there  are approximately 400 APA members who listed cognitive as their major field on a survey but have no division affiliation.  And there are about 500 APA members who listed experimental as their major field but have no division affiliation!  Please help me try to get these APA members to pay the extra $11 to join Division 3.  If you have any colleagues, students, or friends who are cognitive or experimental psychologists but not members of APA, please try to recruit them to our division as well.

What do you say to those individuals to convince them to join Division 3 of APA?  What are the benefits of membership?  When one of my colleagues asked me that question recently, I reminded him that the APA publishes the leading journals in experimental psychology – the five JEPs (as well as other principal journals including Psychological Review, Psychological Bulletin, and Psychological Methods).  Then I asked him whether he thought it was important to belong to the group responsible for publishing those journals, thereby helping to ensure that they remain at the top of the field, or would he prefer not to be part of that group, letting other people take on that responsibility.  Posing that question was a sufficient argument to persuade my colleague to be part of Division 3 of APA.  But there are other good reasons as well.  For example, Division 3 honors its most deserving senior members by electing them as Fellows of the division.  The division also provides awards for outstanding junior investigators who have published superior articles in the JEPs.  There are not many other opportunities for experimental psychologists to receive acknowledgments for their accomplishments, and such honors and awards certainly help at the time of tenure, promotion, and salary decisions.  A third crucial function of Division 3 concerns its role in the annual APA convention.  The division provides a program, including invited speakers, symposia, and poster sessions, at the APA convention.  Although none of us would want to miss the meeting of the Psychonomic Society in November, that meeting includes only a few invited addresses.  In contrast, invited addresses by the most distinguished experimental psychologists are a regular and substantial part of the Division 3 program at the APA convention.  And because the APA convention is held in the summer, it can easily be combined with vacation travel.

Experimental psychology benefits from the APA in other ways as well.  For instance, the Science Directorate at APA sponsors research conferences, providing funding for the conferences and publishing the resulting volumes.  I describe one such recent conference on experimental psychology in my other article in this issue of the newsletter (on the Triple Festschrift for Bourne, Kintsch, and Landauer).  Further, the APA provides our strongest and most influential voice for lobbying congress and government agencies.  Thus, for example, APA is the organization that should be most effective in helping us ensure that basic research in experimental psychology continues to be funded by NIMH.  And the APA Publication Manual influences virtually every article we write in experimental psychology.  The impact of the APA on our writing is illustrated by the fact that beginning in 1994 with the publication of the Fourth Edition of the APA Publication Manual, we were forced to change from the term subjects to the term participants in describing the humans who serve in our experiments.  I’m delighted to report that in recent correspondence with the production editor for the Triple Festschrift volume, I was told that the requirement to use participants is no longer an APA style rule, so for that volume we use the term subjects instead.  I certainly want to be represented when decisions that affect my work are being made, even if they are only minor ones like the words we use in writing.  Please help me to encourage others who are not currently members of Division 3 of APA to join our ranks so that we can have a bigger voice in decisions concerning both large and small issues that affect our lives as experimental psychologists.  Thank you.