The rise and fall of behaviorism: The narrative and the numbers.
This article aims to answer this question in two ways. First, we use advanced scientometric tools (e.g., bibliometric mapping, cocitation analysis, and term co-occurrence analysis) to quantitatively analyze the metadata of 119,278 articles published in American journals between 1920 and 1970. We reconstruct the development and structure of American psychology using cocitation and co-occurrence networks and argue that the standard story needs reappraising. Second, we argue that the question whether behaviorism was the “dominant” school of American psychology is historically misleading to begin with. Using the results of...
Source: History of Psychology - March 19, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The construction of “critical thinking”: Between how we think and what we believe.
This article provides an historical perspective by describing how “critical thinking” emerged as an object of psychological study, how the forms it took were shaped by practical and social concerns, and how these related to “critical thinking” as something that results in certain conclusions, rather than as a process of coming to conclusions. “Critical thinking” became a scientific object when psychologists attempted to measure it. The original measurement treated “critical thinking” as both an ability and an attitude. It measured logical abilities, and consistency and extremity of views, but it avoided mak...
Source: History of Psychology - March 19, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Psychologists’ psychologies of psychologists in a time of crisis.
Beset by detection of replication failures and questionable research practices over the last decade, psychology has been deemed by many to be in crisis. The situation is exceptional not only for the many investigative practices being scrutinized but also for the attention given to the undue influence of psychologists’ psychology on those practices. Comparative analysis of 2 crises finds that the earlier one focused on the experimenters’ activities within the laboratory, whereas the current concerns center on experimenters’ postexperimental work. Whereas the previous crisis did include deep concerns about experimenter...
Source: History of Psychology - January 30, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
“Don't worry”: Figurations of the child in a Swedish parenting advice column.
Materials such as popular books, magazines, and newspapers have historically been important for the circulation of psychologists’ and psychiatrists’ expertise in the public sphere. In this article, I analyze an advice column published in the Swedish parenting magazine Vi Föräldrar [Us Parents], featuring the child psychologist Malin Alfvén. Drawing on the concept of figurations (Castañeda, 2002), denoting the process of outlining and defining an entity, I show how the expert framed the child-related problems brought up in the submitted letters as transient and a normal part of children’s development. In fact, mos...
Source: History of Psychology - December 12, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Poetry corner.
Presents a poem entitled The Ballad of Howard S. Whether or not Howard’s mother can be said to have had an archival memory of his middle name is left to the reader’s discretion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: History of Psychology)
Source: History of Psychology - July 29, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
News and announcements.
James Lamiell announces the recent publication of his latest book, titled Psychology’s Misuse of Statistics and Persistent Dismissal of Its Critics (2019), published in Palgrave-Macmillan’s “Theory and History of Psychology” Series. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: History of Psychology)
Source: History of Psychology - July 29, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Picturing ethnopsychology: A colonial psychiatrist’s struggles to examine Javanese minds, 1910–1925.
This article explores C. F. Engelhard’s struggles to construct psychometric devices for the Netherlands Indies between 1910 and 1925. A young Dutch psychiatrist, Engelhard moved to the Netherlands Indies in 1916, where he applied his clinical experience to subject Javanese individuals to mental assessment devices. He imagined that basic picture tests and one’s orientation in time provided apt solutions to the cross-cultural challenges facing him. To turn his prototypes into actual tests, Engelhard had to leave his daily work environment and move into the surrounding villages. Aided by local chiefs and his assistant, So...
Source: History of Psychology - July 29, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Child delinquency and intelligence testing at Santiago’s Juvenile Court, Chile, 1929–1942.
This article deals with intelligence testing conducted at Santiago’s Juvenile Court, in Chile, between 1929 and 1942. It is based on an analysis of 56 court records containing psychological or psychopedagogical reports filed by the Section for Observation and Classification at Santiago’s House of Juveniles, an institution created in 1929 as part of the Juvenile Protection Law. To understand the purposes for juvenile intelligence testing in this field, several articles published at the time by the key actors involved in these institutions will also be analyzed. The results of this research signal, first, that psychology...
