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The research literature of psychology may be brought to bear on public policy issues in three ways. First, psychology may be useful in establishing procedures for determining public policy. Second, psychology may be useful in formulating the structure for policy and its implementation. Third, the literature of psychology may be reflected in the actual content of public policy. There are many issues involved in making inferences about public policy from the psychological literature. Among these issues are the generalizability of findings from basic science and problems of overadvocacy on the part of policy consultants. Researchers expect that inferences from the psychological literature would lead to innovations in the policy, but the innovations themselves must be evaluated. In this article, we distinguish between the basic science of the field of pyschology and the use of scientific inquiry to address public policy problems. For example, the question, "Does threat of punishment deter people from behavior deemed undesirable," is one for which policy makers might look to the basic psychological literature for information. The question, "Does this program aimed at incarcerating first offenders for brief periods result in reduced likelihood of later delinquency," requires a specific answer from evaluation research. In an ideal situation, the research should be sound from a scientific standpoint. In this article, we will focus on the more general question and attempt to address the extent to which psychological knowledge might be used to inform public policy. The term information is used in this article in a fairly technical way, which was proposed by Shannon and Weaver (1949) in their seminal work on information theory. When we use the term, we mean that some communication is available that reduces uncertainty about a problem. If one is trying to determine whether nicotine is addictive, for example, the message that nicotine can be found in plants other than tobacco is not information. The message that it is an alkaloid is information to someone with a biochemical background—that is, it puts nicotine in a class of chemical compounds (alkaloids) that includes other addictive drugs. The so-called information explosion is not, in a technical sense, an information explosion at all because any given message reduces uncertainty, usually by only a small amount, with respect to any given problem. It would be correct to say mat we suffer from a message explosion. Anyone considering the implications for public policy of more or less basic science research in psychology has to face up to the fact that a very large proportion of that work, and particularly of the work most clearly relevant for policy, lacks face validity. Cook (1990) formulated the concept of causal generalization and the potential limits on the legitimacy of causal inferences based

Although several studies have examined the prevalence of nightmares and their relationship to anxiety, this is the first to have used daily dream logs, rather than retrospective self-reports, to monitor nightmare frequency. 220 undergraduates were administered self-report measures of anxiety and for 2 weeks recorded the number of their nightmares in logs. 47% of Ss reported at least one nightmare during the study period. The dream logs yielded an estimated mean annual nightmare frequency of 23.6, which is 2.5 times as great as the estimate yielded by retrospective reports (p less than .01). Nightmare frequency and anxiety were uncorrelated. The findings indicate that nightmares are more prevalent than has been reported, and their frequency unrelated to self-reported anxiety.