Presents a short biography of one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. The 2012 winner is Bethany Ann Teachman for transformative, translational research integrating social cognition, life-span, and perceptual approaches to investigating clinical phenomena both in the lab and over the course of treatment in unique and externally valid ways. Using elegant and incisive methods, Teachman has identified cognitive processes that contribute to the development and maintenance of fear and anxiety disorders, especially thinking that occurs outside of conscious control. Her work shows the critical need to consider the role of automatic processing of emotional information in order to understand, for example, the seemingly irrational cognitions that accompany panic attacks in otherwise highly rational individuals.