Editorial.

Abstract

Applied-oriented experimental psychology was arguably not present at the birth of psychology as an empirical science in America in 1875. However, by the end of the 1890s, scientific psychology had become sufficiently broad to encompass a wide range of potential applications. Casual perusal of old volumes of Psychological Review and Journal of Experimental Psychology reveals that applied-oriented experimental psychology was a lively domain for investigation, as psychological research blossomed in the first quarter of the 20th century.One of the first experimental psychology investigations that specifically addressed applications in an American Psychological Association (APA) journal was the series of classic studies conducted by Harter (1897, 1899) on the acquisition of skills in telegraphic language published in Psychological Review (though technically APA did not own the journal until 1925 [Hilgard, 1987]). Numerous other studies on applied topics appeared in that journal in the decades that followed. The Journal of Experimental Psychology started publication in 1916, and in the very first volume contained studies on the effects of uniform and non-uniform lighting with reference to street illumination (Burtt, 1916), on the use of psychological tests for college students (Rowland & Lowden, 1916), and on the effects of repetition on advertisement impressions (Strong, 1916). The first issues of the Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP) appeared in 1917. At least for the first few years, though, the majority of the experimentally oriented articles that appeared in JAP focused on mental testing.A central controversy concerned whether such application-oriented empirical and theoretical research belonged in mainstream experimental psychology or was to be subsumed under a broad applied psychology. Debate sometimes centered on what conditions define a psychological experiment. In a seminal sampling of psychologists, for example, Terman (1924) surveyed "Seashore, [E. L.

Confidence intervals for effect sizes: Compliance and clinical significance in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology..

“…In 2003, the editors of the Journal of Applied Psychology (Zedeck, 2003), the Journal of Educational Psychology (Harris, 2003), and Health Psychology (Stone, 2003) each published editorials indicating that ESs were required-but at the same time, the Instructions were all changed to specify that ESs "should" be reported when possible. In addition, two journals published editorials directing authors to use ESs but without changing the Instructions at the same time: the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (Ackerman, 2002) and Neuropsychology (in which Becker, Knowlton, & Anderson, 2005, stated that ESs would be required for all primary findings, but the Instructions did not change until September, 2008). Other than JCCP, the only mention of CIs in the Instructions was in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Zedeck, 2003), and those Instructions did not specify CIs for ESs, as opposed to CIs around means or beta weights.…”