Editorial Type:
Article Category: Research Article
| Online Publication Date: Sep 01, 2010
What Psychology as a Science Owes Neal Miller: The Example of His Biofeedback Research
What Psychology as a Science Owes Neal Miller: The Example of His Biofeedback Research
PhD
Page Range: 108 – 117
Neal Miller did more to make psychology a science than any other investigator. His importance does not lie with any specific discoveries that he made, but rather with his way of doing scientific research, which involved pursuing a line of logic systematically through sequences of experiments, and paying attention to several alternate hypotheses that could answer each of the experimental questions addressed. His approach was a model of what has been called “Strong Inference” and that is characteristically used in the hard sciences. His biofeedback research is used as a case history of his method of approach.Abstract
Keywords: Neal Miller; strong inference; scientific logic; biofeedback; logic tree
Copyright: Association for Applied Psychophysiology & Biofeedback

Figure 1
Logic tree of Neal Miller's biofeedback research.

Contributor Notes
Correspondence: Edward Taub, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, CPM 712, 1530 3rd Avenue S, Birmingham, AL 35294-0018, e-mail: etaub@uab.edu.