Congratulations to Dr. Kenneth Vail for being elected to serve on the Board of Directors and being elected to serve as President of the new International Society for the Science of Existential Psychology (ISSEP).

Dr. Vail is one of three founders of the new society, along with Dr. Mark Landau (University of Kansas) and Dr. Jeff Greenberg (University of Arizona).

Dr. Vail has been elected to serve on the Board of Directors, with his first 3-year term extending until 2023. Members of the Board of Directors include 16 leading researchers in the field of existential psychology at top universities around the world, including universities in Australia, Germany, Austria, Israel, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the USA.

Dr. Vail has also been elected to serve as President of the ISSEP, with his first 3-year term extending until 2023. Other executive officers in the ISSEP include Dr. Mark Landau (University of Arizona), Dr. Lindsey Harvell-Bowman (James Madison University), and Dr. Becca Schlegel (Texas A&M University).

More info about the ISSEP will be posted soon.

The area of research on “existential psychology” has been growing for several decades, and examines critical issues of “being” and “becoming” in the study of human nature and social life. In recent decades, psychological science has shed new light on topics that were traditionally the preserve of philosophy, including freedom and authentic being, identity and the self, social connections and isolation, awareness of mortality, and the pursuit of meaning and purpose, among many others. Building on cross-disciplinary theoretical foundations and rigorous scientific methods and procedures, existential psychology research has productively enabled researchers to empirically test bold ideas about how and why people do what they do, think what they think, and feel what they feel.