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Contemporary discussions about operational definition often hark back to Stanley S. Stevens' classic papers on psychological operationism. Still, he was far from the only psychologist to call for conceptual hygiene. Some of Stevens' direct colleagues at Harvard—most notably B. F. Skinner and E. G. Boring—were also actively applying Bridgman's conceptual strictures to the study of mind and behavior. In this paper, I shed new light on the history of operationism by reconstructing the Harvard debates about operational definition in the years before Stevens published his seminal articles. Building on a large set of archival evidence from the Harvard University Archives, I argue that we can get a more complete understanding of Stevens' contributions if we better grasp the operationisms of his former teachers and direct colleagues at Harvard's Department of Philosophy and Psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the 1962 splitting of the South African Psychological Association (SAPA), when disaffected Afrikaner psychologists broke away to form the whites-only Psychological Institute of the Republic of South Africa (PIRSA). It presents an analysis of the rhetorical justification for forming a new professional association on principles at odds with prevailing international norms, demonstrating how the episode involved more than the question of admitting black psychologists to the association. In particular, the paper argues that the SAPA-PIRSA separation resulted from an Afrikaner nationalist reading of the goals of psychological science. PIRSA, that is, insisted on promoting a discipline committed to the ethnic-national vision of the apartheid state. For its part, SAPA's racial integration was of a nominal order only, ostensibly to protect itself from international sanction. The paper concludes that, in a racist society, it is difficult to produce anything other than a racist psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should historians employ psychological insight when seeking to understand and analyze their historical subjects? That is the essential question explored in this methodological reflection on the relationship between psychology and biography. To answer it, this paper offers a historical, historiographical, and theoretical analysis of life writing in the history of psychology. It touches down in the genres of autobiography, psychobiography, and cultural history to assess how other historians and psychologists have answered this question. And it offers a more detailed analysis of one particularly useful text, Kerry Buckley's (1989) Mechanical Man, to illuminate specific ways in which historians can simultaneously employ, historicize, and critically analyze the theories of the psychologists they study. Although ostensibly about writing biographies of eminent psychologists, this article speaks to a methodological issue facing any historian contemplating the role psychological theories should play in their historical narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are unconscious inferences in psychology? This article investigates their journey from the early philosophical psychology of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) to the experimental psychology of the American pragmatist Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914). Peirce's reception of Wundt's early works situates him in an international web of 19th‐century experimental psychologists and its reconstruction opens new perspectives on the relation between philosophy, psychology, and epistemology. Moreover, this reception testifies to a heretofore overlooked strand of influence of Wundt on North American experimental psychology. The notion of unconscious inferences, of which Hermann von Helmholtz is usually considered the chief exponent, becomes the backbone of Peirce's theory of perception mostly because of the affinity between Wundt's early philosophy of mind and Peirce's logic‐mediated approach to psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two aims. The first is to shed light on a remarkable archival source, namely survey responses from thousands of American psychologists during the 1960s in which they described their contemporary research practices and discussed whether the practices were 'ethical.' The second aim is to examine the process through which the American Psychological Association (APA) used these survey responses to create principles on how psychologists should treat human subjects. The paper focuses on debates over whether 'deception' research was acceptable. It documents how members of the committee that wrote the principles refereed what was, in fact, a disagreement between two contemporary research orientations. The paper argues that the ethics committee ultimately built the model of 'the resilient self' into the APA's 1973 ethics code. At the broadest level, the paper explores how prevailing understandings of human nature are written into seemingly universal and timeless codes of ethics. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces William James's famous “temperament thesis” according to which the philosophical stance that individuals take depends on their “temperaments.” It seeks to understand James's conception of temperament by locating James within a set of contemporary investigations that linked the sources of mental, and even higher, intellectual processes to the physiological and organic constitution of the individual. The paper argues that James understood temperament along the reflex-arc model and discusses the implications of that physiological account of temperament for James's overall conception of philosophy. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper early work of the American rehabilitation psychologist Tamara Dembo (1902–1993) is brought to light. She was highly influenced by the concepts of Kurt Lewin's topological psychology, and she used the framework of topological psychology to analyze her investigations on animal behavior carried out with the Dutch zoopsychologist Frederik J. J. Buytendijk. These investigations have so far been ignored and are being described for the first time making use of archival materials. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting out as a newsletter for radical psychologists, the Dutch journal Psychologie & Maatschappij (Psychology & Society) moved in the past decade toward the theoretical mainstream within psychology. In this paper, the major changes in the journal are described and analyzed, as well as the features that did not change: an emphasis on theory and history, an interdisciplinary approach, and an emphasis on discussion. The main transformations were from psychology as instrumental toward the goals of the progressive movement in the Netherlands, then to extreme criticism of all scientific and professional psychological activities, and finally to adherence to the most advanced approaches within academic psychology. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After its foundation, the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology at Leipzig University became an international center for psychological research, attracting students from all over the world. The Russian physiologist and psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev (1857-1927) was one of Wilhelm Wundt's students in 1885, and after returning to Russia he continued enthusiastically his experimental research on mental phenomena. However, he gradually distanced himself from Wundt's psychological project and developed a new concept of psychology: the so-called Objective Psychology or Psychoreflexology. The goal of this paper is to analyze Bekhterev's position in relation to Wundt's experimental psychology, by showing how the former came to reject the latter's conception of psychology. The results indicate that Bekhterev's development of a philosophical program, including his growing interest in establishing a new Weltanschauung is the main reason behind his divergence with Wundt, which is reflected in his conception of scientific psychology. Despite this, Wundt remained alive in Bekhterev's mind as an ideal counterpoint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Franz Samelson, a historian of psychology and the lack of honor he received from his colleagues. It discusses the originality of Samelson, his study on origins of behaviorism, his pursuit of evidence and the tendency for his fair mindedness and regard for ideas to dissipate personal reactions.

