International Directory of Psychology: "A Guide To People, Places, And Policies"

In the past several decades, psychology has grown so rapidly in many countries that no one has been able to keep up-to-date on more than a handful of countries. To be sure, the highly developed countries of North America, Western Europe, Ja­ pan, and Australia have generally had well-known national psychological societies for most of this century, and consider­ able information about their universities and institutes has been published at one time or another. But even in these more highly developed countries, the rapid changes of recent years are not well known. In any event, what information has been published is scattered so widely that it is hardly accessible when needed. Still less well known is the growth of psychology in the developing countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and at least for Western readers, even the modem nations of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union are relatively unknown. Only recently have most Western psychologists become aware of the fact that psychology as they know it is provincial. With more than half of the world's highly trained psychologists in Canada and the United States, which together devote far more of their national resources to psychological research than is true of any other countries in the world, it is not surprising that the North American journals, psychological associations, institutes, clinics, and other manifestations of psychology have completely domi­ nated the field, at least until recently.