Early and Recent Trends in Psychophysiology

Abstract

The Journal of Psychophysiology (JoP) has faced considerable changes due to external influences during the last 10 years. Those included change of the editor and the editorial board, new policies, changes concerning the Federation of the European Psychophysiology Societies (FEPS), and so forth. Moreover, changes in psychophysiology itself, in particular advances in methods, have occurred during the last 10 years which might be reflected in JoP. In the present editorial I will try to point out developments and trends in psychophysiology as far as they are reflected in JoP, by comparing recent contents to the contents 10 years ago. To begin with, when comparing the issues of 1999 and 2000 to the more recent issues in 2009 and 2010 the reader is struck by several general changes. The most general change is due to the fact that the publisher decided to publish JoP as electronic version only starting in 2008. This change was mainly made by the reason that readers are increasingly wanting to handle journals in digital rather than paper form, as this allows readers to make better use of the information in a journal from the comfort of their desks. As to the contents of the journal, three general changes can be observed: First, in the old issues the Abstracts of the annual meetings of the member societies of FEPS captured a huge part of the earlier volumes since one of the reasons for JoP was the publishing of the abstracts of the society meetings. Such abstracts are fairly important for young psychophysiologists. The main problem with the abstracts was the steadily rising scale of the society meetings, and hence the amount of the abstracts. For example, 200 abstracts from a large society meeting would fill an entire issue. In consequence an increasing backlog of abstracts from earlier years had developed during the early years, which has strongly affected the intended purpose, namely timely publication of abstracts. Also, a journal only filled with abstract does not sell. Consequently the FEPS delegates have voted to cancel the publication of society abstracts, which changes JoP in a way that only papers are published in the more recent issues. A second change which can be observed is the fade-out of book reviews, which were frequent in the old times, for example, three book reviews already in the first issue of Vol. 13, 1999, while there were no book reviews in Vols. 23 and 24, 10 years later. A third and deplorable general change is the fade-out of letters to the editor or short commentaries over the years, which were frequent in the old times and reflected lively debates (e.g., Carretie & Iglesias, 1999; Kayser & Tenke, 1999; Ohman, 1999). The fourth general change, which was made possible by the dropout of the abstracts, was the increase of special issues on important topics. In Vols. 13 and 14 there was no special issue, but the continuation of an earlier method topic, namely the correction of ocular artifacts, which covers only four discussion papers in Vol. 14 (Barrett, 2000; Croft, 2000; Picton, van Roon, Armilio, Berg, Ille, & Scherg, 2000; Verleger, 2000). In sharp contrast, in the more recent Vols. 23 and 24 there were three special issues, namely on neuroelectric oscillations along the Lifespan (Yordanova, Kolev, & Rothenberger, 2009), cognitive effects of alcohol (Tomberg, 2010), and on consciousness and its neurofunctional descriptors (Meucci & Sannita, 2010). As can be seen, the topics of the recent special issues are devoted to cognitive neuroscience, while the older special issue was on techniques. This reflects a general trend in contents which will be discussed in more detail in the following. A considerable part of the old volumes was devoted to method topics which were then mainly focused on peripheral measures. For example, Koers, Mulder, and van der Veen (1999) compared two methods to assess stimulus-related changes in heart rate and blood pressure, Keil, Elbert, and Taub (1999) determined the value of accelerometry as a measure of real-world outcome by comparing it with EMG, Smeja, Foerster, Fuchs, Emmans, Hornig, and Fahrenberg (1999) describe an accelerometric method to quantify tremor activity and posture in real life, and Kettunen, Ravaja, and Keltikangas-Jarvinen (2000) proposed a smoothing method to detect coupled responses in psychophysiological time series. Such method papers were often followed by lively comments (e.g., Jennings, 1999; Velden, 1999) which show the hot debate about new method approaches in the earlier