Impact on science?

Challenges the criterion used by J. P. Rushton and H. L. Roediger (1978) to determine the impact that 80 publications in psychology have had on science. Counting the number of times departments, journals, and people have mentioned other departments, journals, and people will not necessarily reveal the source of the greatest contributions to science. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Publication counts and scholastic productivity: Comment on Howard, Cole, and Maxwell.

Argues that the study of research productivity by G. S. Howard et al (see record 1988-09385-001) replicated the failure of W. M. Cox and V. Catt (see record 1978-21651-001) to use a representative sample by selecting only in-house American Psychological Association (APA) journals and ignoring some journals published by specific APA divisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

False memories and statistical design theory: Comment on Miller and Wolford (1999) and Roediger and McDermott (1999).

In an analysis of H. L. Roediger and K. B. McDermott's (see record 1995-42833-001) false-memory paradigm, M. B. Miller and G. L. Wolford (see record 1999-13930-007) argued that falsely recognized items occur because a bias toward calling such items "old" is created by their membership in a studied category. This interpretation was contested by Roediger and McDermott (see record 2000-15248-006). The authors of this article approach this issue as a statistical decision problem and observe that an explanation of false memory based on stored strengths and one based on decision process can have identical implications for data. Problems with equivalent formal models of this type can frequently be resolved by looking at the effects of other variables on the fitted estimates. The authors illustrate this analysis by examining the effects of presentation duration on the parameter estimates produced by models that instantiate the 2 explanations. Although the question remains open, the storage-based interpretation was found to be somewhat more plausible. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How much does guessing influence recall? Comment on Erdelyi, Finks, and Feigin-Pfau.

M. H. Erdelyi et al (see record 1989-38884-001) present evidence that variations in recall criteria can affect the number of items correctly recalled. In this comment, we (a) describe some procedural differences between their work and the earlier experiments of H. L. Roediger and D. G. Payne (see record 1986-13690-001), (b) note that their large manipulations of recall criteria produced only small effects on the amount recalled, and (c) describe recent research complementing that of Erdelyi et al. We observe that variations in recall criteria have larger effects after a 1-week delay than on an immediate test. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Additions to "Guides to Psychological Literature"

The author opines on the value of Dr. Latham's "Guides to Psychological Literature" (Amer. Psychologist, 1954, 9, 21-28) and states that every effort to complete his listings and to keep them up to date should be made. The author adds two less well-known guides to certain aspects of psychological literature, which he has found to be of some value. The two are special indexes and abstract journals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of response bias on recall performance, with some observations on processing bias.

We explored H. L. Roediger and D. G. Payne's (see record 1986-13690-001) proposal that response bias does not affect recall performance and that it is therefore not necessary to control for response productivity in recall studies. Two initial experiments, contrary to expectation, corroborated Roediger and Payne's findings: Forced recall did not produce more correct recalls than free recall, even though forced recall produced substantially more false alarms than did free recall. However, in succeeding experiments involving pictorial and verbal stimuli, reliable response-bias effects on recall were demonstrated. The stimuli yielding response-bias effects were those associated with higher probabilities of being guessed by chance. In addition, some of the data suggest that processing-bias effects (differential retrieval effort) may be unintentionally induced by instructions and may significantly affect recall memory. Consequently, it is necessary to assess or to control response-bias effects, and, possibly, processing-bias effects in recall experiments in which level of recall is of interest. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Retain the Original Data! Comment.

Comments on how few authors of APA journal articles retain their original data. Some authors have suggested that the APA journals take steps to insure that authors store their data for future reference. The commentator provides specific reasons for the retention of original data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"The structure of phenotypic personality traits": Comment.

Comments on L. R. Goldberg's (see record 1993-17546-001) historical summary of research into the global traits of personality. It is asserted that he failed to mention R. B. Catell's (1956) original discovery of these dimensions. The Big Five factors discussed by Goldberg are said to line up fairly well with Catell's 2nd-order Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) traits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"The reality of repressed memories": Comment.

