Perspectives on Psychological Science 5(6) 627 ª The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1745691610388755 http://pps.sagepub.com
From the Editor: Thank You and Good Bye Ed Diener Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
This is the last issue in my editorship of Perspectives on Psychological Science, and now Barbara Spellman has the opportunity to steward the journal. I have enjoyed my editorship very much, and I want to thank Alan Kraut at the Association for Psychological Science and all the others who have made the journal possible and have given it their support. I am grateful to authors who were willing to take a chance on our new journal. I especially want to thank our editorial board and all the able reviewers we have employed. I am so grateful for the opportunity to have edited Perspectives, and loved every minute of it. Well, almost every minute. When I began as founding editor of Perspectives, I had several goals in mind. One was to publish diverse articles across the full spectrum of psychology, which could be read and easily understood by scholars in other areas of psychology and the behavioral sciences. Another goal was to push authors to write interesting articles that others would want to read, including others outside of the specific area of the article. Many journals nowadays present articles that are only of interest to those working on that specific issue and are read only by a few people. I hoped to create a journal where research psychologists might find a number of articles that would be valuable and readable in each issue. My goal was to make reading Perspectives a way to keep up with current advances across psychology. Finally, a goal was to occasionally publish ‘‘risky’’ articles, ones with a lot of promise but not yet with strong evidence. I wanted to publish articles that would advance science, and not simply ones that lacked flaws. I have saved for the last issue a collection of articles that expresses the breadth that PPS can provide. The first article, by Daniel Levintin, is a humorous piece. The next article, authored by Laura Hsu, Jaewoo Chung, and Ellen Langer, suggests that reminders of age can influence people’s longevity. This article is daring, and the support from the studies it presents are suggestive, but certainly not definitive. The reviewers and I agreed that the article, despite obvious limitations in each of
the studies, presents a provocative heuristic hypothesis that can stimulate further research. Thus, although the article is ‘‘risky,’’ it is the type of article that Perspectives can occasionally afford to publish. The article by Suparna Rajaram and Luciane Pereira-Pasarin is a review of collaborative memory research. I think many of our readers will find this to be very interesting and new. Susan Goldin-Meadows’ article, authored with Sian Beilock, presents a leading developmental psychologist’s review of her recent exciting research showing how gesturing can influence how we think because of its ability to reflect real-world actions. Finally, Rod McDonald’s article on evaluating structural models presents the recommendations of a leading quantitative psychologist about how to judge the adequacy of fit of these models. Thus, the individual articles in this issue are diverse, and present the kind of cutting-edge thinking that I hoped to attract to Perspectives. Next in the issue come two special sections: one that is guest-edited by Morton Ann Gernsbacher, and one on the strengths and limitations of fMRI brain imaging research. Gernsbacher’s special section presents four articles based on her Presidential Symposium at the 2007 annual meeting of APS. The articles address the issue of stigma and group differences, and how our biases can sometimes lead scientists to make unfair comparisons between groups. She presents an overview of these articles in her introduction to the special section. The second special section focuses on fMRI, with articles and commentaries by some of the leaders in the field. I provide an introduction to that section in which I introduce the motivation behind inviting the articles and provide an overview of them. Editing Perspectives has been a pleasure, but I am happy now to pass the baton to the excellent new editor, Barbara Spellman. I know she will do a wonderful job and that the journal will prosper and grow under her leadership. —Ed Diener
Corresponding Author: Ed Diener, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 603 E. Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820 E-mail: [email protected]
Downloaded from pps.sagepub.com at GEORGIAN COURT UNIV on March 17, 2015
From the Editor: Thank You and Good Bye Ed Diener Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
This is the last issue in my editorship of Perspectives on Psychological Science, and now Barbara Spellman has the opportunity to steward the journal. I have enjoyed my editorship very much, and I want to thank Alan Kraut at the Association for Psychological Science and all the others who have made the journal possible and have given it their support. I am grateful to authors who were willing to take a chance on our new journal. I especially want to thank our editorial board and all the able reviewers we have employed. I am so grateful for the opportunity to have edited Perspectives, and loved every minute of it. Well, almost every minute. When I began as founding editor of Perspectives, I had several goals in mind. One was to publish diverse articles across the full spectrum of psychology, which could be read and easily understood by scholars in other areas of psychology and the behavioral sciences. Another goal was to push authors to write interesting articles that others would want to read, including others outside of the specific area of the article. Many journals nowadays present articles that are only of interest to those working on that specific issue and are read only by a few people. I hoped to create a journal where research psychologists might find a number of articles that would be valuable and readable in each issue. My goal was to make reading Perspectives a way to keep up with current advances across psychology. Finally, a goal was to occasionally publish ‘‘risky’’ articles, ones with a lot of promise but not yet with strong evidence. I wanted to publish articles that would advance science, and not simply ones that lacked flaws. I have saved for the last issue a collection of articles that expresses the breadth that PPS can provide. The first article, by Daniel Levintin, is a humorous piece. The next article, authored by Laura Hsu, Jaewoo Chung, and Ellen Langer, suggests that reminders of age can influence people’s longevity. This article is daring, and the support from the studies it presents are suggestive, but certainly not definitive. The reviewers and I agreed that the article, despite obvious limitations in each of
the studies, presents a provocative heuristic hypothesis that can stimulate further research. Thus, although the article is ‘‘risky,’’ it is the type of article that Perspectives can occasionally afford to publish. The article by Suparna Rajaram and Luciane Pereira-Pasarin is a review of collaborative memory research. I think many of our readers will find this to be very interesting and new. Susan Goldin-Meadows’ article, authored with Sian Beilock, presents a leading developmental psychologist’s review of her recent exciting research showing how gesturing can influence how we think because of its ability to reflect real-world actions. Finally, Rod McDonald’s article on evaluating structural models presents the recommendations of a leading quantitative psychologist about how to judge the adequacy of fit of these models. Thus, the individual articles in this issue are diverse, and present the kind of cutting-edge thinking that I hoped to attract to Perspectives. Next in the issue come two special sections: one that is guest-edited by Morton Ann Gernsbacher, and one on the strengths and limitations of fMRI brain imaging research. Gernsbacher’s special section presents four articles based on her Presidential Symposium at the 2007 annual meeting of APS. The articles address the issue of stigma and group differences, and how our biases can sometimes lead scientists to make unfair comparisons between groups. She presents an overview of these articles in her introduction to the special section. The second special section focuses on fMRI, with articles and commentaries by some of the leaders in the field. I provide an introduction to that section in which I introduce the motivation behind inviting the articles and provide an overview of them. Editing Perspectives has been a pleasure, but I am happy now to pass the baton to the excellent new editor, Barbara Spellman. I know she will do a wonderful job and that the journal will prosper and grow under her leadership. —Ed Diener
Corresponding Author: Ed Diener, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 603 E. Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820 E-mail: [email protected]
Downloaded from pps.sagepub.com at GEORGIAN COURT UNIV on March 17, 2015
