National Psychological Associations 549The board passed through a rather fallow period during
the 1960s and 1970s as the number of applicants declined. At
one point, the ABPP board of trustees even raised the possi-
bility of disbanding the board (Bent, Packard, & Goldberg,
1999). The examination procedures were changed; the writ-
ten exam was dropped and the oral component was changed
to allow for more in vivo assessment. Various measures to in-
crease the number of applicants and to reestablish close rela-
tionships with the APA were discussed. In 1971, the ABPP
board established a formal liaison with the APA Board of
Professional Affairs. Also in hopes of reaching more psychol-
ogists, in 1972 the board established six regional boards to re-
cruit applicants and conduct the diplomate examinations.
While the examination burden on the board of trustees was
lessened by the regional boards, there was no hoped-for in-
crease in the number of applicants, and the regional boards
were disbanded in the 1990s.
At the instigation of the health insurance industry, the
APA agreed to work toward establishing a registry of quali-
fied psychologists who would be eligible for reimbursement
for the provision of mental health services. At the request of
the APA, the ABPP agreed to develop the registry in 1974.
The ABPP board of trustees established the Council for the
National Register of Health Service Providers (NR) and
loaned the new organization money to help it get started. The
NR was successful from its beginning in attracting psycholo-
gists to membership. The ABPP and the NR soon fell into
serious disagreement over their legal relationship, with the
ABPP under the impression that the NR was a subsidiary or-
ganization. The ABPP apparently hoped that the NR would
help rescue it from its financial troubles and that it would
prove to be an enduring source of applicants for diplomate
status. However, the leaders of the NR saw the relationship
differently and in 1975 repaid the ABPP loan and declared
that the NR was an independent organization. There ensued a
period of intense acrimony between the leaders of the two
organizations that did not diminish for several years.
The ABPP recognized several more specialties in the
1980s and 1990s. By the year 2000, in addition to the four
established specialties (clinical, counseling, school, and
industrial-organizational), the ABPP had made diplomate sta-
tus available for the specialties of clinical neuropsychology,
forensic psychology, family psychology, health psychology,
behavioral psychology, psychoanalysis, rehabilitation psy-
chology, and group psychology. Each of these specialties had
its own board of examiners and was independently incorpo-
rated; thus, the ABPP served the function of general oversight
of psychological specialties (Bent et al., 1999). In order to
avoid conflict with the Commission for the Recognition of
Specialties and Proficiencies in Professional Psychology
established by the APA in 1995, the ABPP established the
policy of referring all new specialties to the APA for first
consideration.
The National Register of Health Care Providers in
Psychology quickly became a significant component of pro-
fessional psychology, as noted above. The first National Reg-
ister listed 7,000 psychologists in 1975; by 2000 the list had
grown to more than 16,000 psychologists. The National Reg-
ister was successful in providing a definition of the psychol-
ogist as a health service provider and in gaining acceptance
across North American for the definition. In 1976, the NR
was innovative in naming public members to its board of di-
rectors, being the first national psychology organization to do
so. The National Register developed predoctoral internship
criteria in 1980 and required that any psychologist who
wished to be listed in its directory must have completed such
an internship. These criteria were later adopted by the APPIC
as the criteria for membership. The National Register also
worked with the Association of State and Provincial Psy-
chology Boards (ASPPB) to establish criteria for doctoral
programs in psychology for the purpose of licensure of psy-
chologists after the doctoral degree.
The Association of State and Provincial Psychology
Boards (ASPPB) was founded in 1961 as the American As-
sociation of State Psychology Boards. In addition to its work
with the National Register and with other accrediting and cre-
dentialing organizations, the ASPPB developed the national
examination in professional psychology (Carlson, 1978). It
worked over the remainder of the twentieth century on licen-
sure reciprocity between the states, continuing-education
standards, and other professional issues. The ASPPB adopted
the APPIC internship criteria as the basic standard for deter-
mining whether an applicant for licensure met the require-
ment for a predoctoral internship.Interdisciplinary OrganizationsPsychology was an important part of many interdisciplinary
organizations that formed over the course of the twentieth
century. As of this writing, there were far too many such
organizations to even list them all. We provide a short list,
emphasizing their variety, and then provide a brief account of
two interdisciplinary organizations.
The American Orthopsychiatric Association was formed
in 1924 for mental health professionals, primarily psychia-
trists and psychologists, who were chiefly concerned with
problems of delinquency and other behavior disorders of
childhood and adolescence (Lowrey, 1948).
In 1957, the Human Factors Society of America was
formed by and for scientists and technologists working on