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Clark psychology in the post&shyHallian era has attracted little attention from scholars. The only general account, Carl Murchison's ‘Recollections of a Magic Decade at Clark’ (1959), is both partisan and limited in scope. This paper examines the ‘second cycle’ of the Clark department in a period of unusual productivity in research, publication and graduate training from the mid-twenties to the mid-thirties, as well as the internal tensions and constraints that led the department to self-destruct in 1936 and lose its scholarly leadership and professional visibility until the post-World War II era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A first cooperative research program in the developmental psychology was established in the Clark questionnaire studies. The program was not meant to be free­standing but to elaborate an evolutionary conception of child development synthesized from findings of several scientific fields. The short­lived program had some serious faults, but an examination of its research papers suggests that it produced some worthwhile work. The child­study researchers gathered information about children's social and emotional reactions in everyday settings; one or two of their studies were replicated; they found pattern and order; they elaborated a meaningful social­biological view of child development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies the institutional character of pre-1920 psychology at Clark University with founding President G. Stanley Hall's active ‘patronage’ of ‘outsiders,’ argues that the origins of this institutional character can be found in Hall's own personal character and temperament, and traces the influence of this institutional character through much of the psychology done at Clark before 1920. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]