Observer > 2004 > October
image description
172004Volume 17, Issue10October 2004

Presidential Column

Robert W. Levenson
Robert W. Levenson
University of California, Berkeley
APS President 2004 - 2005
All columns

In this Issue:
Patients and Impatience: A Call to the Best and the Brightest

About the Observer

The Observer is the online magazine of the Association for Psychological Science and covers matters affecting the research, academic, and applied disciplines of psychology. The magazine reports on issues of interest to psychologist scientists worldwide and disseminates information about the activities, policies, and scientific values of APS.

APS members receive a monthly Observer newsletter that covers the latest content in the magazine. Members also may access the online archive of Observer articles going back to 1988.

Read more

Latest Under the Cortex Podcast

Trending Topics >

  • Thumbnail Image for Disaster Response and Recovery

    Disaster Response and Recovery

    Disasters like Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut draw massive media coverage, trauma interventions, and financial donations to victims. But psychological research shows the efforts don’t always yield the intended benefits.

Up Front

  • Great Dissertations: Mark I

    A year ago in the Observer, I wrote a column on "Dissertation Dilemmas" which focused on varying perspectives on the dissertation. In some scholars' views, the dissertation should represent a grand intellectual achievement, whereas in other conceptions it is simply a modest hoop through which a student jumps to satisfy a requirement. Because all graduate students must write a dissertation and because it is at least intended (in the criteria set forward by most universities) to represent "a significant contribution to knowledge," I suggested that it would be useful to have a list of "Great Dissertations in Psychology." There could even be a course offered by that name in graduate school, so students could prepare for their own magnum opus by reviewing great works that had preceded them. I invited APS members to write to me with nominations of "great dissertations" so that I could publish the list, and I specified some criteria that might be met for such a distinction. I have received many letters, comments and nominations resulting from this column.

  • Patients and Impatience: A Call to the Best and the Brightest

    The recent proposal by the National Institute of Mental Health, or NIMH, to redirect a portion of its extramural research investment away from basic behavioral and social science research into research that more directly addresses issues of direct relevance to mental health and illness has created shockwaves for psychological science. Were that not enough seismic activity, patient advocacy groups and congressional critics, expressing increasing concerns about research priorities, have sounded similar themes. For decades, grant applications to NIMH from psychological scientists have proposed studies of fundamental human processes in "normal" populations. These applications have all come with a promissory note asserting that knowledge garnered in normal populations about such processes as attachment, attention, decision-making, individuation, emotion, self, perception, and social interaction would yield important insights that would increase our understanding of the nature, course, etiology, treatment, and prevention of mental illness.

APS Spotlight

  • Fatal Attraction

    In the Wake of 9/11 The Psychology of Terror By Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg "Republican leaders said yesterday that they would repeatedly remind the nation of the Sept. 11 attacks as their convention opens in New York City today ... " (The New York Times, August 30, 2004) Following the tragic terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the popularity of President George W. Bush increased dramatically. We have conducted a series of studies that offers an explanation for this phenomenon and demonstrates that for Americans, reminders of 9/11 and of death in general continue to increase President Bush's appeal.

  • Living and Learning: Splitting Time Between Studying and Making Memories

    The Fulbright Program provides grants for students, scholars, professionals, and teachers to travel and study around the world. Sponsored by the US government, the program is designed to "increase mutual understanding between people of the United States and the people of other countries." Following are the first in a series of occasional articles written by APS Members who recently went abroad on Fulbright scholarships. If you are from the Northeast or Mid-Atlantic region, you might remember August 14, 2003 for one of the most sweeping and disruptive power outages in the history of the United States.

  • Home Sweet Home?

    The Fulbright Program provides grants for students, scholars, professionals, and teachers to travel and study around the world. Sponsored by the US government, the program is designed to "increase mutual understanding between people of the United States and the people of other countries." Following are the first in a series of occasional articles written by APS Members who recently went abroad on Fulbright scholarships. "Adjusting to life in Japan was not that difficult. But returning to Memphis - that was hard!" Counter-intuitive yet frequent, this was the kind of complaint I was hearing from families returning to the United States following an overseas living experience.

