Abstract

Psychophysiology is a relatively new discipline. In the mid-1950s, a group of physiological psychologists began referring to themselves as psych physiologists. However, the subject matter of psychophysiology — the interaction of mind and body — has been studied for centuries by people trained as philosophers, physicists, physicians, physiologists, and, most recently, psychologists. John Stern (1964) defined the work of psychophysiology as “any research in which the dependent variable (the subject's response) is a physiological measure and the independent variable (the factor manipulated by the experimenter) a behavioural one”. Stern's definition of psychophysiology is not incorrect, but with the passage of time it has become too limiting.