Fresno State psychology professor Robert Levine has started a one-year term as president of the Western Psychological Association.  It’s the first time anyone from Fresno State has been elected to the position and only the fourth time in the association’s 92-year history that a California State University professor has been president.

The Western Psychological Association is the oldest and largest regional psychology association in the United States. It covers all of the Western states plus western Canada, Mexico and other parts of Latin America.

Levine joined the Fresno State faculty in 1974 and also has served as department chair and associate dean of the College of Science and Mathematics. He was a Visiting Professor at Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niteroi, Brazil, at Sapporo Medical University in Japan and at Stockholm University in Sweden.

Levine has won several awards for his research, writing and teaching, including Western Psychological Association’s Outstanding Teacher Award in 2007. His research spans several areas, including differences between cities and countries in the pace of life, in helpfulness toward strangers and studies on the psychology of persuasion with an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and field-oriented emphasis.

He has been interviewed by national and international media and published four books, including “A Geography of Time,” which has sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide, and “The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold,” which has been translated into eight languages. He most recently co-edited “Journeys in Social Psychology,” a series of first-person accounts of the career journeys of prominent social psychologists.

Levine received his B.A. at UC Berkeley and doctorate from New York University.