The Awards Committee of Division 38 is pleased to recognize the accomplishments of Professor Howard Tennen with this year’s Distinguished Scientist Award. Professor Tennen is best known for his research on coping with chronic illness, daily process analysis and the role of attributions in emotional and behavioral disorders. Howard Tennen received his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1976 where Bonnie Strickland was his mentor. After completing his internship at UCLA, he moved to SUNY at Albany where he was on the faculty for three years. Then he was lured to the University of Connecticut Medical Center where he has been ever since. Currently he is Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology and Community Medicine and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Associate Director of the NIAAA Alcohol Research Center at UCONN.
A simple numerical, bean-counting summary of his research career is impressive. He has published 260 peer-review articles, chapters and/or books and been cited 5,363 times to date. He is an elected fellow of APA Divisions 1, 12 and 38 and of the Society of Behavioral Medicine, the Association for Psychological Science and the Society of Personality Assessment. Since 1991, Howard Tennen has served as Editor of the Journal of Personality. Those who have been around long enough, recall that JP was sleepy for a time, but since Steve West and then Howard Tennen’s extended tenure as editor, the journal has been vibrant outlet and a key reason for the revival of personality and individual differences research.
Albeit impressive, bean-counting does not, however, do Howard Tennen’s scientific career justice. Howard Tennen’s contributions have been creative, integrative, bold and brave. His recent work on the daily stress and coping process may be the best known. With a mix of idiographic and nomothetic methods, he and his colleagues used diaries, ecological momentary assessment and interactive phone technologies to map the trajectory of coping in alcoholics and other chronic illness populations. He has documented how within-person and across-person approaches can produce very different results, for example, about the relationship between the daily use of smoking and drinking. Also, he found that retrospective reports of coping bear little relation to real-time accounts and trait measures of coping do not predict actual coping attempts among chronically ill patients. However, dispositional optimism/pessimism may be important for understanding when people with arthritis can sustain progress toward their goals even when they experience barriers to health. A notable aspect of this work is the appeal it has had to proponents of both nomothetic and idiographic perspectives. Such is the integrative perspective provided by Howard Tennen.
In addition, Tennen’s compelling analysis and empirical demonstration of the use of benefit-finding as a coping strategy used by medical patients is broadly recognized in the field. He also was the first to empirically demonstrate how medical patients prefer control over minor daily stressors, but prefer to defer to their physicians for bigger problems. His research showed how patients with infertility, arthritis or chronic pain use social comparison to adjust to their physical condition.
Although he has studied many different kinds of medical populations, an overall theme of his work from the start has concerned perceptions of control and the role of attributions. In fact, he was among the very first to recognize the attributional underpinnings of the learned helplessness phenomena and its implications for research and practice. It is not surprising that his research has always had implications for depression. What is not always appreciated is that Howard Tennen was the first to make an in-depth analysis of the subtle role of attributions in depression even when this kind of research or analysis was not favored. Our contemporary understanding of depression and coping in medical populations has been appreciably advanced as a consequence of Howard Tennen’s insightful, courageous and pioneering efforts. And finally, in the interest of space, we have passed-over his important analysis of low self-esteem, search for mastery and personality disorders.
Over the course of his career (which is far from over), he has made a series of significant empirical and methodological advances to the science and practice of health psychology and offered conceptual clarity about problems that seemed murky before he approached them. For his contributions to the field, the Award Committee is pleased to award him with the Excellence in Health Psychology Research Award for 2009.