only to me) by its acronym STOMA!], was basically a hodgepodge of kinds of
subtests investigators had used over the years. I actually administered this hodgepodge to a bunch
of people and discovered that using lots and lots of subtests yielded rank-order scores among
people that were not much different from the rank-order scores obtained from using substantially
fewer subtests. In other words, I had rediscovered Spearmans (1927) general intelligence, or g.
Just giving people a lot of tests does not necessarily increase the precision or validity of ones
measurement. The issue, I would discover much later, is which tests one chooses to administer.
My project also involved researching the history of intelligence testing. In the course of doing
this research, I discovered the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test in a book in the adult section of
the library in my hometown. I thought it would be a useful experience to give the test to some of
my classmates.
This aspect of the project was somewhat ill fated. The rst person to whom I gave the test was
a girl in whom I was romantically interested. I thought that giving her the IQ test would interest
her in me. I was wrong. Important lesson here: If you are romantically interested in someone,
dont give the person an IQ test. I am very happily married to my wife, Karin, and have never
given her an IQ test. I plan to keep it that way.
A person to whom I later gave the IQ test was a friend I had known from Cub Scouts. Unfortunately, he suffered from a serious mental illness. I believe the technical term is that he was
a tattletale. He told his mother that I had given him the test. Apparently, being a tattletale is
heritable, because she told the junior high school guidance counselor. It appears that being a
tattletale also is contagious, because she told the head school system psychologist. He came to
my school, called me out of second-period social studies class, and balled me out for 40 minutes,
ending with the comment that he personally would burn the book if I ever brought it into school
again. He suggested I study intelligence in rats, although I do not think he was offering himself
as a subject. There is a lesson there, which most parents and child psychologists know: If you
want to discourage a child from pursuing an interest, dont forbid the child to pursue that interest.
It makes the interest so much more appealing to the child. I suspect the psychologist sealed my
lifelong interest in the topic of intelligence.
My science teacher thought more of my report than the psychologist did: He gave me an A on
it. He also defended me from the onslaught. I learned again how a teacher could save a child from
feeling destroyed.
In grade 11, we had to do an independent project in physics. My grades had shown a pretty
steady trajectory. The rst marking period I got an A, the second one a B+, the third one a
B, and I think you get the idea. I wondered why my performance in physics was agging. We
were taking what was supposed to be an innovative course, called PSSC physics, but I found it
to be close to incomprehensible. So I created a physics aptitude test, which basically measured
two kinds of skillsquantitative reasoning and mechanical reasoning. I came to realize that I was
good at the former but rather poor at the latter. And as the physics course progressed, it involved
more and more mechanics. The physics teacher was impressed and gave me an A on the project,
although it did not save my grade in physics.
The next summer, at age 17, I was admitted to a National Science Foundation program at
Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, New York. It is a cancer institute, and I chose to be in

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the biostatistics department because I was interested in statistics. But I ended up being something
of a mist. So I gave up on biostatistics, learned to program in FORTRAN, and wrote a program
that would score the physics aptitude test if the test were administered on what I believe were
called port-a-punch cards. You punched out your answers on a computer card. (What young
person today even knows that computers used to read cards through a card reader?) Amazingly, my
now-former physics teacher allowed me to administer the test to students in physics, and I found
that it predicted grades with a validity coefcient in the 60s, which was pretty darn impressive. I
saw that, even as a high school student, I could create a test that actually worked.
The summer after that, the summer of 1968, I was ready for something new, so I wrote to the
Psychological Corporation, a testing company in New York, modestly asking that they hire me
for the summer. They were intrigued and asked me to come to New York for an interview. I did.
They interviewed me and also gave me an ability test. They hired me. They paid me a royal $100
a week. I was delighted. I spent the summer there, working on a variety of projects, but mostly
on the Miller Analogies Test, a high-level test used for graduate admissions. The next summer,
1969, I worked there again. The work I did became the basis for a book I later wrote in graduate
school when I was short on money, How to Prepare for the Miller Analogies Test (Sternberg 1974).
It was my rst published book. The book is still in print, entering its eleventh edition. Sadly, this
less-than-monumental volume is the most successful book I have ever written, at least in terms of
going into successive editions.
THE COLLEGE YEARS AT YALE

