Border Crossings

The record of scientific psychology over the past 50 years is one of impressive growth and numerous advances, accompanied by increasing technical and theoretical complexity. This increased complexity almost inevitably leads to more subdisciplinary specialization, as evidenced in the proliferation of specialty journals, sharply focused organizations and conferences, and departmental structures that both reflect and reinforce divergent paths.

As an organization, APS has resisted many of the pressures toward specialization. The founders of APS and successive generations of Board Members endorsed an organization that would operate as a whole, rather than as a collection of separate divisions and subdisciplinary units. Our two journals, Psychological Science and Current Directions in Psychological Science, cover the full range of psychological research, illustrating our commitment to the broad field of psychology.

This emphasis on the common ground among psychological scientists is, I believe, a valuable model for research as well. Increasingly, as the science moves forward, investigators are reaching outside of their subdiscipline to link with others who share concerns, but who approach issues from somewhat different vantage points and knowledge bases. In some cases, the extensions are to fields other than psychology—for example, to biology, medicine, education, sociology and anthropology, and even philosophy and physics. In other cases, the links are between different subfields of psychology- for example, between social and cognitive psychology, or between clinical and neuropsychology. In each instance, however, there is a recognition that a narrow subdisciplinary focus is inadequate to fully document the phenomena of interest.

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Director Steven E. Hyman expressed his support for movement across traditional boundaries in his interview with Alan Kraut published in the November 1997 Observer.

“It is critical,” Hyman said, “that we have people organized … not by professional society or affiliation or degree, but by shared intellectual problems.” The recently announced initiative of the National Science Foundation to fund a number of science and technology centers represents a similar endorsement of cross-disciplinary connections.

Within psychology, we have many examples of research programs that bring together investigators from different traditions. One extremely successful example was the NSF-supported training program developed and conducted by John Cacioppo, in which the methods of neuroscience and psychophysiology were introduced to several cohorts of clinical, cognitive, developmental, and social psychologists. Projects focusing on phenomena as diverse as stress and cardiovascular risk, abusive parenting, and the interaction patterns of couples were stimulated by this training. As an emergent field, social neuroscience was established by Cacioppo and his many colleagues.

Another example of cross-disciplinary possibilities will appear in a forthcoming issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review, a new journal edited by former APS President Marilynn Brewer. Developing ideas that they first presented in a symposium at the 1996 APS convention, Janet Metcalfe and Fritz Strack have compiled a series of articles on the theme of metacognition by cognitive and social psychologists. Several of the articles are written jointly by specialists in the two subdisciplines, recognizing and developing the common ground of these two fields.

I’ve described here only a few examples: many more ongoing projects and emerging plans could be cited. Efforts such as these are crucial for the advancement of psychology, both as a science and as a source of applications in the public interest. We hope that APS, in its efforts to encourage communication and interaction among the various domains of psychological research, can continue to contribute to these goals in the years to come.