Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology: Michael T. Treadway

The Early Career Awards, given for the first time in 1974, recognize the large number of excellent early career psychologists. Recipients of this award may not have held a doctoral degree for more than nine years. For purposes of this award, psychology has been divided into 10 areas: animal learning and behavior, comparative; developmental; health; cognition/human learning; psychopathology; behavioral and cognitive neuroscience; perception/motor performance; social; applied research; and individual differences. Five areas are considered each year, with areas rotated in two-year cycles. The areas considered in 2020 were animal learning and behavior, comparative; developmental; health; cognition/ human learning; and psychopathology. Each year, panels are selected for the areas under consideration, and these panels recommend nominees to the Committee on Scientific Awards. The 2020 recipients of the APA Scientific Contribution Awards were recognized by the 2019 Board of Scientific Affairs and selected by the 2019 Committee on Scientific Awards. For innovative research on decision-making about expending effort and its role in motivational deficits in psychopathology. Building on insights from animal paradigms, Michael T. Treadway has leveraged a combination of neuroimaging, pharmacological, and behavioral economic techniques to reveal the neural and computational underpinnings of individual differences in the sensitivity to effort requirements when pursuing potential rewards. This work, conducted in both healthy and clinical populations, has led to critical insights into the nature of alterations in reward and motivational processes in affective disorders and other forms of pathology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).