Article archive / August 1, 2011
Originally published: . Volume 2, No. 12. Source pages: 11, 12, 13.
Dr. Gary Jones has built a prestigious and fruitful career from his talent for working with people, his enjoyment of psychophysiology, and his love of mentoring students in psychology.
He is Chair of the Department of Psychology at Louisiana State University Shreveport and Tenured Professor, coming to LSUS eight years ago after a full and varied career at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), including Director of Clinical Psychology Training, Director of USM’s Psychology Clinic, and Professor at a university that many in Louisiana affectionately regard as home.
Dr. Jones is a member of the Counsel of Graduate Departments of Psychology (COGDOP) and a member of Association of Heads of Departments of Psychology (AHDP). He has been a member of the Council of University Directors of Clinical Psychology (CUDCP) and the Association of Directors of Psychology Training Clinics.
He is Team Chair, APA Accreditation Site Visit Teams, Clinical Psychology, a position he has held for over ten years. He also serves as Site Visitor, Clinical Specialty Member, and Site Visitor, Health Psychology Specialty Member, among many other duties.
His research in cardiac awareness and visceral perception has spanned decades and led to over 80 publications, 67 national and international presentations, 44 invited addresses and presentations at state/regional meetings, and four book chapters including “Constitutional and physiological factors in heartbeat perception,” in From the heart to the brain: The psychophysiology of circulation-brain interaction, and “Perception of visceral sensations: A review of recent findings, methodologies, and future directions,” in Advances in Psychophysiology.
“My dissertation was an analysis of the imagination process involved in systematic desensitization,” Gary told the Times. He found that “what made people react physiologically was not the valence of the imagined scene, but the activity involved in the imagery.”
“The issue of visceral awareness,” he said, “its accurate measurement, individual differences, and the impact of awareness on a person's understanding of their health or sickness became my programmatic research for the next 35 years, and virtually all of my research, and that of my students, has been in that area. I'm still fascinated by it.”
Along the way he has produced works such as “An investigation of the role of physiological arousal in test anxiety,” in Educational and Psychological Research, “Physiological responding during self generated imagery of contextually complete stimuli,” in Psychophysiology, and “Perception of arousal and awareness of physiological responding prior to and after running 20 kilometers,” in Journal of Sport Psychology.
“I did a series of studies on an American Heart Association grant to understand how patients with serious cardiac diseases such as arrhythmias or premature ventricular contractions interpreted visceral feedback and how it impacted their use of medical services or their understanding of their own health,” he told the Times. “In short, most cardiac patients are not particularly aware of cardiac activity, have lots of misinformation about what their heart is doing, and make lots of bad behavioral choices based on misinformation about their physiological functioning.”
His extensive publishing record in psychophysiology is paralleled by his service as editor for numerous journals. He has served as the Associate Editor for the International Journal of Psychophysiology, as Consulting Editor for the journals of Psychophysiology, Journal of Psychophysiology, Biological Psychology, Psychobiology, Journal of Applied Psychophysiology, and Psychosomatic Medicine.
He has also served as Consulting Editor for Science, Journal of Behavioral Assessment, Biofeedback and Self-Regulation, Journal of Personal & Social Psychology Consulting, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He has served as Special Series Editor for Biological Psychology.
Gary is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in Louisiana, in Mississippi, and holds the Certificate of Professional Qualifications in Psychology (CPQ). He has served on the Mississippi Board of Examiners and he is a past member the American Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards.
He is a member of the American Psychological Association, Southeastern Psychological Association, and Fellow of the International Organization of Psychophysiology. He is a past member of American Psychological Society, Society for Psychophysiological Research, and Society for Behavioral Medicine.
He has served on the Scientific Program Committee for the World Congress of Psychophysiology, on the Convention Committee, Membership, and Bylaws Committee for the Society of Psychophysiological Research. He serves in multiple roles for the Southeastern Psychological Association. He has served as President of the Biofeedback Society of Mississippi, and in many roles for the Mississippi Psychological Association, including Chair of the Scientific Affairs, and Legislative Committee. He has served on numerous university committees including the College of Business, Education, and Human Sciences Technology Committee, the LSUS Technology Fund Committee, the University Research Council, Graduate Council, and the Statistical Review Committee. He has worked as a clinician in private practice, and as Clinical Psychology Consultant and Clinical Supervisor, to P.A.C.E. – Head Start, as a Clinical Psychologist Consultant to Pine Grove Recovery Center, and consultant to Department of Youth Services.
