2010 APA Program Preview

John Wixted

Division 3 Program Chair, 2010

Next year's meeting will be held in San Diego, California, (August 12-15, 2010), and we plan to take full advantage of the fact that nearby institutions are home to leading figures in the field of experimental psychology and related fields, such as cognitive neuroscience. The Division 3 program will feature some of these influential figures as well as many of our distinguished colleagues from around the world in a series of exciting talks and symposia covering the state of the art. For an experimental psychologist, I hope that the experience will be like that of a kid in a candy store. For our clinical colleagues, I can only hope that it will be an experience of some kind (not merely an experience they could have had but didn't).

You do not have to be Sigmund Freud to appreciate the fact that APA is attended by many clinically-oriented psychologists whose interests overlap not at all with the interests of experimental psychologists. Indeed, I would hazard the guess that many of these individuals never, ever attend an experimentally-oriented psychology conference (such as Psychonomics or APS). That being the case, the Division 3 program and some related programs (e.g., Division 6) offer our clinically-oriented colleagues what is perhaps their one and only opportunity to make contact with the basic science that serves as the foundation of their chosen profession. Even so, they do not come to the talks sponsored by Division 3. Next year's program will be cognizant of that fact and will try to entice a few of them with a symposium or two that is directly relevant to what they do (e.g., a symposium on recent developments in fear conditioning and their possible relevance to the treatment of anxiety disorders).

Now let me hazard a second guess. The members of Division 3 usually attend purely experimentally-oriented conferences, so the annual APA convention offers them what is perhaps their only opportunity to make contact with clinically oriented work. Even so, they do not often take advantage of that opportunity. Next year, I encourage you to come to the APA convention to catch up on the latest trends in experimental psychology (yes, you can actually do this at APA), but do not miss the opportunity to take in a clinical talk or two. It's all too easy to scoff at what you will hear in those talks (e.g., you might complain about the lack of methodological rigor), just as it is easy for our clinical colleagues to scoff at what they hear in our talks (e.g., they might complain about methodologically rigorous work of no practical importance whatsoever). Experimental psychologists and clinical psychologists need each other, but it is easier (and, unfortunately, more entertaining) to ignore that fact and to polarize into separate fields that increasingly devalue each other. Perhaps that is an irreversible trend, but I'd like to think otherwise, so next year's Division 3 program will add to its usual assortment of purely experimentally-oriented presentations by including one or two that speak more directly to the vast throng of clinically-oriented psychologists who will no doubt make the journey to San Diego come next August. It should be fun and interesting, and I look forward to seeing you in America's Finest City.