I was going to need a scholarship to go to college. My brother Paul and I are rst-generation
high school graduates. My father dropped out of high school in the Depression; my mother had
to leave Vienna, in a hurry, in 1938. My mother was very supportive of my going to college; my
father, from whom my mother was divorced, had checked out (I never saw him except at my own
instigation) and would have been happy for me to take over his button business in a second-oor
walk-up in Newark, New Jersey. Fortunately, I received a National Merit Scholarship, so I was
able to go to college. I went to Yale in part because I was led to believe it had a strong psychology
department.
My career as a psychologist got off to a rotten start. I took introductory psychology my freshman
year. I was eager still to nd out why I had done so poorly on IQ tests as a child. My rst test was a
series of short essays. I realized as I was writing them that I was not sure exactly what was expected.
What I did not realize was how the writing would be scored. The teacher expected us to make
10 points that he had in mind for each essay. He graded us on the number of points we made and
then averaged the scores. Just before Thanksgiving, he handed out the test papers in descending
order. As each student got his or her paper, he or she could leave. In this way, all the 150 or so
students in the class could see who the smart ones were and who the not-so-smart ones were. He
handed out the 10s, the 9s, then the 8s. By the time he got to the 7s, I gured my paper must have
gotten out of order: It seemed inconceivable to me that I could have gotten lower than a 7. Finally
he handed me my paper with a 3 on it. He commented to me that there was a famous Sternberg
in psychology (Saul Sternberg, mentioned again later in this article) and that it was obvious there
would not be another one. I ended up with a C in the course, which the professor referred to as a
gift, and decided to major in math. After failing the midterm exam in a course on real analysis,
and being told by the professor to drop the course, I returned to psychology. My C in intro
psych was now looking pretty good. I did much better in later courses and ended up graduating
with highest honors in psychology. Three decades or so later I was president of the American
Psychological Association (APA) and commented to the psychologist who was president the year
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beforePhil Zimbardothat it was ironic the president of APA had gotten a C in introductory
psychology. He responded that he, too, had gotten a C.
I learned several important lessons from this experience. First, the skills one needs to succeed
in introductory psychology courses are not the same as, and are only weakly overlapping with, the
ones needed to succeed in the eld. Second, teachers tend to teach (a) the way they were taught
and (b) the way they optimally would like to learn. But the way they teach is not always a good t
to diverse students styles of learning, and unfortunately, some of the students who could be most
successful in the eld may be taught in ways that never allow them to go on to career success.
Third, teachers are sometimes too quick to give up on students. The ones they give up on may
be the ones who, someday, will be able to make more of a difference to the eld than the teachers
themselves.
After my freshman year, I went back to work at the Psychological Corporation. I asked for a
raise, but they did not want to give me one. Finally, they consented to give me a raise from $100
to $105. Had they given me the raise right away, I would have been delighted. But by then I was
so pissed off at them that I decided that this summer would be my last summer there. I learned a
lesson from that, too, which has served me well as an administrator: Dont go out of your way to
antagonize employees on whose goodwill you depend.
As a college sophomore, I did a study that showed that if you gave students taking a mental test
reminders of how much of their allotted time was remaining, the psychometric properties of the
test improved relative to those for a group in which students were not given such information. I
tried to get the paper published but did not succeed. So I later used it as an appendix in a book
I wrote, Writing the Psychology Paper, as an example of how to write a paper. The paper was well
written but somewhat vacuous. In retrospect, the lesson I learned is that it is not enough to write
a paper wellyou really want to have some important message to write about. Duh.
I needed a job. The jobs available sounded boring, such as working in the dining hall or sorting
records in a deans ofce. So I wrote to Henry (Sam) Chauncey, Jr., the director of Admissions
and Financial Aid Policy at Yale, and asked if he would meet with me to consider hiring me. The
meeting took place, and I was hired. I spent my next few years doing part-time admissions research.
In the end, I published a couple of articles in College and University (Sternberg 1972, 1973) based
upon research I had done in the Yale undergraduate admissions ofce. In one piece, I showed that
Yale could cut the number of applicants it carefully reviewed by 40% by employing a decision
rule, which was 98% accurate in predicting admit and reject decisions for the top and the bottom
of the admissions pool. Using the rule would enable admissions ofcers to spend more time on the
applicants for whom decisions were more difcultthose in the middle of the pool. The second
article, a cost-benet analysis of the Yale admissions ofce interview, showed that the interview
was pretty close to useless in the admissions decision process but was benecial because applicants
liked it and thought they performed much better than they actually did on it. So we kept it, if for no
other reason than that it was a good public relations tool. To this day, as an administrator, I have to
think both about the substantive value of what we do in a university and its public relations value.
In my junior year, I took a laboratory course with a professor on human information processing.
I really liked the course a lot and got an A. I had great relations with the professor, who was very
supportive of me, my work, and my ambition to pursue a career in psychology. Heres whats odd.
The professor was the same one who had given me a C in the introductory course and told me
there was a famous Sternberg in psychology and it looked like there wouldnt be another one.
What had changed? Really, the way he taught the course. The freshman intro course was basically
a memorize-the-book, memorize-the-lectures type of course. I never have been very good at that
type of course. The junior-year course was a lab course that emphasized more creative research
work. So I did much better. The lesson? What you learn from a student in a course you teach is

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not how smart the student is but rather how well the students way of learning matches the way
you teach. Teachers should be hesitant to draw conclusions about students abilities unless they
teach to a variety of ability patterns and learning styles.
In my senior year at Yale, I worked with Endel Tulving. He was a fantastic advisor. I did
some work on what was called negative transfer in part-whole and whole-part free recall and some
work on the measurement of subjective organization in free recall. The latter work resulted in an
article with Tulving that we submitted to Psychological Bulletin. We had written a methodological
article that we thought provided a novel and useful way of measuring subjective organization in
free recallthat is, the extent to which the output of a free-recall task is organized rather than
random. The article was summarily rejected by the editor at the time, Richard Herrnstein. For
me, it was quite depressing because it was one of my earliest papers and I (presciently) foresaw
a career of one rejection after another. Later, in writing another paper, I asked Tulving how I
should cite the article that had been rejected. Without skipping a beat, he said, Cite it as rejected
by Psychological Bulletin. At the time, I was stunned by his response. I was just starting my career,
and I could not imagine why, at that time or, for that matter, at any time, I would want to advertise
that my paper had been rejected. I later better came to understand his messagethat we had ideas
in which we took pride, and regardless of what the reviewers and editors thought, we should still
take pride in them. The article was later published in the journal when the next editor took charge
(Sternberg & Tulving 1977). Not all so many years later, I was editor of the journal!
The most important lesson I learned from Tulving is that just because a lot of people believe
something, it doesnt mean it is true (see Tulving & Madigan 1970, Tulving & Thomson 1973).
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL YEARS AT STANFORD

