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Steven Maier, distinguished professor in the University of Colorado Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, has been awarded the  Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award for 2009. This is one of the highest honors bestowed by the APA.

The award is for the body of his work, which is extensive. As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, Maier and fellow graduate student Martin Seligman discovered a phenomenon they called “learned helplessness.”

The pair observed that animals under some conditions of stress learned to behave as if they were helpless, even when they had the opportunity to escape the source of their stress. This discovery has implications for human psychology, as learned helplessness can play a role in human clinical depression.

Lewis O. Harvey Jr., chair of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, says Maier’s career kept growing as he sought to discover why learned helplessness occurs.

“His enormous intellectual curiosity led him to deeply explore the effects of stress on the nervous system and on the immune system,” Harvey observes. “Today, the kind of experiments he does are so different than those early beginnings; they are designed to understand why stress does what it does, because Steve measures behavior, the nervous system and the neurochemical and immune systems all at the same time.”

Harvey describes Maier as “always curious” and “never dogmatic,” with an “expansive and awesome intellect.”

Maier is in impressive company. Harvey describes the list of previous winners as “a veritable who’s who of modern psychology.”

“It is rare that any department has two awardees, but our department does,” Harvey adds. Walter Kintsch, CU professor emeritus of psychology, received it in 1992. Kintsch’s construction-integration model of how people comprehend written text was first considered “revolutionary” but now underlies most psychologists’ understanding of cognition.

Among the “who’s who” of psychology who previously won the APA’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award are Jean Piaget, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Piaget, a 1969 winner, discovered that human development progresses in stages or spurts and that certain developments are necessary before later ones can occur. Kahneman and Tversky, honored in 1982, researched common errors in human decision-making. Kahneman later won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Maier is a distinguished professor at CU and the director of the Center for Neuroscience. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 and has been at the University of Colorado since 1973.

He has received numerous awards, including the Norman Cousins and the Neal Miller Distinguished Lectureships, and is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.