According to traditional French historiography, French scientific psychology was born when it differentiated itself from philosophy. This split between the two disciplines is attributed to Taine and Ribot, who, consequently, are considered to be the “founding fathers” of French psychology. In this paper we shall examine the case of Pierre Janet, who, at the turn of the century, was recognized worldwide as the most important French psychologist. It is generally said that he was the follower of Ribot and of Charcot. However, he was also Paul Janet's nephew. Paul Janet was a very well known and influential philosopher of the so-called French “spiritualistic” school, for which psychology was central to philosophy. In 1889, Pierre Janet published his doctoral dissertation, L'Automatisme psychologique, which was immediately considered to be a classic in psychology. We shall argue that this book is as much indebted to the old spiritualistic psychology, which claimed the substantial unity of the self, as to the new psychology at the time, which questioned it. With Pierre Janet, the split between psychology and philosophy in France was reconsidered. It would be more accurate to speak in terms of a compromise between philosophy and the “new” physiological and pathological psychology. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While ostensively constructing the first national "group tests of intelligence," psychology's war leaders adopted a functionalist conception of intelligence that made the criterion of the tests not evolutionary "general intelligence," but environmentally relevant features thereof. Breaking with the established, structuralist conception of American hereditarian testing, psychologists Walter Dill Scott, Walter Van Dyke Bingham, and Edward L. Thorndike implemented Alfred Binet's pragmatically vague notion of "intelligence in general." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To clarify the historical origins of theoretical and methodological problems faced by Argentinian psychology today, this article describes the philosophical and epistemological ideas held by psychoanalytically oriented professors and transmitted to undergraduate students during the institutionalization and professionalization of psychology at Argentinian universities between 1962 and 1983. Drawing from primary sources such as official publications and undergraduate syllabi, we analyze the systematic and normative perspective of those psychoanalysts on issues such as the nature of science, the scientific method, and the legitimate ways to do research. We argue that the philosophical approach they defended within psychology programs was markedly relativistic, solipsistic, and often recursive, leading them to conceive of psychoanalysis both as a meta‐theory and a self‐sufficient science. The fact that this "theory‐laden" philosophy of science was gradually adopted by psychology graduates (or undergraduates) throughout their education could thus help explain several epistemological beliefs currently held by a majority of Argentinian psychologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julian Ochorowicz (1850–1917) belonged to the first generation of psychologists who regarded this discipline as a scientific, positive endeavor. At the same time, he was a representative of psychic sciences, following a strictly positivist attitude to researching psychic phenomena. This article discusses the key event of his career, experiments with the famous medium Eusapia Palladino, in Warsaw, between late 1893 and early 1894. Ochorowicz's séances with Palladino attracted wide local and international attention and improved his standing as an internationally leading psychic researcher. In Warsaw, however, these experiments were fiercely controversial and, as a result, Ochorowicz was discredited and left the city. As I argue, this dissociation of credibilities was the outcome of a changing media landscape in the late nineteenth century. While Ochorowicz's strategy of boundary‐work and asserting his credibility aimed at scholarly media, it proved fatal when facing intensive, daily coverage in the popular press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Ernst Mach is widely recognized in psychology for his discovery of the effects of lateral inhibition in the retina (“Mach Bands”), his contributions to the theory of depth perception are not as well known. Mach proposed that steady luminance gradients triggered sensations of depth. He also expanded on Ewald Hering's hypothesis of “monocular depth sensations,” arguing that they were subject to the same principle of lateral inhibition as light sensations were. Even after Hermann von Helmholtz's attack on Hering in 1866, Mach continued to develop theories involving the monocular depth sensations, proposing an explanation of perspective drawings in which the mutually inhibiting depth sensations scaled to a mean depth. Mach also contemplated a theory of stereopsis in which monocular depth perception played the primary role. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the compilation of the published papers of psychologist Cyril Burt compiled by R. Ttravis. Purpose of the " The Burt Collection"; Accounts on the release of the official biography of Burt by Leslie Hearnshaw; Exclusion of books, chapters in edited books and monographs written by Burt in "The Burt Collection."

