Association for Psychological Science
professional association for psychology research
The Association for Psychological Science (APS), previously the American Psychological Society, is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to be the home of integrative and rigorous psychological science that connects people, methods, and careers for the public good across the world. APS publishes several journals, holds an annual meeting, disseminates psychological science research findings to the general public, and works with policymakers to strengthen support for scientific psychology.
History
APS was founded in 1988 by a group of researchers and scientifically-oriented practitioners who were interested in advancing scientific psychology and its representation at the national and international level. This group felt that the American Psychological Association (APA) was not adequately supporting scientific research because it focused on the practitioner/clinician side of psychology, and had effectively "become a guild". Tensions between the scientists and the practitioners escalated. The two groups had contrasting beliefs about such divisive issues as scientific versus human values, determinism versus Indeterminism, objectivism versus intuitionism, laboratory investigations versus field studies, nomothetic versus idiographic explanations, and elementism versus holism (Simonton, 2000).
The founding of the APS was only the most recent instance of long-standing intra-disciplinary tensions that have characterized the field since APA's inception in 1892. Organized psychology has always represented various constituencies, and beginning in the 1970s, there were several attempts to restructure the APA in an effort to mitigate internal tensions and satisfy the needs of a heterogeneous group. In 1987, the Assembly for Scientific and Applied Psychologists (ASAP) formed to support another reorganization effort, but ultimately this reorganization plan was rejected by the APA membership in early 1988. As a consequence, in August 1988, the ASAP became the APS.
APS surpassed 5,000 members in its first six months.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Association for Psychological Science” as professional association for psychology research. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as professional association for psychology research. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q743631. VIAF identifies the subject as 147582266. The Library of Congress control number is no2006030839. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988, 2000, 1892 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Association for Psychological Science” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.