For the past three years, Division 38 (Health Psychology) of the American Psychological Association has conducted monthly policy dinner meetings featuring various national health policy experts as guest speakers. The express purpose behind these meetings has been to develop an appreciation within the division for the complexities of formulating public policy. A desirable, though secondary, goal has been to educate guest\ speakers to the potential contributions that psychology could make in various program areas. The resulting dialogues have been stimulating and have opened a number of administrative doors to input from psychologists. The authors urge other APA divisions, committees, and especially state and local associations to initiate their own series of similar meetings. The importance of the profession's developing a first-hand appreciation of the intricacies and truly interdisciplinary nature of the political process governing health care in our nation is especially stressed.The authors would like to express their appreciation for the encouragement and continuing support of Joseph Matarazzo, Stephen Weiss, Neal Miller, and Jerome Singer in their roles as presidents of APA Division 38 (Health Psychology). We would also Jike to express our sincerest appreciation for the volunteer help provided by Hazel Thomas, Patty Camp, and Lisa Jonas, staff of the Association for the Advancement of Psychology.

It is a well-documented finding that children respond more slowly to a stimulus that has been presented repeatedly just before test than to a novel stimulus. The effect, for which a two-factor theory has recently been proposed, did not occur in the only previous study of adults using a comparable procedure. Experiment 1 demonstrated the effect with adults. The previous negative finding may have been the result of too few repetitions of the stimulus. Experiment 2 provided additional support for the two-factor theory. The theory suggests that the effect is the net result of partially counteracting changes in two attentional processes. One process, the alertness elicited by a stimulus, is held to decrease as a result of repeated presentation of the stimulus, while the second process, encoding, is facilitated. The hypothesis tested in Experiment 2 was that the alertness decrement dissipates over a brief passage of time, while the facilitation of encoding does not. Subjects exposed to a repeatedly presented color were tested either immediately thereafter or after a 15-min or 30-min interval. As predicted, the observed effect shifted from one of flower response to one of faster response to the repeated stimulus as the delay interval increased.

Psychology is a relative newcomer to the ranks of professions involved systematically in policy issues. The potential for psychology's contribution to a broad range of national issues is great. Yet, policymakers often are unfamiliar with psychology as a discipline and as a profession. They lack the knowledge of what important contributions psychologists or behavioral experts have to make to specific problem areas. Hence, specific reference to psychology or psychological expertise may not appear in various federal statutes, and this limits the possibility of psychology contributing to needed solutions to national problems. The political process of policy formation is discussed, and the explicit federal recognition of psychology within enacted legislation is examined.Psychologists have not been systematically involved throughout the various stages of the political process until most recently (

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A theoretical interpretation of the stimulus familiarization effect was explored in three experiments. The general familiarization effect finding is that after repeated exposure to a stimulus, reaction time is slower to that stimulus than to a novel stimulus. In Experiment 1 this phenomenon was replicated using 7-year-olds as subjects. Experiments 2 and 3, using a reaction time paradigm analogous to one that separates attention into alertness and encoding components, demonstrated that (a) the familiarization effect results primarily from a decrease in alertness associated with a familiar stimulus and (b) when alertness is held constant, reaction time to the familiar stimulus is faster than reaction time to the novel stimulus due to an encoding advantage enjoyed by the familiar stimulus. Developmental implications of an overall processing system are discussed.

Mere observation of 30 presentations of a colored form results in slower reaction time responses to the familiarized stimulus than to a comparable novel stimulus. Prior research suggest that this result is due to two subsidiary effects of repetition: alertness decrement and encoding facilitation. Four experiments were conducted to compare the effects of stimulus repetition on colors and words. The two-factor theory of repetition was found to hold for words as well as for colors; for words, in contrast to colors, encoding facilitation was found to be stronger than alertness decrement.

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