For Immediate Release

The Journal of General Psychology Introduces New Research and  
Paradigm to the Field of Comparative Psychology

February 27, 2007

   Washington, DC–– A special animal studies issue of Heldref  
Publications’ Journal of General Psychology introduces new evidence  
in nonhuman primate research coming out of the Language Research  
Center at Georgia State University and the Great Ape Trust of Iowa.  
Also in the April 2007 issue, Sam Gosling and Anna Graybeal,  
researchers at the University of Texas-Austin, propose a new  
paradigm, which has the potential to be groundbreaking in the field.

Throughout psychology’s history, researchers have utilized animal  
research to understand behavioral and mental processes. Human  
behaviors that contributors to the special issue examine include  
delayed gratification in the rhesus macaque and evidence of a  
Strooplike effect in the chimpanzee.

The impact of the research, submitted from renowned universities  
across the United States, is published in the context of Dr.  
Gosling’s tree thinking paradigm, which previews where psychology and  
animal research is headed in the coming years. Many researchers  
testify to the potential such a paradigm will offer to comparative  
psychology.

“Although tree thinking has played a crucial role in biological  
literature over the last hundred years, phylogenetic ideas haven’t  
had much of an influence in how we conceptualize human behavior.  
Gosling and Graybeal do a wonderful job at summarizing the core  
ideas, the methods, and the insights needed to bring tree thinking to  
contemporary psychology,” says R. Chris Fraley, associate professor  
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“In this important and timely article, Gosling and Graybeal lay out  
ways that tree thinking can and should be applied in empirical  
analyses to enhance our understanding of the significance of  
psychological adaptations and the environmental features that drove  
their selection. This is must-reading for anyone interested in how  
comparative data can shed light on understanding human behavior—and  
if you’re not, it will tell you why you should be interested,” says  
evolutionary psychologist Dr. Steven Gandestad from the University of  
New Mexico.

The Journal of General Psychology is a quarterly peer-review  
publication of the Helen Dwight Reid Foundation: http://www.heldref.org.

For more information on the special issue of The Journal of General  
Psychology, please contact the managing editor, Jason Alyesh at  
[log in to unmask], or via telephone at (202)296–6267 x1267.


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