Handbook of Experimental Psychology

In a very real sense this book was created by popular demand. Murchison’s _Handbook of General Experimental Psychology_, published in 1934, went out of print before World War II, and by 1946 many psychologists were feeling a need for a technical survey that would systematize, digest, and appraise the mid-century state of experimental psychology.
This need for a handbook is a periodic occurrence. When the mass of new material in the journals becomes unmanageable, a secondary digest is called for, and psychology has had about half a dozen handbooks in the last century: Miller (1833), Wagner, Hermann, Schaefer, Nagel, and Murchison (1934). Of course other books have partially served the handbook function, and specialized handbooks have appeared in the various segments of psychology as the subject has expanded in the twentieth century.
In experimental psychology proper, then, a handbook was fully due.