Special Section: Doing Psychological Science Domain Denigration and Process Preference in Academic Psychology

ABSTRACT—Unlike most other disciplines, psychology parses its field primarily in terms of processes or mental entities (e.g., learning, sensation, perception, memory), rather than domains of life (e.g., eating, work, leisure). Although there are merits in this organization, a perhaps unintended result is that psychology has paid minimal at-tention to the major domains of life and how people func-tion in them. Examination of contemporary major introductory, social, and developmental psychology text-books reveals that their indexes include almost no terms representing five critical domains: food, politics, religion, leisure-entertainment, and work. The process division of psychology dates back at least to Wundt and James, and probably derives from psychology’s origins and early dedication to discovering general laws of the mind. Th