Chuck Carver was a humble and unassuming person. He once described himself as a thoroughly unremarkable student during college and graduate school, and noted that as a grad student he had difficulty finding any topic to sustain his interest until his third year. It was at that point that he became fascinated with the topic of human motivation. His work since that time spans the areas of personality psychology, social psychology, health psychology, and more recently experimental psychopathology. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute of Mental Health. He was a person who had an inquisitive mind, an exceptional clarity of thought, and showed a tremendous amount of generosity to his collaborators.
Carver has been honored by the American Psychological Association (APA), Divisions 38 (Society of Health Psychology) and 8 (Society for Personality and Social Psychology), for his career contributions to the areas of Health, Social, and Personality Psychology. In 2018, he received APA’s award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions "for significant theoretical and empirical contributions to our understanding of goal-directed behavior and self-regulation.”
He served for 6 years as Editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology’s section on Personality Processes and Individual Differences and another 6 years as an Associate Editor of Psychological Review. He is author of 10 books and over 400 articles and chapters. His work has been cited over 120K times in scientific publications by other researchers.