APA Convention - Society for General Psychology

As I mentioned in a prior post, while I'm not a big fan of the main APA convention, I am a big fan of the APA Shadow Convention (© Charles 2012). This year I am in charge of the hospitality suite run by The Society for General Psychology (APA Division 1). We are co-hosting a number of events with The Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (Division 24) and The Society for the History of Psychology (Division 26). It is a pretty fun program, with some experiments thrown in (Post-symposium discussions, a Speed Scholars Event, etc.) as well as a lot of social activities. There is also the two-hour "Unifying Psychology" Lunch I mentioned in the last post, featuring several authors from this month's special issue. I'll do my best to get the program cut and pasted below. Hope to see some of you in Hawaii!

The APA convention can be worth while?!?

Last year I attended the American Psychological Association's annual meeting for the first time in over a decade. The main conference was as much a waste of time as I had remembered. It was filled with sad talks given to mostly empty rooms and sad poster presentations that only a handful of people stopped at (including my own). The only filled rooms were for awards talks, where people talked about work long past. That was really interesting, but only if they were in an area you were not familiar with, and people tended not to attend talks in areas they were unfamiliar with. (In fairness, many rooms were filled for talks that counted as continuing education credits for clinicians, as well as a few "advice" sessions for students.)

That said, it was actually a very positive experience; I was now connected enough to find out about The APA Shadow Conference (© Charles 2012). It turns out that almost every APA division has a bunch of meetings, small talks, and organized discussions in dedicated hotel suites, and that a lot of very interesting stuff happens there. Small groups (ranging from 5 to 25) people interested in similar topics were continuously coming together, with discussion continuing over meals and across days. Most of the time the suites were filled to a neigh ideal level of intimacy, sometimes they were downright crowded. Never was a person talking to an empty room, nor was a speaker ever addressing people who were not genuinely interested. This was actually worth while!