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 Dr. Steven Gangestad, evolutionary psychologist and associate chair of the graduate program at 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 jalyesh@heldref.org, or via telephone at (202)296–6267 x1267.

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