This paper describes the inception of a scientific movement (the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology); the individuals who begot it; the two journals and numerous scientific articles which resulted; it effects in stimulating new areas of teaching and of theoretical development; and its international reception as well as its successes and failures in stimulating the creation of satellite societies on the same pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports developments related to the behavioral sciences in the U.S. as of July 1992. Joint meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science with the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology to be held in Gothenberg, Sweden; Venue of the third International Summer School in History of Science from July 13 to July 24, 1992; Announcement for scholars interested to participate in a panel on Non-Western Perspective on Science and Technology at the 1992 Swedish meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

Although the "Negro" question merited only passing reference during Jung's 1957 interview (2020, pp. 34-35) surely it is no longer acceptable to ignore those allegations of racism first raised by Radin (1927, p. 63) a Jungian and colleague of Jung's? Richard Evans (1922-2015) graduated junior college in 1942, served 3 years in the army, and, having completed his studies at the University of Pittsburgh, was appointed instructor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee and then at Michigan State University (Anon, 1950) before becoming a professor and Director of Social Psychology at the University of Houston. Evans's question minimizes those allegations whilst his own intervention simply repeats Jung's claim that "Jews who had known him most intimately... have taken it upon themselves to contradict the myth of his anti-Semitism.". [Extracted from the article]

Hannah Proctor has written a most interesting, well-informed, and thoughtful history, attractively not easy to pigeonhole, locating what she calls the "psy-ences" in Soviet social history. Proctor argues that Luria implicitly, when not explicitly, conceptualized the subject matter of each of his psychological themes, whether reported "classically" or "romantically", in terms of a developmental framework at one and the same time individual and social, historical, and biological. The author questions the ways Luria's published writing did and did not live up to his own prescription, and she asks whether it can be read to gain insight into the psychic worlds Luria I and i - more innovatively - his collaborators, experimental subjects, and patients inhabited. [Extracted from the article]

Provides information on events relating to the behavioral sciences as of July 1989. Inclusion of an international congress to be held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, by the William James Foundation to celebrate the centennial of the publication of William James' "Principles of Psychology"; Fulbright grants for 1990 to 1991; Summer meeting of the British Society for the History of Science, to be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in July 1989.

The importance of instrument firms in the development of psychology, and science in general, should not be underestimated since it would not have been possible for various leading psychologists at the turn of the twentieth century to conduct certain experiments without the assistance of instrument makers, as is often the case today. To illustrate the historical perspective introduced here, the example of Alfred Binet is taken, as he is an interesting case of a psychologist working in close collaboration with various French instrument designers of the time. The objective of this article is twofold: (1) to show the considerable activity carried out by early psychologists to finalize new laboratory instruments in order to develop their research projects; (2) to reassess the work of a major figure in French psychology through his activity as a designer of precision instruments. The development of these new instruments would certainly have been difficult without the presence in Paris of numerous precision instrument manufacturers such as Charles Verdin, Otto Lund, Henri Collin, and Lucien Korsten, on whom Binet successively called in order to develop his projects in the field of experimental psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to Peter L. Rudnytsky's review of her book "Freud in His Time and Ours." She thanks Rudnytsky for pointing out certain errata in her biography of psychologist Sigmund Freud. She argues that the reviewer does not appear to have a convincing grasp of Freudian historiography. She also defends herself after the reviewer labeled her a hagiographer.