Comments on E. F. Loftus's (see record 1993-37888-001) review of data on patients' recovery of repressed memories of sexual abuse in psychotherapy. Certain facts of the Ingram case, held up by Loftus as an example of questionable police work and misuse of forensic psychology, differ from her presentation of them. A corrected version of the facts is provided by a psychologist involved with the case. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Citation impact, rejection rates, and journal value": Correction.

Reports an error in the original article by J. Rotton et al (American Psychologist, 1993[Aug], Vol 48[8], 911–912). Table 1 listed the journal Psychological Research twice, and the journals Cognition and Child Study Journal were omitted. The mean SSCI for applied journals in Table 1 should have been 1.17. Multiple rather than squared multiple correlations were reported for rejection rates. Area and type of journal explained 48% of variance in rejection rates, and the F ratio for predicting citations should have been F(9,28)?=?14.82. On page 912, the mean SSCI for experimental journals should have been 1.51. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in record 1994-03368-001.) Comments on L. C. Buffardi and J. A. Nichols's (1981) list of rejection rates for psychological journals and further examines the relation between rejection rates, citation impact, and journal value. It was found that 69% of the variance in rejection rates was explained by area and type of journal. As Buffardi and Nichols reported, rejection rates were higher for APA than for non-APA journals (80.27% vs 65.37%), and citation indices were higher for APA than for non-APA journals (2.63 vs 0.91)… (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sleeping Beauties in Psychology: Comparisons of "Hits" and "Missed Signals" in Psychological Journals.

Scientific publications tend to be forgotten quickly. A few works, however, are still cited 100 years and more after their publication. The author used bibliometric methods to compare "hits" (works noticed by the scientific community soon after their publication) with "missed signals" (works that went unnoticed until much later) by investigating 2 psychological journals founded in the 1890s: Zeitschrift für Psychologie and Psychological Review. All articles that were published in either of these journals up to 1920 and cited more than 25 times in the Web of Science up to the year 2000 were considered for inclusion in the analysis. It emerged that hits corresponded more closely to the focus of scientific attention at the time of publication than missed signals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Proposed Book Review Journal: Comment.

Comments on "Book Reviewing in American Psychological Journals" by Girden and Dennis in the June 1954 American Psychologist. The comment author presents an argument against the establishment of a book review journal by APA. While it is true that the establishment of such a journal would constitute a reorganization of APA's present activities, it would require that the subscriber to present journals either subscribe to this new journal, which may carry a large portion of reviews in which he has no interest, or be deprived of the reviews of books in his field of special interest which currently appear in the journals to which he is already subscribing. It is unreasonable to expect an editor to have the breadth of acquaintance with the various fields of psychology that would be necessary to decide which books merit review or to have the breadth of acquaintance with psychologists in the various fields that would be necessary to enable him judiciously to select reviewers in all of the specialties. It seems difficult to understand how a book review journal could be operated without any pronounced increase in the number of pages that the APA now devotes to this function and still provide "a more complete coverage of psychological books." Several disadvantages to establishing a book review journal are summarized. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"The citation of Soviet scholars by Western psychologists": Comment.

Comments on the original article by R. L. Solso (see record 1986-13286-001). The commenter states that in the original article, in the table, Solso listed Marx, Engels, and Zeigarnik as Soviet scholars. This is, in his opinion, a flagrant error, because Marx, Engels, and Zeigarnik (Berliner Schule) worked at German universities and published their work primarily in German. For him it is very difficult to see how these scholars could be mixed up with Soviet scholars. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comment on "Right-wing authoritarianism."

Canadian scholarship has recently been honoured in that Bob Altemeyer's book, Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right wing authoritarianism (see record 1988-98419-000) received the 1988 prize for behavioural science research, awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The book has also received a number of favourable reviews. Ray feels that some comments on the limitations of the book are needed to balance the account, and submits that, in fact, the book is a complete failure as far as achieving what it set out to achieve is concerned. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Review of Pure types are rare": Comment on book review.

