The Association for Psychological Science (APS), previously the American Psychological Society, is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in research, application, teaching, and the improvement of human welfare.

To this end, APS publishes several journals, holds an annual meeting, disseminates psychological science research findings to the general public, and works with policymakers to strengthen support for scientific psychology.

Psychology is the science of behavior and mind, embracing all aspects of conscious and unconscious experience as well as thought.

It is an academic discipline and a social science which seeks to understand individuals and groups by establishing general principles and researching specific cases.

A nonprofit organization (also known as a non-business entity) is an organization whose purpose is something other than making a profit.

A nonprofit organization is often dedicated to furthering a particular social cause or advocating for a particular point of view.

In economic terms, a nonprofit organization uses its surplus revenues to further achieve its purpose or mission, rather than distributing its surplus income to the organization's shareholders (or equivalents) as profit or dividends.

This is known as the non-distribution constraint.

The decision to adopt a nonprofit legal structure is one that will often have taxation implications, particularly where the nonprofit seeks income tax exemption, charitable status and so on.

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

A mental representation (or cognitive representation), in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality, or else a mental process that makes use of such a symbol: "a formal system for making explicit certain entities or types of information, together with a specification of how the system does this.".