UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Emerita Christina Maslach was awarded the Association for Psychological Science’s (APS) 2025 James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award in recognition of her lifetime achievement and groundbreaking work on occupational burnout that led to developing the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), a measurement of burnout that has been long considered the “gold standard” in the field.
A San Francisco native, whose father was the dean of Berkeley Engineering at UC Berkeley, Professor Maslach’s research is globally recognized and her “indispensable work cuts across health, personality, social, industrial/organizational, and clinical psychology,” according to the APS. Maslach was named in 2021 as one of the top 100 individuals transforming businesses by Business Insider
Professor Maslach spoke to Berkeley Social Sciences about growing up in Berkeley and how she transformed occupational burnout research from a “pop psychology” putdown to a critical measurement that’s used globally by workforces and researchers. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Tell us more about your background and how you ended up at UC Berkeley?
Christina Maslach: I grew up in the City of Berkeley, near UC Berkeley, because my father was a professor (and later the dean) in the College of Engineering. I graduated from Berkeley High School, but wanted to go somewhere else for college. So I went to Harvard — Radcliffe College, and majored in social relations, a multi-disciplinary major in the social sciences (sociology and the social science sides of anthropology and psychology). I was able to do some cross-cultural research in Japan for my undergraduate thesis, and that experience hooked me on becoming a researcher. I went to Stanford to get my Ph.D. in social psychology, and there I also got hooked on teaching.
Clearly, I was heading for a job as a university professor, and I interviewed at several places. But one of the available jobs was at UC Berkeley — which seemed a bit strange to me at first, because: 1) it felt like I would be “going back home;” and 2) the Psychology Department had been called out in a campus report for not having hired a female professor in the past 47 years.
To clarify, there were many departments that had never hired a woman, but of those departments that had previously done so, Berkeley Psychology had gone the longest since their last hire. But the department had indicated that they were interested in female candidates, so I applied — and eventually both Eleanor Rosch (now a professor emerita) and I were hired as assistant professors in 1971.
Tell us more about your UC Berkeley career before you retired?
Christina Maslach: As for my career at UC Berkeley before I retired in 2013, I did research on a number of different topics, especially emotion, and stumbled upon the occupational hazard of job burnout by accident (I’ll say more about the burnout research in the next question). I really loved teaching, and taught a variety of large lecture courses in psychology, as well as smaller seminars. In 1978, I was given the Distinguished Teaching Award, one of UC Berkeley’s highest honors, and I am very proud of that.
I also got involved in campus-wide service, first in the faculty Academic Senate, and later as an administrator. For the Senate, I chaired some committees, such as the one on the Status of Women, and then I served twice as the chair of the Academic Senate. I also served as the Faculty Assistant on the Status of Women for the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, who was Carol Christ (former UC Berkeley Chancellor) at the time. My job was to provide confidential advice to women faculty and to ensure that they were being treated fairly in their career advancement. Later, I was asked to take on a new position of vice-provost for Undergraduate Education and Educational Technology, and oversaw that teaching and learning portfolio for almost 10 years.
Tell us more about your research?
Christina Maslach: At Stanford, I had been trained as an experimental researcher in social psychology, so I needed a special laboratory to continue to do my research on emotion. But for various reasons, I did not get a laboratory right away, so I decided to do some exploratory field interviews on how people coped with emotionally challenging jobs (many of whom we now call “first responders”).
However, my initial interview studies on burnout were not viewed favorably by traditional academic journals, who viewed burnout as “pop psychology,” so my first article about burnout was published in 1976 in Human Behavior, a popular magazine at that time. That article got a huge response from people all over the country — in today’s terms, it “went viral” — so I knew I was dealing with something important. The widespread impact of that first “popular” article has also led me to always publish books designed for the general public (most recently, The Burnout Challenge), along with research articles in academic journals.
One of my departmental colleagues, the late Berkeley Psychology Professor Emeritus Harrison Gough, was the leading expert in psychological test assessments. He taught me how to do the necessary psychometric research to establish a valid measure of the burnout experience that I was hearing about in my interviews. And that measure, the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) has been considered the “gold standard” for assessment of burnout, and has been translated into many languages and used in research around the world. Once that measure was published, then the phenomenon of burnout became a concept of great interest, not only to other researchers, but to employee groups and organizations.
Using the MBI and other measures, I did research with large groups of employees in many large organizations, often collaborating with research colleagues in other countries. Interestingly, burnout was recognized more quickly by other nations, especially in Europe, than it was by the United States. My research on the MBI measure was finally published in a journal based in the UK, rather than the U.S. This meant that subsequent research on burnout grew in a global way, rather than being typecast as “just an American problem.” I think that helped lead the World Health Organization to officially recognize burnout in 2019 as “an organizational phenomenon with negative health consequences.”
Tell us more about this award?
Christina Maslach: The Association for Psychological Science (APS) gives annual Lifetime Achievement Awards to APS members who have made many years of outstanding contributions to the field of psychological science. One of these lifetime awards is the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award, which honors a lifetime of significant intellectual achievements in applied psychological research and their impact on a critical problem in society at large.
Why do you think you were selected for this award?
Christina Maslach: I think the statement issued by APS says it all:
“Christina Maslach pioneered research on the definition, predictors, and measurement of job burnout, an experience of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy caused by chronic job stressors. She also has focused on finding interventions for burnout. A professor of psychology (Emerita) and a core researcher at the Healthy Workplaces Center at the University of California, Berkeley, she created the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the most widely used instrument for measuring job burnout.
Her groundbreaking work is the basis for the World Health Organization’s 2019 decision to include burnout as an occupational phenomenon with negative health effects in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). Her research has garnered widespread recognition. Her longitudinal research on early burnout predictors was honored in 2012 as one of the 50 most outstanding articles published by the world’s 300 top management journals. In 2021, Business Insider named her one of the top 100 people transforming business. Maslach’s indispensable work cuts across health, personality, social, industrial/organizational, and clinical psychology. Her research has spurred countless scholars to investigate burnout and organizations to take steps to alleviate it.”
What was your reaction to receiving it?
Christina Maslach: I was thrilled and deeply honored to be recognized for my applied research! It has always been an important professional goal for me to translate psychological knowledge from research findings into useful social and personal actions. Obviously, teaching psychology classes is one way to do this translation.
But working on actual solutions to a societal problem, in partnership with people and organizations that are struggling with it, is another way of doing this. Also, when I first began doing occupational burnout research back in the 1970s, it was viewed in a negative way professionally (the “pop psychology” putdown), so it was a bit of a “side hustle” instead of my main job. That makes being selected for the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award especially meaningful to me, in acknowledging the value of applied research and giving me a very positive reward for doing it all these years!