I arrived at Stanford for graduate school and proudly showed my new advisor, Gordon Bower,
a project I had done as an undergraduate. I was very proud of the paper I had written and asked
him for comments. I gured this was a good way for him to see what a brilliant student he had
acquired. A week or two later he handed the paper back to me and merely commented that the
parts he had not liked, he had crossed out. I looked at the paper and discovered he had crossed
out almost the whole thing. I later concluded he was rightthe paper really wasnt very good. He
had been kind in not just coming out and telling me that.
My rst-year project with Gordon Bower at Stanford was on negative transfer in part-whole
and whole-part free recall (Sternberg & Bower 1974). The project was based on some of my
(unpublished) undergraduate research with Endel Tulving on the same topic. The project was
quite successful in one sense and not very successful in another. The success was that, after the
article based upon the research was published, research in the area pretty much stopped. The bad
news, I later learned, is that it is actually bad to close down an areathere is nothing to do in it
anymore!
My main interest was not really in memory but rather in intelligence. I was still trying to gure
out why I had done poorly on IQ tests. At the end of my rst year, I met Tulving at the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. A group of his colleagues at the Center joined us. They
asked me what I was doing in my research. I told them about my successful rst-year project but also
told them that I was not sure what I was going to do next. I still remember their pitying looks. They
seemed to be thinking, The poor guyhe had one idea and amed out immediately thereafter.
I thought I wanted to do something with intelligence, and with analogies in particular. Thus,
when Barrons Educational Series, Inc. asked me to write a book on analogies, I accepted. I have
written or edited over 100 books, but regrettably, my most successful book has been that one I
wrote in graduate school, How to Prepare for the Miller Analogies Test (Sternberg 1974). I wrote it
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partly for the money, obviously. As a graduate student, I needed that money. But I was also hoping
it would give me ideas about how to study analogies.
I did end up studying analogies and intelligence for my dissertation, but the ideas did not
come from writing that book. Rather, they came from looking at materials that my wife (at the
time) was using in her work as an elementary school mathematics specialist. The materials were
called People Pieces, and they were tiles with schematic pictures of people that varied in four
dimensionsheight (tall or short), weight (fat or thin), color (blue or red), and sex (male or female).
I realized I could systematically manipulate these features and create analogies out of them. In
this way, I could scientically study the psychological bases of reaction times in solving analogies
based on the pieces.
The dissertation took the better part of my second and third years at Stanford, which were
my last years there. I went through the whole two years having no idea how the data would come
out. Finally, when the data all were collected, I analyzed the data and found that none of the
mathematical models I had proposed accounted particularly well for the data. I was chagrined.
But then I studied the residuals and found that with just one slight modication of the models, the
prediction of response times was excellent. This experience also taught me a valuable lesson: It aint
over til its over! If the data dont look right at rst, make sure that you understand and analyze the
data in the best possible way before concluding there is little or nothing there. Had I not carefully
looked at residuals of the data from the model, I would have thought the project had failed.

