>>SOUTHERN INDIANA — A couple of weeks ago, I attended Rauch’s Inc.’s 10th annual 2010 Imagine Awards at Casino. I’m not usually an awards kind of person, but this one was special because the winner of the Community Leader Award was someone I personally knew and have admired for years — Jackie Madden.

No one could deserve this award more than Jackie, who has spend a whole career helping other people.

Awards keep dominating the news. The pursuit for medals, trophies and prizes seems to provoke emotions in fans that are just as strong as in the actual contestants. In the past months, we debated the appropriateness of President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, the New Orleans Saints’ Super Bowl victory, the Vancouver Olympic games and most recently the Academy Awards — in which “Avatar” got totally robbed, in my humble opinion.

People take these awards pretty seriously. Russian figure skater and Olympic silver medalist Evgeni Plushenko was so upset over not winning the gold at Vancouver, he awarded himself a platinum medal. In on-line commentaries, derisive fans around the world have called Plushenko everything from a “sore loser” to an “arrogant toad” and said he should have won “the gold medal for being a jerk”.

Awards are important to us because they symbolize our need for individual recognition. Once when handing out medals to his troops, Napoleon said, “with such baubles, men are led.” Having little monetary value, ornamental baubles were used by Napoleon as a tactic to motivate his troops and cement their loyalty.

Swiss researchers Bruno Frey and Susanne Neckermann from the University of Zurich recently published an international study looking at awards from the perspective of psychological economics. They found substantial differences in the frequency of awards being used in different countries.

Out of the 82 countries they studied, the top-five award givers were Canada, United Kingdom (Britain), Poland, Australia and Senegal. How do we stack up?

The United States’ rate of giving awards was significantly higher than the average country studied. Award-giving nations seem to be those with long traditions of monarchies, military organization and a high degree of competitiveness.

Frey and Neckermann also identified the following reasons why awards can be effective in motivating people and improving overall performance:

1. Winning an award results in increased self-esteem, independent of any associated economic reward, so they have an impact even when others are not aware of them.

2. Awards are typically conferred by someone whose opinion the winner values.

3. Awards create social prestige and increase status and recognition within the peer group.

4. People enjoy competing in a game-like environment regardless of the outcome.

5. Money and other benefits are usually directly or indirectly associated with winning awards.

6. Awards provide positive feedback and establish role models by publicizing information about what behaviors are successful and desirable.

Major awards can transform people’s lives. In a 2008 interview, award-winning editorial cartoonist Clay Bennet repeated the frequent adage that once you win a Pulitzer Prize, you always know the first three words of your obituary.

I can hardly use the phrase “major award” without thinking about Jean Shepherd’s movie, “A Christmas Story,” in which the long-suffering father finally wins an award in a trivia contest, which turns out to be a lamp shaped like a woman’s leg wearing a fishnet stocking. Now that was a major award!

Many people however go through their entire lives without ever winning any special honors. Several years ago, I worked with a woman who received a plaque after helping start a residential program for abused and emotionally handicapped children. She was especially touch by this award and told me it was the only plaque she had ever received.

The late actor and comedian Red Buttons had a standing routine at the Friar’s Club’s testimonial dinners — or roasts — in which he would joke about historical figures who, despite their fame and importance, “never got a dinner.” Most of us will “never get a dinner” either, but we can remember in detail, any minor awards or recognition we might accumulate.

At the end of his fifth-grade school year, our middle son, Andy, told us that he needed to take a box to school to carry home all the awards and trophies he planned to win. We scoffed at this, thinking he was like Charlie Brown in “Peanuts,” wondering if he should take a briefcase to school to bring home all the valentines he thought he was going to get.

We tried to prepare Andy for the cold realities of life, but he remained undaunted. The next evening, I had to eat my words, when Andy brought home the box, we had reluctantly agreed he could take, chock full of trophies. My wife, Diane, who had attended the awards day, testified to his overwhelming success.

We weren’t so fortunate when our youngest boy was given an invitation to attend the school awards night when he was a junior in high school. We sat through the whole ceremony, but he was never called up to receive an award. I admired how our son took the experience so good-naturedly. He seemed genuinely amused. I was prouder of his attitude than any certificate or trophy he could have won.

In my field of counseling, Paul Heppner and Steve Pew from the University of Nebraska found that the presence of diplomas and awards in a counselor’s office significantly increased people’s perception of a counselor’s expertise. If you run short of real awards or certificates, you can always purchase them from diploma mills or so called “vanity boards.” Vanity boards are organizations that provide attractive and official looking certificates and titles for the price of membership. 

With sophisticated graphics, programs people can even create their own credentials these days. There is the apocryphal story about the acupuncturist who had a menu from an upscale Shanghai restaurant hanging on the wall, along with other official looking certificates.

Personally, I’ve always had mixed feelings about the value of awards, since they seem to divide the world, too simplistically, into winners and losers, and there are way too many losers. When I see that small group of attractive super kids win nearly every prize at some awards ceremony, I naturally identify with the underdogs and always think, surely this largess could be spread around more democratically. Never-the-less this weekend, I’ll be rooting for our granddaughter as she competes in the Kentucky State Spelling Bee, hoping that she will be a good sport, as she crushes her opponents.

Nonaward wining writer Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D., lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring, the mental health center in Jeffersonville. He once lost in a desperate bid for a Dog Writers of America Award, although it was an honor just to be nominated, he lies. He can be reached at tstawar@lifespr.com. Check out his Welcome to Planet-Terry blog and podcast at http://planetterry.wordpress.com