In so far as researchers viewed psychical, occult, and religious phenomena as both objectively verifiable and resistant to extant scientific explanations, their study posed thorny issues for experimental psychologists. Controversies over the study of psychical and occult phenomena at the Fourth Congress of International Psychology (Paris, 1900) and religious phenomena at the Sixth (Geneva, 1909) raise the question of why the latter was accepted as a legitimate object of study, whereas the former was not. Comparison of the Congresses suggests that those interested in the study of religion were willing to forego the quest for objective evidence and focus on experience, whereas those most invested in psychical research were not. The shift in focus did not overcome many of the methodological difficulties. Sub-specialization formalized distinctions between psychical, religious, and pathological phenomena; obscured similarities; and undercut the nascent comparative study of unusual experiences that had emerged at the early Congresses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to better understand the broader trends and points of contention in early American psychology, it is conventional to organize the relevant material in terms of 'schools' of psychology-structuralism, functionalism, etc. Although not without value, this scheme marginalizes many otherwise significant figures, and tends to exclude a large number of secondary, but interesting, individuals. In an effort to address these problems, we grouped all the articles that appeared in the second and third decades of Psychological Review into five-year blocks, and then cluster analyzed each block by the articles' verbal similarity to each other. This resulted in a number of significant intellectual 'genres' of psychology that are ignored by the usual 'schools' taxonomy. It also made 'visible' a number of figures who are typically downplayed or ignored in conventional histories of the discipline, and it provide us with an intellectual context in which to understand their contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The psychologist Timothy Leary (1920-1996), an iconic cultural figure in the United States in the 1960s and afterward, has received comparatively scant attention in the history of psychology. This may be due to perceptions that, after a major career shift centering around his experimentation with psychedelic substances and his subsequent dismissal from Harvard in 1963, Leary parted company with the field. While there are several good reasons to adopt this view, examination of his entire career as well as his intellectual ancestry reveals unacknowledged continuities, suggesting that a more prominent place be accorded to him in the history of psychology, as well as to the challenges he poses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The golden section has been said by many to be the most beautiful proportion. Fechner was the first to investigate it experimentally, and several late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American psychologists followed up on his work. Among these were four prominent names: Lightner Witmer (1867–1956), Edward L. Thorndike (1874–1949), Robert S. Woodworth (1869–1962), and Robert M. Ogden (1877–1959). Why did such well-known psychologists bother with the golden section? In attempting to answer this question we discovered that the golden section was surprisingly well known during this period, not only in psychology but also in advertising and design. It would have been entirely congruent with their stature for prominent psychologists to take an interest in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in the 1870s, American jurists deciding cases of trademark infringement began advancing arguments that the ordinary purchaser was an unwary one, easily deceived by imitations. Embedded within their legal decisions was a vision of the typical consumers' habitual behavior and cognitive ability. In response to legal critics who argued that the presumed psychology of the consumer was unevenly deployed, applied psychologists developed laboratory-based experiments and scales for determining the likelihood that the “average” purchaser would be confused. Although these psychologists failed in their goal of securing regular legal patronage, this commercial context and the resulting experiments were constitutive of the delineation of “recognition” as a distinct mental process. Furthermore, this case study complicates the scholarly consensus about the role of standardization and personal responsibility in the liberal administration of mass society. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gabriele Buccola, since his untimely death, often has been mentioned as the first Italian psychologist who developed a strict program of laboratory research. Buccola, a Sicilian of Albanian ancestry, is a “case” in the history of Italian psychology. A self-taught positivist, he established a relation with the major representatives of the European positivism. Kraepelin mentions him as one of the precursors of his project of applying experimental psychology to psychopathology. Buccola actually carried out research on the psychological, chemical-biological, and psychopathological “modifiers” of reaction times, following an experimental program dealing mainly with the differential study both of basic and superior psychological processes, with mental hygiene ends. Historians of psychology agree in considering Buccola the first Italian laboratory psychologist to plan a program of research that was close to European psychological experimentalism. The present article, starting from an outline of Buccola's role in the rising Italian scientific psychology, recontextualizes his experimentalism in an international sphere. This operation, which is carried out through a careful survey of Buccola's entire production—both theoretical and more properly scientific—is based on the search of the Darwinian, Spencerian, and Haeckelian evolutionist themes emerging from Buccola's program of research—a program that was influenced by the variegated European experimental panorama and characterized by the vision of science as a knowledge capable of transforming the nature of man and of society. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the attempts of academic psychologists and critical occultists in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to construct a psychology of occult belief. While they claimed that the purpose of this new subdiscipline was to help evaluate the work of occult researchers, the emergence of a psychology of occult belief in Germany served primarily to pathologize parapsychology and its practitioners. Not to be outdone, however, parapsychologists argued that their adversaries suffered from a morbid inability to accept the reality of the paranormal. Unable to resolve through experimental means the dispute over who should be allowed to mold the public's understanding of the occult, both sides resorted to defaming their opponent. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inez Beverly Prosser (ca. 1895–1934) was arguably the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in psychology. Her dissertation, completed in 1933, examined personality differences in black children attending either voluntarily segregated or integrated schools and concluded that black children were better served in segregated schools. This research was one of several studies in the 1920s and 1930s that was part of the debate on segregated schools as maintained in the United States under the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). This article examines the life and career of Prosser in the context of educational barriers and opportunities for African Americans in the early part of the twentieth century and explores the arguments that pitted African Americans against one another in determining how best to educate black children, arguments that eventually led to the desegregation decision of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American psychiatrists and psychologists have long been close colleagues and fierce rivals. There is no better illustration of this polarized relationship than the chronic tug-of-war over psychotherapy. Both groups laid claim to psychotherapy—whatever it was and however it was practiced. Psychiatrists attempted to monopolize psychotherapy despite its ambiguous status as an essential component of the healing arts. After the war, psychologists pressed for a share on the basis of their qualifications and competence, but struggled to overcome the limitations imposed by medical envy. This story lays bare the crucial function of tools and techniques for defining the identity and the boundaries of a science-based profession. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I compare, contrast, and analyze two published constructions, a straightforward approach and a social constructivist perspective, of the life and work of psychobiologist Karl S. Lashley (1890–1958). Although it is clear at a general level that scientific endeavors are affected by extrascientific factors, particular concern is directed at the issues involved in demonstrating that the scientific work of an individual, in this case Lashley, is affected by specific extrascientific influences. There is insufficient evidence to conclude that Lashley's work was driven predominantly by racial and genetic determinist positions and that he was something other than the scientist he represented himself as being. I then discuss an unpublished personality theory approach to Lashley that suggests the influence of some personality characteristics on his work and helps to provide balance and perspective in constructing representations of Lashley. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on several psychologists in the U.S. Ralph Andrews; Susan Carson; Walter S. Hunter.