My book Pure types are rare: Myths and meanings of madness (see record 2007-08930-001) may have piqued some members of the mental health community; thus I was not entirely surprised by the caustic review that appeared in the January 1985 issue of Canadian Psychology, nor do I wish to engage the polemics or the personal asides therein. I am impelled, however, to respond to the allegation of "repeated failure of professional scholarship." The reviewer provides three substantive examples. In the first, he objects to the citation following my statement that post-mortem studies have failed to find neurological correlates of senile dementia, and implies that the study cited did find such correlates. Actually, the study was inadequate for the question inasmuch as statistics were not presented for senile dementia exclusive of other conditions, and normal controls were not used. The second maintains that I underestimated the significance of a concordance rate of 53% for the diagnosis of schizophrenia between two psychiatrists examining the same patient, and says it should actually be "somewhere beyond even the .00000001 level." My point, however, was that in vivo, where more than 50% of mental patients are diagnosed schizophrenic, a 53% concordance rate represents chance. Third, Professor Burd relates several sentences of mine to make it appear that I questioned the validity of the co-twin data on genetic factors in schizophrenia on the "curious grounds" that similar data have been obtained for a variety of behavioural and personality traits. I will comment on the statement "There are but a dozen references to articles in established professional journals." I did not attempt to deduce the criteria for "established," nor did I count journals, but I did ascertain that there were 112 citations in the text, comprising 80 separate sources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A re-examination of recognition memory in amnesia: Reply to Roediger and McDermott.

In a previously reported study using the process dissociation procedure, we (M. Verfaellie & J. Treadwell, see record 1993-18420-001) demonstrated that amnesic patients were impaired relative to controls in their recognition of words they had solved as anagrams but performed comparably to controls in their recognition of words they had read. H. L. Roediger and K. B. McDermott (see record 1994-30444-001) suggested that the finding of normal performance in the read condition of our study might have been due to differing false-alarm rates between groups, a finding that would complicate application of the process dissociation procedure. In this reply, we argue that the amnesic patients' normal performance in this condition was not due just to differences in guessing rate and is not inconsistent with findings from standard recognition memory tests. In addition, 2 corrections to the process dissociation procedure discussed by Roediger and McDermott are considered as solutions to the problem of differing false-alarm rates. Applied to our amnesic data, these corrections reinforce our original conclusion that under conditions in which the contribution of recollection is minimal, amnesic patients' performance is normal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Synesthesia and memory: Color congruency, von Restorff, and false memory effects.

In the current study, we explored the influence of synesthesia on memory for word lists. We tested 10 grapheme-color synesthetes who reported an experience of color when reading letters or words. We replicated a previous finding that memory is compromised when synesthetic color is incongruent with perceptual color. Beyond this, we found that, although their memory for word lists was superior overall, synesthetes did not exhibit typical color- or semantic-defined von Restorff isolation effects (von Restorff, 1933) compared with control participants. Moreover, our synesthetes exhibited a reduced Deese–Roediger–McDermott false memory effect (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Taken as a whole, these findings are consistent with the idea that color-grapheme synesthesia can lead people to place a greater emphasis on item-specific processing and surface form characteristics of words in a list (e.g., the letters that make them up) relative to relational processing and more meaning-based processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unfamiliarity breeds disdain: Comment on department chairmen's ratings of psychological journals.

Comments on data from K. C. Mace and H. D. Warner (1973) indicating that a substantial number of psychology department chairmen rated the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and the Journal of Educational Psychology as poor or just adequate. The validity of the ratings may have been affected by rater familiarity with the journals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The journal wedge.

Describes how peripheral (e.g., subdisciplinary) psychological foci lead to the creation of new organizational divisions and journals, and warns against the potential unintended consequence of driving a wedge, i.e., the "journal wedge," between related fields of inquiry. One suggestion for lessening the impact of the journal wedge is for organizations to maintain more complete and up-to-date home pages on the World Wide Web, well linked to other home pages and accessible to nonmembers, so that it would be easier for nonmembers to keep up with fields of concern. If organizations can get and keep the peripheral psychologist interested by providing information of this sort, they may be better able to recruit new members who may then ultimately help control journal costs as well as other aspects of organizational operating budgets. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)