Editorial

Abstract

In 1960, the newly founded Society for Psychophysiological Research captured the already considerable breadth of the just-forming field of psychophysiology. The Society began publishing Psychophysiology in 1964 with the mandate to address that breadth. As the field has grown rather enormously in the past 40 years, the journal has expanded accordingly. Whole new (and still overlapping) fields such as behavioral medicine have taken root, and new technologies such as hemodynamic brain imaging continue to enrich the psychophysiologist's toolbox. Beyond important domains of clinical, developmental, and human-factors application and exciting methodological developments, psychophysiology has made great progress on basic substantive questions such as the relationship of fundamental reflexes to emotional behavior and the role of regional brain specialization in perceptual and cognitive function. In so doing, the field has necessarily faced up to conceptual challenges such as what is involved in manipulating emotion in the laboratory and in verifying the manipulation.