Guest Column

Loretta McGregor,
STP President

For this month’s update, I have invited our Vice President for Grants and Awards, Morton Ann Gernsbacher, to submit a guest column.  Morton is seeking participants for a survey on renaming the Abnormal Psychology course to reduce stigma. Please complete the survey and encourage your colleagues to do as well.

Brief Survey on Changing the Name of Abnormal Psychology

by Morton Ann Gernsbacher

Academic course titles preview our courses’ content, connect with our departments’ curricula, and entice our potential students. We also hope that our course titles don’t offend or stigmatize any students in our courses or members of the general public.

Recently, many psychology departments have chosen to change the title of their “Abnormal Psychology” courses, due to concern that the term “Abnormal” might be offensive and stigmatizing. In 2022, the previously named APA Journal of Abnormal Psychology also changed its name to The Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science due to concerns about stigma.

Last year, then STP President Diane Finley commissioned a Working Group to investigate the curricular implications of changing the name of “Abnormal Psychology” courses. I heartily encourage everyone interested in this topic to read this Working Group’s masterpiece report.

The report answered the important question of how changing the name of “Abnormal Psychology” courses would affect high school advanced placement credits and applications to graduate programs. The working group concluded there would be “minimal problems” and any “problems can be minimized with communication among interested parties (alerting transfer institutions, providing course description and/or course syllabus).”

The report also recommended possible replacement names for “Abnormal Psychology” based on important metrics of stigma. Last summer, my lab conducted a study to evaluate the Working Group’s most highly recommended replacement name, along with the previous name “Abnormal Psychology” and an often-chosen replacement name “Psychopathology.”

In our study, we used assays for assessing both implicit and explicit bias. This past fall, we replicated the results of our previous one-site study on four additional campuses, plus a larger sample on our home campus.

I’ll be reporting the results of these studies in a future STP newsletter column. One preview I can share now is that the STP Working Group’s most highly recommended replacement name did indeed fare the best!

For now, I’d like your input. Has your department considered changing the name of its “Abnormal Psychology” course? If so, I would be incredibly grateful if you could complete this short survey.

Thank you in advance!