The founding of the Psychonomic Society

The Psychonomic Society falls within a long tradition of efforts to create organizations of psychologists as alternatives to the American Psychological Association, which has frequently been perceived as failing to meet the essential needs of some of its constituents. As the result of 1950s discussions and correspondence centered on the need for more effective communication among psychologists doing scientific research, an Organizing Committee was formed to undertake the task of designing a new scientific society from the ground up. The Psychonomic Society was founded by a group of experimental psychologists meeting in Chicago, Illinois, in December 1959. They fashioned the Psychonomic Society to provide maximal opportunities for communication about science with minimal bureaucratic structure and without frills unrelated to free and open scientific exchange.     

History of the Psychonomic Society III: The meetings of the Psychonomic Society

A primary function of the Psychonomic Society, founded in 1959, has been the conduct of scientific meetings. Its first 37 meetings have been held in 18 different cities, St. Louis being the most popular with 11 meetings. The 5 Chicago meetings have been held at 5 different sites. Although there have been some changes in format and procedure, there has been a general adherence to guidelines laid down by the Society’s founders whereby the format is kept simple, with a strong emphasis on the communication of results of scientific research.     

History of the Psychonomic Society II: The journal publishing program

The possibility of a Psychonomic Society journal publishing program dates back to the very founding of the Society in 1959. The program was initiated by Clifford T. Morgan on his own, however, with the publication ofPsychonomic Science in 1964, followed byPsychonomic Monograph Supplements andPerception & Psychophysics within the next 2 years. In 1967, Morgan gave the journals to the Psychonomic Society, which has controlled them ever since. The structure of the journal program and the means of producing the journals have evolved since then, so that today the Psychonomic Society publishes six prominent journals in experimental psychology, all of them produced in-house.     

Index of norms and ratings published in the Psychonomic Society journals

The journals of the Psychonomic Society have served as outlets for numerous stimulus norms and ratings. Such norms are useful to researchers in a variety of areas for manipulating and controlling stimulus attributes. This article presents an index of 142 norms published in the Society’s journals, categorized according to the types of materials and ratings that are included in each.     

Promoting research integrity at the American Society for Microbiology

The American Society for Microbiology addresses issues of research integrity in several ways. There is a Code of Ethics for Society members and an Ethics Committee, a Publications Board has editorial oversight of ethical issues involved in Society journals and other publications, and the Public and Scientific Affairs Board is involved in ethical issues and scientific policies at the national level. In addition, the Society uses meetings and publications to inform and educate members about research integrity. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the AAAS-Office of Research Integrity (ORI) meeting in Washington DC on the theme: “The Role and Activities of Scientific Societies in Promoting Research Integrity” held on April 10–11, 2000.     

The birth of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology

This paper describes the inception of a scientific movement (the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology); the individuals who begot it; the two journals and numerous scientific articles which resulted; its effects in stimulating new areas of teaching and of theoretical development; and its international reception as well as its successes and failures in stimulating the creation of satellite societies on the same pattern.     

Sixty years of the Interamerican Society of Psychology (SIP): Origins and development

This paper presents a historical overview of the Interamerican Society of Psychology, which was founded on December 17, 1951, in Mexico City. Firstly, the historical circumstances of the foundation period are presented, as well as the people who made this organization possible, and the state of psychology on the American continent at that time. Secondly, the most important activities that the Interamerican Society of Psychology has developed during its 60 years are mentioned, such as the publication of books and scientific journals, the creation of several task forces and the Interamerican Congresses of Psychology. Basically, the purpose of this paper is to review the history of the Interamerican Society of Psychology through the recovery and use of various documentary sources.     

A Position Statement by the International Graphonomics Society on the Use of Graphology in Personnel Selection Testing

Among the various tests employed in personnel selection, handwriting analysis, or graphology, has enjoyed long-standing international popularity despite being highly contentious. This report contains not only an evaluation of the current published scientific reviews on the use of graphology in personnel selection, but also an evaluation of several additional studies graphologists provided that seemed to have been overlooked. The latter were obtained by contacting nine of the foremost institutes offering graphological training, consulting services, or both to ensure that the graphologists themselves would be fairly represented. Even with this additional information we found no reason to counter conclusions the scientific community has reached, namely that (a) the continued use of graphology in personnel selection could prove harmful to many individuals and firms, and (b) it fails to approach the level of criterion validity of other widely available and less expensive screening devices used for personnel selection. This article ends with a position statement about this matter, which the International Graphonomics Society1 endorsed.     

An Epistemologically Arrogant Community of Contending Scholars: A pre-Socratic Perspective on the Past, Present, and Future of the Pavlovian Society

The paper begins with a statement of the Society's purpose and its pre-Socratic roots. The Society differs from other contemporary scientific and scientific-professional societies in that it is thoroughly apolitical, unusually open to discussion and debate, and has had a restricted scholarly written impact. I then suggest and interpret six phases in the Society's history: (1) the pre-Socratic roots; (2) Pavlov and the young Gantt; (3) the Society's Gantt score of years; (4) the Joe McGuigan decade; (5) the Stewart Wolf era; (6) reforming the Society. I conclude with the hope that even if the content of the Society's interests changes, it will preserve the pre-Socratic approach against the various forms of intellectual barbarism that continue to arise. Keywords: Pre-Socratics, disinterested discussion, conflict of ideas, contending scholars, Pavlovian procedures     

Voice,speech, and language: selected papers from APCAM

ABSTRACT

This special issue features selected papers from the 13th annual Auditory Perception, Cognition, and Action Meeting (APCAM). APCAM is a unique meeting in its focus on the perceptual, cognitive, and behavioural aspects of audition. The meeting is held each year just before the Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society.     

