SPSSI’s United Nations Committee Remembers Dr. Peter Walker

Andrew L. Stewart, Ph.D.,Associate Professor and Chair
Clark University

Aldo M. Barrita, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Michigan State University

Co-Chairs of SPSSI’s Program at APA 2026

SPSSI’s program at the 2026 APA Convention (August 6–8, Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC) offered five live sessions alongside three poster sessions featuring almost 70 posters from presenters at every career stage and from institutions on four continents. Across the three days, presenters shared scholarship on social issues and social justice, attentive to the current political climate and to challenges facing equity worldwide.

Thursday opened with “Using Psychological Science to Advance Economic Justice,” a symposium co-chaired by Heather Bullock (UC Santa Cruz) and Sam Abbott (SPSSI) drawing on Rethinking Inequality, a collaborative volume spanning seven APA divisions. Presentations moved from financial exploitation of older adults to housing justice for women with serious mental illness, the developmental needs of children experiencing homelessness, medical-legal partnerships as a health equity tool, the criminalization of poverty, and the mental health toll of minimum wage stagnation.

Friday brought our first poster session, with topics ranging across brief self-compassion interventions for stigmatized students, political activism among Black and Latinx young adults, fear of crime and perceptions of policing, person-centered profiles of immigration attitudes, and disability as a dimension of multicultural competence. That afternoon, “Evaluating the Psychological Impact of Community Violence Interventions” focused on Project Restore, a community-based violence prevention program in Brooklyn, New York, featuring presentations from program participants, researchers, and community partners. Across varied methods (e.g., synthetic control designs, participant interviews), the presentations demonstrated community, interpersonal, and individual-level impacts: a 19% reduction in gun violence, dramatically expanded social networks for participants, and improved relations between rival gangs.

Saturday began on APA’s Feature Stage with “Beyond Monolithic Blackness: Advancing Research with Black Immigrants,” where Nancy Adane (Tennessee State University), Vanessa Anyanso (University of Minnesota Twin Cities), and Koree Badio (University of Florida) examined socioecological stressors, intra-racial variation in the Strong Black Woman schema, and reconciliation among Liberian women peacemakers. Around midday, “Remembering Violence, Living its Consequences” turned to collective memory, with papers on commemoration structure and conflict attitudes, memory and wellbeing after Srebrenica, and Mapuche collective memories under postcolonial ideologies in Chile. Our second poster session followed with another 29 posters, several examining the political aftermath of the 2024 election, from worry and life satisfaction to conflict inside close relationships, alongside sociopolitical belonging among immigrant-origin youth, hypervigilance under identity-based threat, and system-justifying beliefs and White fragility, with contributions from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea.

The in-person program concluded with a critical conversation, “Strategies for Equity and Justice in Psychology Through Political Backlash,” in which Emma Sterrett-Hong (University of Louisville), Lauren Reba-Harrelson (Emory), and Michael McRae (StartCare) led collaborative strategy-building after 25 years of shifting approaches to equity. A late-evening virtual poster session added 11 more presentations, extending participation beyond Washington.

Overall, the program addressed economic justice, political violence, diverse experiences of Blackness, collective memory, and the practice of equity work in hostile political contexts. We thank the reviewers, presenters, and attendees who demonstrated that rigorous social science and social change are not competing commitments. Abstracts remain available at: https://www.spssi.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.ViewPage&pageId=517

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