Editor Spotlight

As professor and chair of the Educational Psychology department at the University of Illinois, Daniel Morrow, PhD, focuses on issues of lifelong and life-wide learning.

Much of Morrow's work addresses these issues in the context of health care (e.g., health literacy and self-care among older adults with chronic illness) and aviation (e.g., pilot/controller communication).

Tell us a bit about your background: What is your area of research? What is your most recent journal-editing experience?

I am a cognitive psychologist by training, with an interest in cognition and aging as they affect comprehension, learning, and communication.

For the past several years I have been an Associate Editor for the Journal of Human Factors, and in 2013 I edited a volume focused on the human factors of health care for the Reviews of Human Factors and Ergonomics series.

Why is this journal important for the field? What is its relevance to society/public health? What are the hot issues in your area right now?

I think of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (JEPA) as the premier outlet for "use-inspired basic research" (Stokes, 2011, Pasteur's Quadrant) in the psychological sciences.

While theory and application are traditionally contrasted as opposed goals, Donald Stoke's formulation emphasized the value of research that pursues both as mutually reinforcing constraints. Theory helps parse problems into empirically addressable phenomena, and can move us toward solutions that generalize beyond the specific conditions of the study.

At the same time, addressing practical issues, or conditions of use, can advance theory by providing crucial contexts for evaluating theory-based predictions.

Use-inspired basic research not only advances theory, but addresses key societal problems such as designing more effective computer-assisted diagnostic systems, improving the validity of eyewitness testimony, and influencing attitudes about climate change and other crucial challenges facing society.

Briefly, what are your main priorities? For example, how will you grow readership, what type of scholarship would you like to see in the journal, and what kind of content are you hoping to attract?

I plan to continue the tradition of publishing the best of "use-inspired basic research" in several ways.

The first is to maintain the methodological rigor of work appearing in the journal by requiring experimental methods to support causal inferences about mechanisms underlying the results.

Second, I will encourage practices that ensure JEPA continues to contribute to incremental growth in knowledge of psychological principles, methods, and empirical findings. These practices include publishing papers with multiple experiments that replicate and extend core findings. This practice helps to address issues of replicability in psychological science, as well as to avoid "bite-size" science that leads to fragmented publication.

Third, papers describing "use-inspired basic research" are most useful when read by people who can leverage the findings to address the target problems.

I hope to broaden journal readership to match the broad coverage of topics published in JEPA, including social and developmental as well as cognitive studies that address issues in a broad range of domains, such as law, health care, aviation, and education.

While JEPA is already broadly read by researchers in psychology and allied social sciences, it is less well known beyond these disciplines. I plan to reach out to practitioner organizations (e.g., American Medical Association) and government regulatory agencies (e.g., Food & Drug Administration; Federal Aviation Administration) in these domains, for example by distributing briefs of key articles that summarize "bottom line" messages relevant to the organizations.

Finally, I want to ensure the journal remains relevant to new generations by expanding JEPA's student reviewer program.

Return to Editor Spotlight homepage