A Positive Psychological Paper on Scientology
Recently two positive things have happened regarding knowledge and use of Scientology. The first is named in the previous article; the appearance on the Internet of 40 early and first editions of Scientology books (direct link: http://www.antology.info/first-editions.php ).
The other one is the publication in The Humanistic Psychologist of a positive paper concerning Scientology. This was written by a very old time Scientologist, John Wolfe. John has been deeply interested in Scientology since February 1950 when he read John Campbell's article (editorial) in the March 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. He became a book auditor in the summer of 1950. John has also been deeply involved in psychology and to quote from the paper he wrote, "John H. Wolfe retired in 1994 from a long career at the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center, where he led a team of psychologists in several projects to develop and validate new computerized aptitude tests. He is best known for his development of the mixture approach to cluster analysis."
Anyone can have it. You get it by clicking on the following link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hum0000043 . When you do that you get an abstract of the paper and to see the full printed version you click on the word PDF on the right side of the screen. Alternatively you can click on the HTML link on the right side of the screen.
I was in touch with John Wolfe about his writing this article and it does appear that it is quite an arduous process to get one's paper accepted by a scientific journal. The network of scientific journals in psychology is also fairly complex as is the distribution and reading of the individual articles published in those magazines. John sent me abstracts of about 50 articles available when psychologists and others search in the database of psychological articles. From the point of view of wanting to spread the positive side of Scientology, they are a sorry bunch! Many deal with reviews of books and films describing the atrocities of the Miscavige Church of Scientology. In contrast John's article describes clearly a few basic Scientology auditing principles and even suggests one which might be useful to psychologists.
John Wolfe wrote an email to me about the availability and distribution of these articles and I quote it to you here. So enjoy reading what is a interesting scientific article on Scientology.
Here is John's letter to me:
On 16-10-2016 16:11, John H. Wolfe wrote:
Ant:
I want to expand on what I last wrote to you about the availability of journals.
The American Psychological Association (APA) publishes about 92 journals. There are, perhaps, 5 times that number of psychological journals published by other profit and non-profit organizations. All APA members receive the same two journals: The American Psychologist and APA Monitor. All other journals are sent only to subscribers. It costs $62 a year to subscribe to The Humanistic Psychologist.
Most subscribers do not read all of the articles in each issue. Usually, they skim the Table of Contents and select an article or two to read. If they are too busy, they skip the entire issue.
If you live close to a University, or live on campus, you don't have to subscribe. You can go to the Library and read the journals there. Once you have graduated, you may wish to subscribe to keep up with your profession.
The major value of journals is not in their current issues. They provide archival information for researchers. The way people do research has changed significantly in my lifetime.
It used to be that if you were starting research on a particular issue, you did a literature search to see what people had done before you. You did this by going to the Library Reference section and looking at books of Abstracts and articles indexed by subject. You wrote down the names of all journal articles that looked promising. Then you went to the Card Catalog and looked up the call number of the bound year of each journal on your list. Then you got the bound journal from the stacks, found the article, and read it, writing down notes of relevant information.
The advent of photocopiers simplified this. You didn't have to read and take notes in the Library, you could just use their photocopy machines to get a copy of the article itself. You could read it at home and highlight relevant passages.
Next, the Internet came along. Now, you could do your searches online, using Google Scholar and PsycNet. Then, with a mouse click, you could bring up an Abstract of the article. Instead of using a photocopy machine, you could get a PDF copy of the article itself. But you might have to pay for the last. The APA charges about $11.99 for a PDF copy of a journal article. Commercial publishers charge up to $33 an article. There are several ways to avoid the charges:
1. Electronic access is free to subscribers of the journal.
2. If you are using a University Library computer, you can download the article for free.
3. Some articles are Open Access, which means that someone else has paid to make the download free for everyone. Research paid for by the U.S. Government is, by law, open access. I paid the APA to make my article open access.
Another development makes it unnecessary to subscribe to a journal in order to keep up. You can sign up for PsychAlerts for any journal you wish, and you will get an email listing the Contents whenever a new issue comes out. Also, you get an email when an article is published Online First, before the issue is printed on paper. You can click on a article title and get an Abstract of the article. You don't have to be an APA member or subscriber of the journal to do this.
My article was published online first. I expect that the printed edition of the journal will come out March 2017.
Most people will not read my article unless they are searching for information on Scientology. Thus the impact will be long-term over the next 50 years, on anyone planning to write an article or book involving Scientology.
---John
