REMINISCEIVCES OF JEAB

Nathan H. Azrin (Editor, 1964-1966)BEHAVIOR IN THE BEGINNING

JEAB, where were you when I needed you?In 1955, I had finished my dissertation re-search and was deliberating with Dr. Skinneron where to publish it. (Others may call him"Fred"-folks who scarcely know him, or he,them-but to me even "Mister" seemed pre-sumptuous.) He suggested the Journal of Psy-chology. One alternative was Science, whichwas receptive to operant behavior studies butusually published one-page reports. The Jour-nal of Experimental Psychology was not recep-tive and was too enamored of statistics ratherthan the behavioral referent of the numericaltransformations. So off my manuscript wentto Journal of Psychology, where it appeared ina 1956 issue that is the only one of that journalI have ever looked at. We have come a longway; I now subscribe to ten journals that arestrongly behavioral in orientation and wish Ihad the time to read even the abstracts fromseveral others.

I can still recall a meeting in a hotel roomat the EPA convention in 1957. Nat Schoen-

feld was surveying the small assemblage todetermine the number of manuscripts each ofus anticipated submitting per year for the"newsletter" I thought was being considered.Joe Brady, Murray Sidman, Charlie Ferster,Og Lindsley, Dr. Skinner-everyone there re-sponded with estimates of "Five," "Four,""Six," "Three," and so on, with no numberless than three. When my turn came, I hesi-tantly whispered "One" and wondered how Iwould find an excuse if I couldn't deliver. Theestimates were so impressive that Nat and theothers concluded that a newsletter would beinadequate and a journal, which had also beendiscussed by some of the participants, wasneeded. And the Journal was born. In duetime, most of us delivered our articles. Moreimportant, so did many others whose identitieswere unknown at the time to the founders.The initial burst of manuscripts slackened andJEAB was, for a time, coming out very latebecause it did not have enough to publish atthe promised quarterly intervals. But soon theflow of manuscripts was sufficient to sustainus and, indeed, seven years later, my first yearas Editor (1964) was the first to feature bi-monthly publication.Once JEAB began, I looked forward to re-

ceiving it in the mail just as I always lookedforward to attending the annual EPA meet-ings; each issue was rather like a family re-union, where I could see what my friends weredoing. Authors, editors, readers-we were asmall group alternating in taking different roleswith each issue, even with each article. JEABhelped satisfy our obsession with rigorous re-search, our need for a sympathetic publicationoutlet of high quality, and our hope of creatinga more descriptive science of behavior. And italso meant that we didn't have to rely so muchon carrying sample cumulative records to con-ventions to share with like-minded enthusiasts.As the third Editor of JEAB, after Charlie

Ferster and John Boren, I was given no guid-ance as to how to run the Journal. I had servedas Associate Editor under John, along with J.M. (Mike) Harrison and Roger Kelleher, andthey continued as my Associate Editors, joined

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by Bill Morse after about two years. The Jour-nal was too young to have strongly establishedpolicies and the field was too new and full ofsurprises for one to feel that a title conferredspecial wisdom. From the founding, we all hadfelt so strongly about precision and objectivitythat the title of Apparatus Editor had beencreated and Douglas Anger took on the posi-tion for several years. I did it for a couple ofyears, feeling a strong personal commitmentto defining both response and stimulus con-ditions in as standardized a fashion as possible.I wanted to have physical definitions that wereobtained through apparatus rather than themuch more nebulous social definitions thatsometimes were used. In fact, much of my ownresearch at the time was devoted to developingways of measuring human behavior with pre-cision. During my term, Thom Verhave andthen Bill Holz took over as what had beenrenamed Technical Notes Editor.Lower animals were used by most investi-

gators in large part to control for unknownhistories, yet we cherished human studies suchas those by Ted Ayllon, Jack Michael, andHal Weiner, because we felt that the generalapplication of our approach in applied settingswas imminent. JEAB continued in my years

to be receptive to studies with any subject mat-ter-retardation, drugs, education, psychosis,imprinting, aggression, sex-so long as highstandards of evidence and experimentationwere met. But, in considering whether a paperin a new field was publishable, we always triedto remain true to Charlie Ferster's admonitionthat one of the Editor's principal roles in mak-ing editorial judgments is to "protect the au-thor from the reviewers," balancing defini-tiveness against importance. I am forevergrateful to him.

In 1967, when we first investigated whetherwe should start a second journal, one devotedto applications, I was put in charge of inves-tigating its feasibility. And now I found myselfdoing what Nat Schoenfeld had done in thathotel room at EPA ten years earlier: deter-mining whether there were enough active re-searchers who would promise us their bestwork to warrant the founding of a new journal.There were, and we started the Journal ofAp-plied Behavior Analysis.

Department of PsychologyNova UniversityFt. Lauderdale, Florida 33314

A. Charles Catania (Editor, 1967-1969)EDITORIAL SELECTION

I first heard about JEAB while I was anundergraduate at Columbia, and I saw its firstissue during my first year as a graduate stu-dent. But my involvement with it really beganlater, with the publication of a few papers andthen the occasional review of manuscripts. Iassume most of my reviews were reasonablycompetent, but the one I remember most viv-idly was not. I had published only one paperon human operant behavior, and during hiseditorial term Nate Azrin sent me a humanoperant manuscript for review. I recom-mended its acceptance, but Nate rejected it onthe grounds that no evidence was provided that

the putative reinforcing consequences were in-deed effective as reinforcers. I think I learnedthe lesson, but Nate never again sent me amanuscript on human operant behavior forreview.

Nevertheless, I must have done some thingsright. In early 1966, while I was in the midstof wiring an experiment on the electrome-chanical equipment of the time, John Borentelephoned me on behalf of SEAB to askwhether I would be a candidate for the edi-torship of JEAB. I was surprised; after all, Ihad received my PhD only a little more thanfive years earlier. I learned much later that the