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THE FACULTY YEARS AT YALE

My dissertation came out successfully, and after three years I left Stanford to return to Yale as
an assistant professor. I submitted a book manuscript based on my long dissertation (it was over
750 pages long) to Larry Erlbaum, who had just recently started Lawrence Erlbaum, Inc. He sent
the book out for review and got two reviews. One was fairly short and fairly positive. The other was
17 single-spaced pages long and devastating. I gured that was the end of that. The person who
wrote it was very famous in the eld and obviously did not like my take on it. To my amazement,
Erlbaum told me that, despite the review, he still fully intended to publish the book. He told me
to make the revisions I thought were warranted and to ignore the rest. I did, and he published the
book (Sternberg 1977), which later became a citation classic. I learned that just because work is
negatively reviewed, it is not necessarily bad.
One thing I learned early in my career is the value of collaboration. Most of my written work has
been collaborativewith graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty members, and others.
I could have accomplished relatively little in my career without collaborators. I have had many
notably successful collaborations, such as with Janet Davidson, Elena Grigorenko, Linda Jarvin,
James Kaufman, Todd Lubart, David Preiss, Karin Sternberg, Richard Wagner, Wendy Williams,
and Li-fang Zhang, among others. The list of collaborators goes on, and I would have had little
success in writing without these joint efforts.
One of the weirder experiences I had during my assistant professor years was with the Journal
of Experimental Psychology: General. I submitted an article on our work on response-time and errorrate models of linear syllogistic reasoning (i.e., solution of problems such as John is taller than
James; James is taller than Joseph; who is shortest?) I got back two reviews, which were generally
quite favorable. However, one review suggested I lengthen the paper, whereas the other review
suggested I shorten the paper. The editor, a famous experimental psychologist, wrote back that he
had to reject the paper because one reviewer suggested I lengthen it, the other suggested I shorten
it, and I obviously could not do both. Duh! He seemed unable to make the decision for himself. I
wrote a protest and he eventually accepted the paper.
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I have thought a great deal about the peer-review process in editorial as well as grant decisions.
I once received a review of an article I wrote in which the referee suggested I nd some other
line of work more consistent with my limited level of mental abilities. My receiving this review
reected two extraordinary events: the rst was that the referee would have written such a savage
remark, and the second was that the journal editor would send the review to me.
I shrugged the review off, even nding it mildly amusing. As someone who then had been
writing articles for 25 years, I was used to nasty ad hominem remarks. This one was worse than
most, but probably not the absolute worst I had seen to that point (or subsequently). And I even
have seen published critiques of my and others work where the primary goal of the critic seemed
to be character assassination rather than scientic exchange. It is important, in academia, never to
take things personally.
When I was an assistant professor, I received excellent advice from my mentors, advice that,
in combination with my own, I have attempted to pass on to the next generation. One of the best
pieces of advice I received was from Wendell Garner, my mentor when I was a junior faculty
member. He told me that, as psychologists, we ultimately are judged by the positive contributions
we make. Indeed, if one thinks of great psychologists in any eld of endeavor, they are known
primarily not for their critiques but rather for their new and useful ideas. As a eld, we need to
set better examples for our colleagues and for the next generation by exerting positive rather than
negative leadership and, most importantly, by being civil to those with whom we interact.
Very early in my career, I received a phone call inviting me to collaborate with the Ministry for
the Development of Intelligence in Venezuela on a project for developing a program to enhance
the intelligence of Venezuelan college students. The grant we received enabled us to spend several
years developing a program that was to be administered to the college students (Sternberg 1986a).
But then the party in power lost the next election, and the subsequent administration mocked
and cut off the funding for these projects. The program was later published as a book (Intelligence
Applied; Sternberg 2006), now in a new edition (and published as Applied Intelligence; Sternberg
et al. 2008). I learned how easy it is to have ones funding cut off when the government, or a
corporation, nds further funding of the work to be inconvenient.
Although most of my work has been scientic, I also have done some textbooks, some of which
died after a few editions (e.g., Sternberg 1995), and some of which have persevered through many
editions (e.g., Sternberg & Sternberg 2012). Writing textbooks is a different art from writing
scientic articles. It is extremely hard. You need to write in a way that will engage people much
younger and less knowledgeable than you. Moreover, there is tremendous pressure to dumb down
the materialmore so in recent years than in years further past. But if you succeed in getting a
contract and producing the book, you may nd it greatly rewarding to know that students have
learned psychology from your own textbook. In my own case, textbooks were motivated partly by
my desire to produce a better textbook than what was out there, partly by my excitement about
writing for a student audience, and partly by my need for money to pay for my kids college. My
better idea was to teach psychology using principles of my theory of successful intelligence.
When an article (or book manuscript) is rejected, one never knows for sure whether it is because
it is really bador because it is really good. I usually would take reviews seriously, ignoring personal
comments, and then resubmit. Sometimes, the second and then the third journal would reject the
work. I would usually conclude after three go-arounds that either my ideas were not so good or
that I had not succeeded in writing about them in a way that persuaded other people that they were
good, however good or bad they might be. Sometimes I would put the article in the proverbial
le drawer until I could gure out a way to present the ideas more effectively.
Once, I went through this process and got three rejections of an article. I put it away and then
forgot about it. Ten years later, I was cleaning out some le drawers and found the article. I reread
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it and felt, as I had ten years before, that it was a good article. I resubmitted it to a strong journal,
making no changes at all. Within a few months, I got a response. The reviews were very positive
but pointed out that my citations were all at least ten years old. I updated the references, and the
article was accepted (Sternberg 1997a).
A lot of my ideas about creativity were crystallized in our investment theory of creativity
(Sternberg & Lubart 1995). It was Endel Tulving who served as a role model for the theory. We
argued that creative people are creative by virtue of an attitude toward lifethey are people who
defy the crowd. People often are afraid to defy the crowd, however, because of external pressures
to conform, which then lead them to pressure themselves to conform.
Things did not always go so well. Another article that I submitted was rejected by a couple of
journals, and the ideas were ridiculed as nave and ill conceived. I gave up on the article. A few
years later, the article was publishedby someone else. That is, someone else did essentially the
same research, got it published, and also got many citations to the work. In that case, I think I was
ahead of the times, and when one is ahead of the times, ideas are often not appreciated.
I should add that not everything that goes into the le drawer is worth publishingever.
During my rst year, I did some research in perception, which I thought showed that Wendell
Garners theory of perception was incorrect. I was in an awkward position, because he was a senior
faculty member in my own department and a mentor to me. I showed him the paper, and he did
not think much of it. I submitted it, and it was rejected, but I planned to resubmit it. Then I was
invited to give a colloquium at Bell Labs. I presented the work. In the audience was my namesake,
Saul Sternberg, to whom I am not related, to my knowledge, in any way. He asked a question
about the work, and I immediately realized that he had pointed out a fatal aw in the work: The
results suffered from a statistical artifact, which rendered them worthless. It was one of the most
embarrassing experiences in my professional career and one from which I learned that sometimes
ones own condence in ones own work can be severely misplaced.
In my third year I got a phone call from a professor I knew at another institution. He asked me
what his institution would have to do to recruit me to come to that institution. I told him that at Yale
very few assistant professors got tenureat the time it was about 10%and so the big issue for me
was tenure. He told me that would be no problem. We agreed to be in touch. Still a nave 28-yearold, I told the chair of my department, at the time Bill Kessen, that I had received a tenure offer from
that institution. Yale formed a committee to consider me for tenure. Things went badly downhill
from there. I did not hear back from the other institution for a long time. In the meantime, a full
professor at Yale left Yale to go to that other institution. I should have realized that his departure did
not bode well for me. I eventually called another professor I knew at that institution, who said that,
well, I did not have a tenure offer, but more like a 90% tenure offer. He said they would invite me to
give a talk. I told Kessen that what I had thought was a tenure offer had turned out to be only a 90%
offer. He asked me to keep him informed. Eventually the other department did invite me to give a
talk, and almost no one came. I went through the visit without even meeting the head of the department, certainly a bad sign. I never heard back from them. I eventually called the department head,
who told me that I was not going to receive a tenure offer from them. I was mortied. I went back
to Kessen and told him that the 90% offer was now a 0% offer. He asked me to write a letter asking
that my name be withdrawn from consideration for tenure. I felt that writing such a letter would be
incredibly embarrassing. I delayed and thought and thought about how I could turn things around.
I even went to interview at one other place but didnt much like it. One day, while I was jogging, I
had an insight. There was absolutely nothing I could do to turn the situation around. I had to write
the letter. I did. I can remember few times in my life when I have been so embarrassed. I expected
my colleagues at Yale to treat me poorly after that, but in fact they were very kind. I was grateful and
stayed. I learned that in academia, if you dont have anything in writing, you dont have anything!

