Posters

In chapter 12 we write about posters and how they have become the dominant method for conveying research results at psychology meetings. Today I put together a poster for the upcoming meeting of the Southwestern Psychological Association (SWPA) to be held in San Antonio, TX next week.

I had a conversation a few months ago with a colleague from the English Department. She's in charge of our school's first faculty research day to be held next Fall. The idea is to provide a hometown setting in which faculty who have published or presented research elsewhere to do it again on campus. She asked me about posters, apparently because they are rare at meeting of English faculty. So, I volunteered to handle the poster session for her (after sending her some pages from chapter 12, that is :-).

Here is the main graphic on the poster:



I compared the American Psychological Association's (APA) list of convention topics to the similar list of convention topics of the Association for Psychological Science (APS). The 39 topics in the green area above are the ones common to both lists. The 18 in the greenish-yellow area are the ones unique to the APA list and the 7 in the gray are unique to the APS list. Also on the poster are the APA and APS lists in alphabetical order as are an abstract (see below) and the topics that used before 1998 and the topics they use now.

My fingers are still sticky from the spray glue I used to assemble the poster. I'll be presenting it next week and hope to have some conversations with passersby about how these lists help us define psychology today.