I had the luck and good sense to decide to pursue graduate school following
my undergraduate degree at Penn State University. When you look back on life,
you sometimes can't remember the most important things, and can remember clearly
things that don't matter much. I have no idea why I decided to go to graduate
school other than I enjoyed school, the Viet Nam war was raging at the time, and
I had a real fascination with psychology as a discipline. I would guess that the
decision was made over a bottle of beer in a discussion with fraternity brothers
sometime during my senior year. I know that it was not given much real thought.
Although it was certainly the most important decision of my life, I have no
clear recollection of how and when it was made. However, I applied late for
admission to graduate school, but the real decision was made by my undergraduate
mentor, Robert Stern, Ph.D., an experimental psychologist and psychophysiologist
at Penn State (who ended up being one of their most successful department
chairmen). He suggested I go to Bowling Green State University and study with a
colleague of his, Harold Johnson, Ph.D. who was a clinical psychologist and a
psychophysiologist that he knew. That is the only place that I considered going.
Dr. Johnson had an amazing impact on my life, promoting my interests in both
clinical psychology and psychophysiology, and I worked with him as my major
professor from 1969 through 1975 when I accepted my first faculty position at
the University of Southern Mississippi. I was hired in the first "class" of
young assistant professors that the new president, Aubry Lucas was hiring to
convert USM from a "teaching college" into a "research university". I had never
been south of Maryland but I flew into Hattiesburg, MS on a job interview. I
discovered Hattiesburg to be a very nice little town, and the University of
Southern Mississippi a surprisingly great place to be for the first 25 years of
my career. Near the end, USM named an individual as president that I had worked
under early in my career who, once president, changed the university in many
fundamental ways, all of which were not ways that I believed were in the best
interest of the University or faculty and certainly not in mine. So after 29
years, it was time to retire and look at other possibilities. The chance to
become the department chair at Louisiana State University in Shreveport was very
attractive, but necessitated putting a lifetime of belongings into trucks and
moving them to Shreveport and starting over in a new state.
I am a clinical psychologist by training and that has been a very important
part of my career. I will discuss it below. However, even as an undergraduate at
Penn State, I developed a fascination with the interaction of psychological
factors with physiological factors. This is an area called psychophysiology. It
is either equivalent or similar to other terms like psychosomatics, behavioral
medicine, and health psychology. It literally is at the junction of Descarte's
mind/body dualism. I'm sure that what fascinated me most was that it was an area
of psychology which involved psychology and electronics (and thus the connection
with ham radio) since the process of recording and processing physiological
dependent measures all involved basic and sophisticated electronics. Very
quickly, my interests began to center on one of the core issues of
psychophysiology, the area of emotion, as emotion was, by its very definition, a
psychological phenomenon which involved physiological reactions at its very
core. For most people, an emotion without a physiological component is not
really an emotion, but a thought. However, the role and contribution of
physiological processes (autonomic and central) to the experience of emotion was
then (as it is still) very much a matter of debate. Early in graduate school, I
realized that although an understanding of our internal physiological system
functioning was a key part of successful life, there was really very little real
knowledge (e.g., facts) about the extent and nature of people's access and
understanding of their visceral sensations. This is as central to the basis of
symptom perception (our detection of non-normal physiological states (disease,
cancer, etc.)) in medical disease as it is to emotion, stress, anxiety,
and positive mental health (psychological states). In the mid 1960s, we knew
precious little about any of this at a real scientific level. There were lots of
theories, and philosophers had been at this area for centuries, however, science
had just begun to examine these thorny questions. In many ways, my entire
career has been devoted to this fundamental fascination: How do we process our
internal physiological sensations? Under what conditions are we are aware of our
sensations and does that awareness change over life and events? How do we
scientifically study awareness of internal processes? What is a valid and
reliable and ecologically valid procedure to measure a person's awareness of
internal events? Are there individual differences in visceral perception? Are
these differences replicable and consistent? What is the impact of high and low
visceral sensitivity to one's life and immunity or susceptibility to stresses,
etc? Do differences in visceral sensitivity translate into mental health issues?
These, and other questions and answers, have occupied most of my professional
interest and attention for the past 40 years. I have done other research and
been interested in other issues, but these core areas are where you will see my attention and interest
has remained.
Links below lead to my curriculum vita (a list of publications,
presentations, and other academic accomplishments, honors, and service). A second
link leads to a reference list that was put together in the early 1990 for a very
large review of the research and findings of the entire area of visceral
sensation/perception as part of a nearly 200 page book chapter that I had
authored and published. The list is less complete since approximately 2000 but I
plan to update it with more recent work soon.
In many ways, the most rewarding and undoubtedly most rewarding aspect of an
academic career is the role one has with nurturing and guiding the intellectual
and professional development of very sharp, doctoral students. Although the role
is temporary, it is amazing to watch recent college graduates, who are very
bright and motivated by definition, but still very young and evolving, find
their "intellectual feet" in graduate school, turn their fascination and hunger
for learning and innovation into real drive to discover and develop, and over
the course of four or five years, become young scientists. I hve had the honor
of being entrusted with the guidance and development of about 60 - 65 doctoral
students that I have mentored over my career. All of these people are having an
impact on the world, the profession, and lives of real people. Some are making
major personal contributions to the science of psychology, and it is immensely
rewarding to having been a part of their development. Many of them now have
their own students, and the process repeats itself.
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