The well-known power system stabilizer（PSS）is used to generate supplementary control signals for the excitation system of a generator so as to damp low frequency oscillations in the power system concerned. Up to now，various kinds of PSS design methods have been proposed and some of them applied in actual power systems with different degrees. Given this background，the small-disturbance eigenvalue analysis and large-disturbance dynamic simulations in the time domain are carried out to evaluate the performances of four different PSS design methods，including the conventional PSS（CPSS），single neuron PSS（SNPSS），adaptive PSS（APSS）and multi-band PSS（MBPSS）. To make the comparisons equitable，the parameters of the four kinds of PSSs are all determined by the steepest descent method. Finally，an8-unit24-bus power system is employed to demonstrate the performances of the four kinds of PSSs by the well-established eigenvalue analysis as well as numerous digital simulations，and some useful conclusions obtained.