Source: History of Psychology - July 29, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Racial degeneration, mental hygiene, and the beginning of Peruvian psychiatry, 1922–1934.
This article seeks to analyze the viewpoints held on racial differences by the most significant members of Peru’s first generation of psychiatrists, in which degeneration theory was key in explaining the differences between human groups and in justifying the superiority of Whites and Western culture in the Peruvian state’s mestizo identity initiative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: History of Psychology)
Source: History of Psychology - July 29, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Psychology and psychiatry in the global world: Historical perspectives.
Introduces articles in the special issue of History of Psychology, Psychology and Psychiatry in the Global World Part I. The special issue seeks to consolidate and extend the historical analysis of psychology and psychiatry in the global world by bringing together seven articles detailing how theories, techniques, and practices have been translated, adapted, and appropriated in the colonial and postcolonial eras. The contributions demonstrate that it is fruitful to conduct research in the history of psychiatry and psychology together as broader ideational frameworks such as social Darwinism, eugenics, degeneration, and men...
Source: History of Psychology - July 29, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Who first created the Chinese term for psychology—Xin Li Xue?
Shu-Chang Yan’s (2018) recent article challenged the popular notion that the formal translation of psychology into Chinese—Xin Li Xue (心理学)—was first made by the Japanese scholar Nishi Amane (1829–1897) in 1875 (Nishi, 1875; Zhao, 1983, 1991) when translating Joseph Haven’s Mental Philosophy (see Haven, 1869; Howland, 2002; Koizumi, 1971). In the archive of Shanghai News, a popular newspaper in 19th- and 20th-century Shanghai (see Ye, 2017; Zhao & Zhang, 2004), Yan discovered that a Chinese intellectual with the penname of Zhi Quan Ju Shi (执权居士) had already used Xin Li Xue as the name for psychology...
Source: History of Psychology - April 25, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Poetry corner: Personality assessment scales: Psychometric and poetic.
The formal structure of both the sonnet and haiku present a dichotomous frame that the reader is invited to interpret in Likert-scale fashion. Included is the author's contribution to this tradition, which, were it to be translated into an MMPI-2 question, might contribute to Scales 2 (Depression) and 10 (Social Introversion). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: History of Psychology)
Source: History of Psychology - April 25, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Why we should be reading Vittorio Benussi.
Reviews the book, Vittorio Benussi in the History of Psychology by Mauro Antonelli (2018). Mauro Antonelli is Professor of the History of Science and Technology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Milano-Bicocca as well as lecturer in Philosophy at the Alexius Meinong Institute of the Karl-Franzens-University of Graz. His new book, Vittorio Benussi in the History of Psychology, treats of the life and work of the Austrian-Italian psychologist Vittorio Benussi. Benussi was a seminal figure in the early days of the Graz school and a founding father of the Italian Gestalt movement. According to Edwin Boring in...
Source: History of Psychology - April 25, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Research notes: John Bowlby’s critical evaluation of the work of René Spitz.
In the history of psychology and theoretical discourse on the socioemotional development of children, the names Bowlby and Spitz are often mentioned in tandem. Both men were hugely interested in research on the consequences of maternal deprivation for young infants. However, though they would appear to have been thinking along the same lines and often referenced each other’s work, it turns out they held very different views on the dynamic assessment and theoretical underpinning of their observations (Bowlby, 1960; Spitz, 1960). Even though some of this became public when they criticized each other after Bowlby’s public...
Source: History of Psychology - April 25, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Society for the History of Psychology news.
Effective March 1 of this year, Javier Bandrés has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of Revista de Historia de la Psicología, https://www.revistahistoriapsicologia.es, a journal published by the Sociedad Española de Historia de la Psicología (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: History of Psychology)
Source: History of Psychology - April 25, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