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The next year, they did a search for the tenure slot vacated by the colleague who had left to go
to the institution that never came through for me. I was now 29 years old. Yale had a xed-slot
tenure system. There was no actual tenure track. One could be tenured only if someone else
resigned or retired. Anyway, Yale eventually offered the slot to Bill Estes, who was 60. He went
to Harvard. So the slot was open again the following year. I became a candidate once again.
Several assistant professors were being considered at the same time for tenure at Yale. Once
I was in the ofce of one of them and noticed his calendar out on his desk. He had dinner
engagements with pretty much all the full professors in the department. I found myself thinking
that I had really blown it. I didnt know that that was part of the deal in getting tenure. That
colleague was acting kind of strangely toward me. One day I went to see him and said that I hoped
we could remain friends even though we both were being considered for the same slot. He said
we couldnt. We didnt talk a whole lot after that. I got the slot. And I learned that life is too short
to take things personally. Its not worth getting into a personal tiff over everyone with whom you
compete or have differences because that will eventually be almost everyone you know. I have had
some colleagues who went after me in a serious way. Taking things personally is a sure way to be
left with no friends at all and to wreck ones health as well.
Wendell Garner, the next chair of the department, taught me many lessons during my years
at Yale, one of the most important of which was the need to stand up for what one believes in.
During my fth year at Yale, when I was being considered again for the senior position, scuttlebutt
reached my ears suggesting that some of the referees who had been consulted on my work were not
so positive about it because it was on intelligence, and they believed that intelligence was a rather
dumpy area of study within psychology. According to the gossip I heard, they were suggesting that
Yale instead give the position to someone writing about a more prestigious eld, perhaps thinking,
reasoning, or problem solving. I spoke to Garner and asked him what I should do. I somewhat
bitterly pointed out that I could have done exactly the same work and called it something else
thinking, reasoning, or problem solvingand then perhaps I would not be in the pickle I was in.
He stared me in the eye and said that I was right in my concern: My work in the eld of intelligence
might indeed cost me my job. But if it did, I would nd another job. He pointed out that, when I
had come to Yale, my goal had been to make a meaningful difference to the eld of intelligence.
That I had done. That was my missionmy reason for being in psychologyand so that was what
I had to do. It was a good lesson to learn early in my career. Garner also repeated to me some
advice he had once gotten from Michael Posner, who had told him that the hardest articles to get
published are ones worst ones, because they are bad, but also ones best and most creative ones,
because they threaten the existing order.
Not long thereafter, I decided to start studying love (see, e.g., Sternberg 1986b). I was in a
failing relationship, so it was time again to study something I was failing at. I published a few
articles, thinking that people would be impressed with my versatility. Instead, I started getting
comments such as that perhaps I had run out of ideas about intelligence, or maybe I was getting
soft in the head, or perhaps I wanted to be a TV star like Dr. Ruth (or, years later, Dr. Phil), or
maybe my love life had gone sour (which it had). I got quite a bit of ack. I learned that people
tend to put you in a box. If you start writing about something new, it makes them uncomfortable.
Yet to continue to grow as a scholar, that is precisely what you need to do.
For most of my career, if someone had told me that they thought I would become a dean, I
would have suggested he or she get his or her head examined. But after 30 years at Yale, I left. It
was not an easy decision. But a number of factors combined to lead me to make the change at a
time when many other scholars are counting the years to retirement.
First, I had been writing for 30 years and found myself feeling increasingly frustrated. I had
never had the success with trade (popular) books that some of my colleagues had, and perhaps as
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a result, I felt that my writing was producing little change in the world. I had set out to reform
admissions, instruction, and assessment, none of which had happened or even looked to be close
on the horizon. Indeed, in those days of George W. Bush as president and the No Child Left
Behind Act in the schools, I felt I was further away from realizing change than I ever had been
before. I looked forward at perhaps 15 more years doing science and writing articles, and what I
saw depressed me. I felt that the trajectory I was on was not going to lead to any signicant change
in society. Some writers succeed in changing the worldI clearly hadnt.
Second, a really important grant proposal I had written was turned down. My collaborators and
I had done an assessment project that had yielded really great results. It was called the Rainbow
Project (Sternberg & Rainbow Proj. Collab. 2006). But the commercial outt that funded us, upon
seeing the results, cut off our funding. There are various interpretations as to why they might have
done so. One is that we threatened them commercially. Another is that the work was not very
good, despite the enormous attention it received and despite its having been published as the lead
article in the leading journal in the eld. A third was the explanation the commercial outt gave
usthat the work could never be upscaled and made to work with large numbers of participants.
I had gone into psychology to make a difference to the world, and now I felt the testing company
wanted to make sure I didnt make that difference. I wanted to prove that upscaling was possible
and that my ideas about admissions could make the difference to the world I hoped for.
Third, I had not much liked what I had seen in observing some of my senior colleagues during
my years at Yale. My feeling about an academic career was that one spends the rst 20 or 30 years
trying to claw to the top or wherever one can get, and then after that, one tries desperately to
hang on to whatever position one has obtained, only practically inevitably to feel one letting go,
nger by nger, of the precipice on which one is hanging. I thought that by becoming a dean and
remaining at the same time a professor, I might be able to start on a new trajectory, metaphorically
climbing a new mountain.
Finally, in 2003 I served as president of the APA. I had been reluctant to run because I never
saw myself as much of a big-time leader or even candidate for a basically political position. But
I thought I had a missionto unify psychology (Sternberg 2004b)and the presidency of APA
seemed to be the way to achieve that mission. When I ran, I initially was able to endure doing
something I thought I stank atrunning a campaignby imagining I was only playacting being a
candidate. Eventually I became the candidate whose role I playacted and forgot I was playacting.
My experience as APA president convinced me I could do administration and, to my surprise, I
really liked it.
One would like to say that, as the years go on, ones career gets easier. I think this is partially
right. In my experience, the trajectory is curvilinear, as I imply above. At rst, one is on a rising
trajectory. But as the eld moves on, it is difcult to change oneself as quickly as the eld changes.
I had noticed this earlier in my careersome people got stuck and seemed not to be able to change
with the world. Earlier on, I had noticed this in others. As the years went by, I noticed it in myself.
I had early on developed a three-part theory of intelligence, and then a three-part theory of
love, and then a three-part theory of creativity. At that point, I had three theories with three parts.
People began to ask me why three of my theories had three parts. I thought about the question
deeply, not to mention profoundly, and answered that I could think of three reasons my theories
had three parts. I was stuck. The theory of leadership that I have developed is called WICS,
which stands for wisdom, intelligence, and creativity, synthesized. I have graduated to a four-part
theory!sort of.
So I think things get a little easier and then get a lot harder later in a career. It is a constant
challenge to renew oneself and not allow oneself to get stale. The rejections dont stop in ones
later yearsat least, they have not for me. I have probably had more articles rejected than anyone