Bartlett's claim that the Cambridge anthropological expedition of 1898 to the Torres Strait “put a social and ethnological stamp upon Cambridge psychology” does not bear close examination. Rivers pursued his interests in both anthropology and psychology but came to regard them as largely independent pursuits. Myers, through the influence of Rivers, came to identify himself primarily as a psychologist. McDougall was very quickly marginalized. There were two occasions when the promise of the Torres Strait began to be fulfilled: first, the reunion of Rivers, Myers, McDougall, and Seligman, all medically trained, at Maghull Hospital to help in the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers; second, Bartlett's attempt, early in his career, to establish a sociocultural psychology. However, the remarkable “academy” at Maghull was disbanded at the end of the war, and Bartlett, in his attempt to promote the “upstart subject” of psychology at Cambridge, increasingly came to distance his department from social and ethnological concerns. There is a neglected legacy of the Torres Strait expedition, the curious belief that the methods of experimental psychology, and indeed psychophysics, could (somehow) be foundational to the human sciences. This legacy has served both to suggest that psychology must have something to do with anthropology, while perpetually deferring any actual integration between the two disciplines. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article (based on published writings of the researchers plus unpublished data and report in recently opened archives) examines why Alfred Binet's concept of multifaceted intelligence requiring lengthy and varied testing continued and flourished in the 1920s and 1930 in the laboratories of Henri Pieron, Henri Laugier and other French psychologist and Psychologist and psychotechnicians. While the Americans and British evolved theories and practices of intelligence measurement reducible to a single number, most French psychologist used a much more subtle and complex understanding of the phenomenon. This hindered mass applications of intelligence tests which did not occur in France until the end of the Second World War. The Terman version of Binet's test did not re-enter France until 1950. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heinz Werner, a comparative­developmental psychologist who had emigrated from Europe in 1933, came to Clark in 1947, when the once-renowned psychology department was at a low ebb. Under Werner's leadership, the department reestablished its reputation a center of research and graduate training. It is suggested that Werner's vision of psychology and graduate education led him to form a department that had a unique perspective and was, in many respects, ahead of its time. The question of Werner's position in relation to the mainstream is considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to the reaction of author Frederick Crews about his review of the book "Freud: The Making of an Illusion." He applauds the extensive research effort reported in the book. He asserts the claim made by Crews that he has scanted the conventional elements of the biography of psychologist Sigmund Freud.

Presents an update on issues concerning behavioral sciences as of Summer 2005. Death of developmental psychologist Sheldon H. White; Information on several social science conferences to be held in 2006.