| Abstract: | In the 6 years since the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology was divided into three sections, Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes (IRGP) has come to be the impoverished sibling in the family. This weakness seems curious in a discipline that concentrates on human interrelatedness as its central theme. Indeed, Gordon Allport's definition in the Handbook of Social Psychology (1968) acknowledged the social core of social psychology: "an attempt to understand and explain how the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others." Perhaps the short rations to which many readers have become accustomed reflected a reluctance of researchers to engage these phenomena in the individualistic Zeitgeist of the 1970s and early 1980s. Nevertheless, 1986 brings a renewed interest in the scientific study of human social bonds. It is to the dissemination of the very best of this work that this editorship is dedicated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