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I know, although almost all of them were eventually published. What has changed is the thickness
of my skin: I have grown used to rejections and take them much more lightly than I did when I
was younger.

THE DEANSHIP YEARS AT TUFTS

Becoming a dean is undoubtedly not the right thing for everyone, but it was the right thing for
me. My research operation has been smaller, and I have been publishing less, but it is still more
than most academics publish. Moreover, the nature of my writing has changed to some extent.
I have become much more concerned with writing about issues as they pertain to colleges and
universities, in general. It has been a chance for me to apply the concepts about which I wrote
before to a larger academic context (e.g., Sternberg 2010a).
I encountered one major challenge as a dean that I had not encountered before. When I would
write anything pertaining to the university, I had to be super careful about what I said. As a
professor, you can tell any story you want about what you do, so long as it is veridical. In contrast,
administrators cant all be telling different stories about their university. They need a more or less
common story. At Tufts, the president wanted very much to control the message. I chafed at this,
but it was his prerogative to control that message.
At Tufts, we instituted the Kaleidoscope Project (Sternberg 2010b), which was an upscaling
of the Rainbow Project. We measured creative, analytical, practical, and wisdom-based skills in
our applicants who chose to participate, roughly one-third of them. The results were excellent:
We improved prediction of academic and extracurricular performance over SAT and high school
grade point average. And I showed that it was indeed possible to upscale the Rainbow Project we
did at Yale.
THE PROVOSTSHIP YEARS AT OKLAHOMA STATE

Tufts was not quite the right place for me. In the end of my term at Yale, I had begun to feel that
the place was a bit elitist as well as elite, and I had gone to Tufts hoping that it would be different.
It was different, but not really in that way. There is nothing wrong with being elitist, I suppose,
but it was not a good t to a guy who was a rst-generation high school graduate whose research
had always been about the breadth and modiability of abilities and about access. It almost felt as
though the underpinnings of the universities I had been at were at odds with my core beliefs in
my research and my life.
Oklahoma State is a land-grant university that emphasizes access, service to the state and the
nation, and the development of ethical leaders who make a positive, meaningful, and enduring
difference to the world. I had a wonderful time during my three years as a provost at Oklahoma
State. I also published like a madman, but in different outlets from those to which I had been
accustomed. Now I was publishing mostly in higher-ed periodicals, and mostly about my thoughts
on education [e.g., Sternberg (2010b) on the land-grant mission; Sternberg (2012b) on how our
meritocracy has become fractured through the way we admit students].
At Oklahoma State, we instituted an admissions project, Panorama, that was an expansion of
the project on admissions, Kaleidoscope, we had done at Tufts. We once again found it to be
highly successful in selecting students for admission who were not only analytically smart but also
creatively and practically smart and wise.
The greatest lesson I learned at Oklahoma State was how differently diverse constituencies see
the role a university should play in society. Professors often tend to take their views as denitive, but
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I was working with the legislature, major donors, alumni, students, businesses, and others beside
professors, and all had vastly different conceptions of what we as a university ought to be doing.
THE PRESIDENCY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING

I reached age 62 and realized that if I ever were to be a university president, my time was running
out. And I really wanted to apply my ideas about psychology applied to education in an entire
university setting. So I became a candidate in a few searches, but the place to which my wife
and I really wanted to go, without question, was the University of Wyoming. I loved its being a
land-grant institution committed to excellence, and Karin loved that it is situated in the Rocky
Mountains. Both of us thought Laramie, Wyoming, would be a great place to raise what now were
two-year-old triplets. Ive just arrived and so far our expectations are more than met. We love
it here! And it is indeed a chance to apply my ideas about education. What I probably had not
realized, however, is how intensely political the context is in which a public university president
operates. Almost as much so as the presidency of APA.
If there is one thing I have learned in administration, it is never to cover up a universitys
screwups, or ones personal ones either. In the course of ones career, one will make mistakes,
some of them serious. The temptation is to cover them up. The problem is that then one has
two issues to deal withthe initial screwup and then the cover-up. And my experience is that the
career killer is almost never the initial mistakeits the cover-up.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I believe the issue of t is important not just for administrators but also for all scholars (Sternberg
2004a). Yale was a great t for me in the 30 years I was there. Had I been in another institution, I
might not equally have ourished. But I also saw scholars, especially junior faculty, ground down
by a system that was highly competitive, that dismissed most of its junior faculty, and that required
very high visibility and impact nationally and internationally. It was a great t for me for 30 years,
but then it wasnt. It was time to move on. It is hugely important that one nd a job where the
kind of science one does and the kinds of writing one does are valued. I needed to be in a place
that shared my view that the purpose of higher education is to produce ethical leaders who will
make the world a better place (Sternberg 2013).
One can help nd t by nding great mentors. In this regard, I have been very lucky. Endel
Tulving at Yale taught me the importance of defying the crowdof being willing to take contrarian positions, even though writing about them would inspire conict and sometimes animosity.
Gordon Bower at Stanford taught me the importance of having an audience and of writing appropriately for different audiences. Wendell Garner taught me the value of integrity in all I did.
As a dean, Jamshed Bharucha, our provost, taught me the importance of seeing things from perspectives that seem strange and often just plain wrong. As a provost, Burns Hargis, our president,
taught me how to operate an academic institution in a political context. Ones writing will be far
more insightful and just plain wise if one can nd mentors who broaden and deepen ones thinking
about the issues on which one writes.
One nal warning: When I was young, I wanted to be like my mentorsEndel Tulving, Gordon
Bower, and Wendell Garner. All were internationally famous experimental psychologists, all were
elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, and all won practically every award
there was to win. As the years went by, I felt like I was falling further and further behind on their
path. I became more and more despondent. Eventually, though, I realized that I had not exactly
fallen behind on their path; rather, I had taken a different path. We are successfully intelligent to
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the extent we optimize becoming the person we can be. None of us can be someone else. Find your
own dreams and realize them; dont settle for someone elses, no matter how appealing they may be.
When I was younger, I admired the people who wrote until they dropped. I remembered
B. F. Skinner giving a talk at APA, writing an article based on it, and then dropping dead. I
thought this was just the greatest thing. Now I see things differently. I wonder if they could not
nd anything else in their later years that made life worth living. I believe I have, and when the
time comes, I will look forward to other challenges and opportunities to renew myself. I hope
to write for a long time, but not until I drop dead. Ive got other things I hope to do, and they
await me down the line. And I have learned that if you want to be immortal, dont count on your
work to achieve immortality (Sternberg 2012a). For the most part, psychologists work, and the
psychologists themselves, start to be forgotten no later than the day they announce they are going
to retire. For me, my immortality is through my beloved wife and ve children, and their children,
and the children the generation thereafter. Thats good enough for memore than good enough!
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any afliations, memberships, funding, or nancial holdings that might
be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
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Contents
Annual Review of
Psychology
Prefatory
Volume 65, 2014
I Study What I Stink At: Lessons Learned from a Career in Psychology

Robert J. Sternberg p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 1
Stress and Neuroendocrinology

Oxytocin Pathways and the Evolution of Human Behavior

C. Sue Carter p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p17
Genetics of Behavior
Gene-Environment Interaction
Stephen B. Manuck and Jeanne M. McCaffery p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p41
Cognitive Neuroscience
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight
John Kounios and Mark Beeman p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p71
Color Perception
Color Psychology: Effects of Perceiving Color on Psychological
Functioning in Humans
Andrew J. Elliot and Markus A. Maier p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p95
Infancy
Human Infancy. . . and the Rest of the Lifespan
Marc H. Bornstein p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 121
Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood
Bullying in Schools: The Power of Bullies and the Plight of Victims
Jaana Juvonen and Sandra Graham p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 159
Is Adolescence a Sensitive Period for Sociocultural Processing?
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Kathryn L. Mills p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 187
Adulthood and Aging
Psychological Research on Retirement
Mo Wang and Junqi Shi p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 209
Development in the Family
Adoption: Biological and Social Processes Linked to Adaptation
Harold D. Grotevant and Jennifer M. McDermott p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 235
vi
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Individual Treatment
Combination Psychotherapy and Antidepressant Medication Treatment
for Depression: For Whom, When, and How
W. Edward Craighead and Boadie W. Dunlop p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 267
Adult Clinical Neuropsychology
Sport and Nonsport Etiologies of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury:
Similarities and Differences
Amanda R. Rabinowitz, Xiaoqi Li, and Harvey S. Levin p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 301