Practice

  • Great Dissertations: Mark I

    A year ago in the Observer, I wrote a column on "Dissertation Dilemmas" which focused on varying perspectives on the dissertation. In some scholars' views, the dissertation should represent a grand intellectual achievement, whereas in other conceptions it is simply a modest hoop through which a student jumps to satisfy a requirement. Because all graduate students must write a dissertation and because it is at least intended (in the criteria set forward by most universities) to represent "a significant contribution to knowledge," I suggested that it would be useful to have a list of "Great Dissertations in Psychology." There could even be a course offered by that name in graduate school, so students could prepare for their own magnum opus by reviewing great works that had preceded them. I invited APS members to write to me with nominations of "great dissertations" so that I could publish the list, and I specified some criteria that might be met for such a distinction. I have received many letters, comments and nominations resulting from this column.

  • Brave New World … Wide Web

    Have you ever thought students in your course were listening to what you say, yet barely communicate with you? Have you ever wanted to provide a large number of documents and information to your students without using the copy machine? Have you ever had the intention to guide students to certain topics, but there were too many in your class to be able to do this? If your answer to any of these questions was "yes," a Virtual Learning Environment may be a solution. VLEs provide many possibilities to use online tools in and of themsleves, or even better, as an addition to a face-to-face class. In a VLE, course- and content-management are incorporated and easily coordinated through Web-based software. Alternative teaching and discussion methods like online quizzes, forums, chats, or Wikis (comparable to a white board on which anyone can write anything) are built in. Best of all, working on the teacher's (as well as the student's) side of a VLE is simply a lot of fun. What Exactly Is a VLE? A virtual learning environment is a set of teaching and learning tools designed to enhance a student's learning experience by including computers and the Internet in the learning process.

First Person

  • The Importance of Introductory Psychology Courses

    When I started researching colleges during my last months of high school, I thought psychology was simply something that involved a notepad and a couch. But by March of my first year of college, I went into my advisor's office and officially became a psychology major. The biggest motivation for this choice was the introduction to psychology course I took my first semester. As at many other colleges in the nation, my introductory psychology class was the biggest on campus, fulfilling an elective requirement for many students and laying the foundation for psychology majors. What made that introductory psychology course a great experience for me, one that cemented my choice in a major, was how interactive the instructor made it. One activity my professor used was a decision-making experiment. Nine dots in a three-by-three pattern were written on the board.

More From This Issue

  • Non-Human Nature

    By Duane M. Rumbaugh and David A. Washburn Yale University Press, 2003 Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings By Duane M. Rumbaugh and David A. Washburn Yale University Press, 2003 Intelligence, creativity, and complex learning in non-human animals have concerned psychologists and others throughout the history of psychology and the evolutionary sciences (e.g., Romanes, 1895; Köhler, 1925; Yerkes, 1916). In spite of the vast accumulation of information that this interest has generated, general theories of intelligence have rarely, if ever, incorporated or attempted to explain what is known about intelligent behavior in animals.

  • News

    Benbow Receives Mensa Lifetime Award Benbow APS Fellow Camilla Benbow, Vanderbilt University, is the recipient of the Mensa Education and Research Foundation's 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award. MERF president Greg Timmers made a surprise visit to give Benbow - an unknowing recipient - the award. Benbow's mentor, APS Fellow Julian Stanley, Johns Hopkins University, also surprised her by attending the ceremony. The award consists of a showcase medal and $1,000, and an issue of Mensa Research Journal will be dedicated to some of Benbow's research articles.

  • Global Impact: How International Collaborations Strengthen Science

    Peter Glick didn't expect his unassuming Ambivalent Sexism Inventory to become an international sensation. But soon after he published the questionnaire in 1995 (with APS Past President Susan Fiske), researchers from Botswana to Taiwan were knocking on his door with ideas for joint projects. Glick started small, sketching out ideas on a napkin with some Chilean psychologists while attending a conference in Puerto Rico. The group hit it off, and a collaboration was born. Then things took off. Within a few years, Glick, an APS Fellow and a social psychologist at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, had acquired a large coterie of international colleagues.

  • Peace in the Middle East May Be Impossible

    16th Annual Convention William James Fellow Award Address Lee D. Ross presents his William James Fellow Award Address at the APS Annual Convention. "[Social scientists] haven't gone as far as we should go in proving that our research is useful," Ross said. Ever notice that when you're driving you hate pedestrians, the way they saunter through the crosswalk almost daring you to hit them, but when you're walking you hate drivers? According to Lee D. Ross, in his William James Fellow Award Address at the Annual Convention, there's a reason for your equal-opportunity animosity.