Gary earned his B.A. in psychology from Penn State, and his masters and doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Bowling Green State University. But he chose psychology only after some turns.
“I started as a marine biology major at Penn State primarily because I had watched Lloyd Bridges on the television program, Sea Hunt, and that seemed really interesting,” he explained. However, he soon changed to biology, then education, and finally psychology.
Nothing quite felt right until one day, while walking past an office in the basement of the psychology building at Penn State, Gary spotted a “very large piece of electronic equipment…” It was a Beckman Dynograph, a device for recording physiological, autonomic, or cerebral electrical signals.
Gary was hooked. The combination of psychology, sophisticated electronic equipment, and research, was exactly what he had been looking for. “What a combination! It pushed all my buttons simultaneously,” he said.
“I decided quickly that I would like to be a psycho- physiologist,” and he asked to work in the lab, proceeding next to graduate training with Bowling Green’s Dr. Harold Johnson, a licensed clinical psychologist and psychophysiologist.
“To me, psychophysiology was a natural combination for a clinician,” Gary told the Times. “I was most fascinated with the role of a person's perception of visceral sensations as being critical to the emotional experience.”
He still loves gadgetry. “I am definitely an old technology geek (long before there was such a term) and have been one since my introduction to amateur radio at about 12 years of age.” He began collecting physiological data on $50,000 minicomputer in 1971 that had only 64K of memory, with hard drives that were “the size of a large steamer trunk,” explained Gary.
In recent years Gary has attended an NIMH and APA sponsored Advanced Training Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery (fMRI) at Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, a collaboration of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard, and MIT.
What has been most rewarding? “I am, at my core, mostly an academic, researcher, and mentor,” he said. “Clearly, the most rewarding part of all of this activity was my role as a mentor for doctoral students.”
During his almost 30 years at USM, Gary mentored approximately 65 doctoral candidates. “There is nothing like having a research group of 4 to 9 PhD candidates all working in the same area as I was working. These people were bright, enthusiastic, eager, motivated and excited about learning psychology, and it was an amazing environment for me.”
Gary’s very first graduate student was Dr. Glenn Ally, Louisiana medical psychologist. “I taught the intellectual testing courses,” Gary said, “for our program and students were required to do lots of practice testing, and Glenn would bring his son [Brandon] in to be tested by his colleagues. Brandon was a fixture of the testing classes,” Gary said.
“About 25 years later, a young man named Brandon Ally applied to our doctoral program…” and “…became ‘my’ last doctoral student. The ‘Ally psychologists’ bookended my mentorship career. Brandon is one of ‘my’ most distinguished students, now on the faculty at Vanderbilt Medical School (after leaving Boston University and Harvard Medical), and has a research track record that puts almost all of us to shame.” “Seeing all of those kids turn into professionals and make careers and names for themselves is amazing, and to have a little to do with furthering that process, is, by far, the best part of my career in psychology.”
What does Dr. Gary Jones see ahead for psychology? “I think that this is an exciting time for psychology. I think that psychology is growing into a real science.” He explained that the field has advanced more in the last 15 years than in the previous 100. “We have a lot more to learn, but psychology is riding technological advances into advanced understanding of human behavior.”
His advice to younger psychologists? “Truly master the knowledge and skills available in your disciplines.” And, “… graduate school is just not getting a degree but is the acquisition of knowledge that you are going to build on the rest of your career. Don't be in a rush…”
Dr. Gary Jones is married to Dee (Dolores) Jones. Dee is a professional librarian now at the LSU Health Science Center Medical Library in Shreveport. In her career she has served as the Curator of the DeGrummond Children's Literature Research Collection, the second largest collection of original children’s literature manuscripts and original illustrations in the U.S. Also, Dee has served on the Board that confers the premier national award for Children's Literature, the Andrew Caldecott Medal.
The $50,000 minicomputer and steamer trunk-sized hard drives are on the right. The now Dr. Michael Scott above is collecting dissertation data, while Drs. Ken Jones and John Caldwell program the computer. (Photo courtesy Dr. Gary Jones.) This was a newspaper picture taken sometime during Dr. Gary Jones’ first year (1975-1976 ) as a faculty member at USM. (Photo courtesy Dr. Gary Jones.)
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.