Self and Identity

The Psychology of Change: Self-Afrmation and Social
Psychological Intervention
Geoffrey L. Cohen and David K. Sherman p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 333
Gender
Gender Similarities and Differences
Janet Shibley Hyde p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 373
Altruism and Aggression
Dehumanization and Infrahumanization
Nick Haslam and Steve Loughnan p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 399
The Sociocultural Appraisals, Values, and Emotions (SAVE) Framework
of Prosociality: Core Processes from Gene to Meme
Dacher Keltner, Aleksandr Kogan, Paul K. Piff, and Sarina R. Saturn p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 425
Small Groups
Deviance and Dissent in Groups
Jolanda Jetten and Matthew J. Hornsey p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 461
Social Neuroscience
Cultural Neuroscience: Biology of the Mind in Cultural Contexts
Heejung S. Kim and Joni Y. Sasaki p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 487
Genes and Personality
A Phenotypic Null Hypothesis for the Genetics of Personality
Eric Turkheimer, Erik Pettersson, and Erin E. Horn p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 515
Environmental Psychology
Environmental Psychology Matters
Robert Gifford p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 541
Contents
vii
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Community Psychology
Socioecological Psychology
Shigehiro Oishi p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 581
Subcultures Within Countries
Social Class Culture Cycles: How Three Gateway Contexts Shape Selves
and Fuel Inequality
Nicole M. Stephens Hazel Rose Markus, and L. Taylor Phillips p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 611
Organizational Climate/Culture

(Un)Ethical Behavior in Organizations

Linda Klebe Trevino,
Niki A. den Nieuwenboer, and Jennifer J. Kish-Gephart p p p p p p p 635
Job/Work Design
Beyond Motivation: Job and Work Design for Development, Health,
Ambidexterity, and More
Sharon K. Parker p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 661
Selection and Placement
A Century of Selection
Ann Marie Ryan and Robert E. Ployhart p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 693
Personality and Coping Styles
Personality, Well-Being, and Health
Howard S. Friedman and Margaret L. Kern p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 719
Timely Topics
Properties of the Internal Clock: First- and Second-Order Principles of
Subjective Time
Melissa J. Allman, Sundeep Teki, Timothy D. Grifths, and Warren H. Meck p p p p p p p p 743
Indexes
Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 5565 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 773
Cumulative Index of Article Titles, Volumes 5565 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 778
Errata
An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Psychology articles may be found at
http://psych.AnnualReviews.org/errata.shtml
viii
Contents
ANNUAL REVIEWS
Connect With Our Experts
New From Annual Reviews:
Annual Review of Vision Science
Volume 1 September 2015 http://vision.annualreviews.org

Co-Editors: J. Anthony Movshon, New York University and Brian A. Wandell, Stanford University
The Annual Review of Vision Science reviews progress in the visual sciences, a cross-cutting set of disciplines that intersect
psychology, neuroscience, computer science, cell biology and genetics, and clinical medicine. The journal covers a broad
range of topics and techniques, including optics, retina, central visual processing, visual perception, eye movements, visual
development, vision models, computer vision, and the mechanisms of visual disease, dysfunction, and sight restoration. The
study of vision is central to progress in many areas of science, and this new journal will explore and expose the connections that
link it to biology, behavior, computation, engineering, and medicine.
Complimentary online access to Volume 1 will be available until September 2016.

TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR VOLUME 1:
3D Displays, Martin S. Banks, Davind M. Hoffman,

Joohwan Kim, Gordon Wetzstein
Adaptive Optics Ophthalmoscopy, Austin Roorda,
Jacque L. Duncan
Angiogenesis in Eye Disease, Yoshihiko Usui,
Peter D. Westenskow, Salome Murinello, Michael I. Dorrell,
Leah Scheppke, Felicitas Bucher, Susumu Sakimoto,
Liliana P Paris, Edith Aguilar, Martin Friedlander
Color Vision and the Cone Mosaic, David H. Brainard
Control and Functions of Fixational Eye Movements,
Michele Rucci, Martina Poletti
Development of 3D Perception in Human Infants,
Anthony M. Norcia, Holly E. Gerhard
fMRI Decoding and Reconstruction in Vision,
Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
Functional Circuitry of the Retina, Jonathan B. Demb,
Joshua H. Singer
Image Formation in the Living Human Eye, Pablo Artal
Imaging Glaucoma, Donald C. Hood
Mitochondria and Optic Neuropathy, Janey L. Wiggs
Neuronal Mechanisms of Visual Attention, John Maunsell
Optogenetic Approaches to Restoring Vision, Zhuo-Hua Pan,
Qi Lu, Alexander M. Dizhoor, Gary W. Abrams
Organization of the Central Visual Pathways Following

Field Defects Arising from Congenital, Inherited, and
Acquired Eye Disease, Antony B. Morland
Retinal Ganglion Cell and Subcortical Contributions to Visual
Feature-Selectivity, Onkar S. Dhande, Benjamin K. Stafford,
Jung-Hwan A. Lim, Andrew D. Huberman
Ribbon Synapses and Visual Processing in the Retina,
Leon Lagnado, Frank Schmitz
The Determination of Rod and Cone Photoreceptor Fate,
Constance L. Cepko
The Role of Face-Selective Areas in Face Perception:
An Updated Neural Framework, Brad Duchaine, Galit Yovel
Visual Adaptation, Michael A. Webster
Visual Functions of the Thalamus, W. Martin Usrey,
Henry J. Alitto
Visual Guidance of Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements,
Stephen Lisberger
Visual Memory, George A. Alvarez
Visuomotor Functions in the Frontal Lobe, Jeffrey D. Schall
What Does Genetics Tell Us About AMD? Felix Grassmann,
Thomas Ach, Caroline Brandl, Iris Heid, Bernhard H.F. Weber
Zebrafish Models of Retinal Disease, Brian A. Link,
Ross F. Collery
Access all Annual Reviews journals via your institution at www.annualreviews.org.
ANNUAL REVIEWS | Connect With Our Experts

Tel: 800.523.8635 (us/can) | Tel: 650.493.4400 | Fax: 650.424.0910 | Email: service@annualreviews.org

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Volume 1 September 2015 http://vision.annualreviews.org

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