The influence of thought probes on performance: Does the mind wander more if you ask it?

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Mind-wandering has emerged in the past decade as a popular topic in many areas of psychological research. Numerous studies have demonstrated the potential costs...     

An open-source LabVIEW application toolkit for phasic heart rate analysis in psychophysiological research.

The cardiovascular system has been extensively measured in a variety of research and clinical domains. Despite technological and methodological advances in cardiovascular science, the analysis and evaluation of phasic changes in heart rate persists as a way to assess numerous psychological concomitants. Some researchers, however, have pointed to constraints on data analysis when evaluating cardiac activity indexed by heart rate or heart period. Thus, an off-line application toolkit for heart rate analysis is presented. The program, written with National Instruments' LabVIEW, incorporates a variety of tools for off-line extraction and analysis of heart rate data. Current methods and issues concerning heart rate analysis are highlighted, and how the toolkit provides a flexible environment to ameliorate common problems that typically lead to trial rejection is discussed. Source code for this program may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

On the norming of homophones

Associative norms for homographs have been widely used in the study of language processing. A number of sets of these are available, providing the investigator with the opportunity to compare materials collected over a span of years and a range of locations. Words that are homophonic but not homographic have been used to address a variety of questions in memory as well as in language processing. However, a paucity of normative data are available for these materials, especially with respect to responses to the spoken form of the homophone. This article provides such data for a sample of 207 homophones across four different tasks, both visual and auditory, and examines how well the present measures correlate with each other and with those of other investigators. The finding that these measures can account for a considerable proportion of the variance in the lexical decision and naming data from the English Lexicon Project provides an additional demonstration of their utility. The norms from this study are available online in the Psychonomic Society Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, at www .psychonomic.org/archive.     

An epistemologically arrogant community of contending scholars: A pre-socratic perspective on the past, present, and future of the Pavlovian Society

The paper begins with a statement of the Society’s purpose and its pre-Socratic roots. The Society differs from other contemporary scientific and scientific-professional societies in that it is thoroughly apolitical, unusually open to discussion and debate, and has had a restricted scholarly written impact. I then suggest and interpret six phases in the Society’s history: (1) the pre-Socratic roots; (2) Pavlov and the young Gantt; (3) the Society’s Gantt score of years; (4) the Joe McGuigan decade; (5) the Stewart Wolf era; (6) reforming the Society. I conclude with the hope that even if the content of the Society’s interests changes, it will preserve the pre-Socratic approach against the various forms of intellectual barbarism that continue to arise. “People who love wisdom must be acquainted with many things indeed”,fragment from Heraclitus, www.forthnet.grll/presocratics/heracln.htm.     

全球公民社会:理论模式与研究框架

全球公民社会作为一种兴起于上世纪末的新话语,在新世纪初已备受关注。西方学术界围绕着全球公民社会的概念、全球公民社会的产生与发展以及全球公民社会对现实政治的影响及其发展趋势等问题展开了广泛讨论,并且形成了不同的理论分析框架和研究阵营。虽然西方的全球公民社会研究取得了一系列的成果,但是仍表现出规范性研究不足、研究主要囿于自由民主框架中等不足之处。我国学者已分别从国际关系、政治学和政治哲学的角度关注全球公民社会,但从总体上看,这一领域的研究力量还比较薄弱,成果不足,进一步的研究有待作出。     

An open-source LabVIEW application toolkit for phasic heart rate analysis in psychophysiological research

The cardiovascular system has been extensively measured in a variety of research and clinical domains. Despite technological and methodological advances in cardiovascular science, the analysis and evaluation of phasic changes in heart rate persists as a way to assess numerous psychological concomitants. Some researchers, however, have pointed to constraints on data analysis when evaluating cardiac activity indexed by heart rate or heart period. Thus, an off-line application toolkit for heart rate analysis is presented. The program, written with National Instruments’ LabVIEW, incorporates a variety of tools for off-line extraction and analysis of heart rate data. Current methods and issues concerning heart rate analysis are highlighted, and how the toolkit provides a flexible environment to ameliorate common problems that typically lead to trial rejection is discussed. Source code for this program may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive atwww.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Psychology and homosexuality: The British Sexological Society

The British Sexological Society was a largely unknown society composed of influential people of the early twentieth century in Great Britain. The present research is an archival study of the Society and its work concerning homosexuality. Issues addressed by the British Sexological Society are relevant to the early development of sexual emancipation movements as well as to issues of sexuality today.     

42nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society Orlando, Florida November 15–18, 2001

Notices and Announcements

42nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society Orlando, Florida November 15–18, 2001     

Memory for metaphors

Three experiments examined memory for metaphorical sentences. No differences between metaphors and nonmetaphorical equivalents (e.g.,The ivy cuddled up to the window vs.The ivy grew up to the window) in the number of correct recalls or recognitions were found. There was, however, a significant trend for recall errors that were meaning-preseving to be less metaphorical than the input sentence. The results supported hypotheses that metaphors and nonmetaphors are equally easy to remember and that the stored memory representation does not distinguish whether its antecedent linguistic input was metaphorical or not.This research was supported by Grant MH 28493-01 from NIMH and by a grant from the Kansas State University Bureau of General Research.Some of the data were reported at the Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Denver, November 1975.     

Representational coexistence in the God concept: Core knowledge intuitions of God as a person are not revised by Christian theology despite lifelong experience

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Previous research has shown that in the minds of young adult religious adherents, acquired theology about the extraordinary characteristics of God (e.g.,...