 During his time at Virginia, he served as chair of the Department of Psychology from 1990-1998.In 1998, McCarty was named Executive Director for Science at the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C., where he helped the APA launch the "Decade of Behavior".The Decade of Behavior, a nickname for the 2000s and successor to the 1990s' "Decade of the Brain", was a public education campaign—endorsed by more than 70 professional associations across a variety of disciplines—to bring attention to the importance of behavioral and social science research.