Society Awards
To encourage all SAS members to participate in the important process of recognizing the accomplishments of our members, the nomination form is very brief. We encourage self-nominations as well as nominations of others. The SAS Awards Committee especially encourages creative nominations (i.e., for individuals or teams) and will recognize multiple awardees, as fitting.
Award winners will each receive a physical award, complementary registration for the 2025 annual conference, and an opportunity to speak during the awards session at the 2025 annual conference.
Award Nominations Open
Click here to go to the submission form
The deadline for submissions is Dec 4, 2023
Best Dissertation in Affective Science Award
This honor recognizes outstanding dissertation research conducted by SAS members who received their PhD (or other terminal degree) during the calendar year immediately preceding that year’s SAS meeting.
2024 Winner
Anthony Vaccaro
University of Southern California
For his dissertation entitled “The neuroscience of ambivalent and ambiguous feelings” that was completed at University of Southern California under the mentoring of Professors Jonas Kaplan and Antonio Damasio.
Description: Mixed feelings, the co-occurrence of positivity and negativity, are a commonly reported experience. Despite this, research on mixed feelings in affective neuroscience remains limited due to methodological and conceptual issues. This dissertation used behavioral and neuroimaging methods to add clarity to these issues. First, neuroimaging and behavioral studies were used to show how overlap between feeling states varied neurally and behaviorally based on individual differences in traits and subjective clarity. Then, an fMRI study where subjects watched an animated short found that mixed feelings were temporally consistent and unique in some key affective regions, such as the ACC and vmPFC, while insular cortex had consistent and unique representations for only single valence states. This work aims to develop methods and theory to guide future neuroimaging work on mixed feelings.
Previous Winners
2023:
Daphne Y. Liu, PhD, Stony Brook University – “Interpersonal emotion regulation in current and remitted major depressive disorder: An experience sampling study” that was completed at Washington University in St. Louis under the mentoring of Professor Renee J. Thompson.
Sean Dae Houlihan, PhD, MIT, Dartmouth – “A computational framework for emotion understanding” that was completed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in September 2022 under the mentoring of Professors Rebecca Saxe and Josh Tenenbaum.
2022:
Hannah S. Savage, PhD, The Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University and Radboud University Medical Center. – “The neural basis of threat and safety reversal learning in healthy subjects and patients with social anxiety disorder” that was completed at the University of Melbourne under the mentoring of Professor Ben Harrison.
Meltem Yucel, PhD, Duke University – “’No fair!’: An investigation of children’s development of fairness” that was completed at University of Virginia in May 2021 under the mentoring of Professor Amrisha Vaish.
2021:
Jennifer K. MacCormack, Ph.D.,University of Pittsburgh – “Minding the body: The role of interoception in linking physiology and emotion during stress” – Completed at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the mentoring of Professor Kristen Lindquist.
Early-Career in Affective Science Award
This honor recognizes scientific contributions and early evidence of impact for SAS members who received their PhD (or other terminal degree) fewer than 10 years prior to that year’s SAS meeting.
2024 Winner
Brett Q. Ford
University of Toronto
Dr. Ford’s research examines emotion regulation, challenging common assumptions about which emotions are best to feel and which regulation strategies are best to employ. While it’s often assumed that feeling good is best, her work indicates that striving to feel happy can paradoxically promote worse well-being, that negative emotions can help us pursue our valued goals, and that effectively regulating our emotions can backfire by promoting complacency instead of action, especially at times when action is needed most. These insights inform our models of when, why, and for whom emotion regulation is beneficial or harmful in the real world. Dr. Ford’s work has been published in top academic journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Psychologist, Psychological Science, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and she served as co-editor for the recently published Handbook of Emotion Regulation (3rd edition).
Previous Winners
2023:
Jonathan Stange, PhD, University of Southern California
2022:
Daryl Cameron, PhD, Pennsylvania State University
Dylan Gee, PhD, Yale University
2021:
Katharine H. Greenaway, PhD, University of Melbourne
Mid-Career Trajectory in Affective Science Award
This honor celebrates the outstanding scientific impact of SAS members who received their PhD (or other terminal degree) more than 10 and fewer than 25 years prior to that year’s SAS meeting.
2024 Winner
Jamil Zaki
Stanford University
Previous Winners
2023:
Naomi I. Eisenberger, PhD, University of California, Los Angeles
2022:
Anthony D. Ong, PhD, Cornell University
2021:
Abigail A. Marsh, PhD, Georgetown University
Mentorship Award
The 2023 SAS Mentorship Award is bestowed to Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes. This honor recognizes her unparalleled devotion to the career development not only of her own mentees, but of countless others through contributions at the society level and beyond. Although only three letters of support were permitted, nearly twenty former trainees collaborated to support her nomination and all agreed that, through her mentorship and modeling, she has had a truly transformative influence on their development as psychological scientists and as individuals. In addition, many remarked – with absolute certainty – that they would not be here today, and myriad advances in affective science would not have been made if it wasn’t for Wendy’s mentorship.
2024 Winner
Iris Mauss
University of California, Berkeley
Iris Mauss received her PhD in psychology from Stanford University. She is Professor of Psychology and director of the Institute for Social and Personality Research (IPSR) at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines emotions and emotion regulation, with an emphasis on their links with psychological health, and has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. For her teaching and research, she has received multiple awards, including the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Ed Diener award.
Previous Winners
2023:
Wendy Berry Mendes, PhD, University of California, San Francisco
2022:
Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, Northeastern University
James J. Gross, PhD, Stanford University