| Abstract: | Starting with this issue, obituaries of recently deceased members of the APA will be published regularly in the American Psychologist. We are initiating this new feature with the encouragement of the Editor of the AP and on the recommendation of the Publications and Communications Board. The growing interest in the history of psychology, enhanced at present by the celebration of the centennial of the founding of Wundt's laboratory, makes the inauguration of the section especially timely. The men and women whose lives have been spent as psychologists reflect history through their contributions to psychology's advance as a science and as a profession. Through their teachers before them and their students and others who have been influenced by them, there are connecting threads from the past into the future. The selection of a few persons whose careers have been sufficiently distinguished to be recognized in this manner is necessarily arbitrary, and no firm and fast rules can be devised for deciding whose obituaries should appear. In order to inaugurate the publication of obituaries, the Section Editor has sought the assistance of an advisory committee of psychologists identified with the history of psychology and with the biographies of psychologists. The final decisions have rested, and will continue to rest, with the Section Editor, concerning those to be included, the length of the obituaries requested, and those invited to prepare them. Full cooperation will be needed to make this section of the AP serve well its intended purposes. Deaths should be reported promptly to the AP office. Comments on published obituaries, looking forward to making future ones more useful, may be sent privately to the Section Editor. After some experiences in publishing these accounts, improved guidelines can be given to those who are invited to prepare them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
