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This paper explicates the argument of The Origins of American Science. Starting from my own historical premises and the origin of the social sciences in both historicism and science, I compare the divergent historical orientations of the sociologies of Robert Par and Max Weber. I argue that the inclination of American social science toward scientism and liberalism derives from the national ideology of American exceptionalism. Since this structural feature of American political culture was itself a part of history. I indicate how changes in historical consciousness and politics led American social scientists to reformulate exceptionalism and their disciplines. By the 1920s, their hope of establishing scientific control over, and maintaining the liberal direction of, the fast-changing national history was embodied in scientism. I close with some thoughts about the continuing power of scientism and exceptionalism since the 1920s, and the possibility that an historical. Weberian model of social science could bridge the widening gap between scientistic and hermeneutic wings of the social science disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social control doctrines of mental disorders have influenced a generation of psychologists and have shaped attitudes and discussions about how to treat mentally ill. In light of the failure of deinstitutionalization as a public policy and the contemporary concern with the medical or biological bases of psychiatric disorders, this paper re-examines social control doctrines. Reviewing mid-nineteen century statistical accounts, the author challeges claims of social control theorists and shows that in recent years some former social control advocates and revisionists have “ recanted ” and critized their earlier use of the concept of social control, particulary the characterization of the asylum as a “ total institution ”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic writing has been of interest to psychologists, clinicians and theoreticians of the mind both as a phenomenon in its own right and as a technique for exploring aspects of dissociation and normal and pathological consciousness. This paper follows the course of experimental investigations of automatic writing in psychology; beginning with the early work of Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney and continuing with that of Alfred Binet, Pierre Janet, William James and Morton Prince, it centers on the 1896 experiments of Leon Solomons and Gertrude Stein, but also examines tater laboratory studies. The conceptual and methodological challenge posed by automatic writing persist in such contemporary concerns as divided attention, implicit memory, and dissociations of awareness and intentionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a bibliography of received books in the January 1991 issue of "Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences."

This case study of an inter-university controversy over the publication of research from an interdisciplinary social science project on the forced migration and long- term internment of West Coast Japanese-Americans during World War II shows some of the difficulties of maintaining ownership of research materials. In this particular instance the junior employee was able to override his seniors' demand for control of the dissemination of research results by playing on the concerns about even appearing to suppress work for political reasons. The paper discusses conflicting norms of science and rhetorics of justification ranging from proprietary self-interest through "good science" to "the national interest" and onto "the needs of a free society." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Announces developments and conferences of scientific and research organizations as of January 1991. Venue for the 14th Annual Spring Systematics Symposium; Purpose of the meeting of the Society for American Archaeology's Committee on the History of Archaeology; Acceptance of applications for grants-in-aid by the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy.

Reports on developments involving several research institutions and associations in the U.S. as of April 1990. Plan of Scientific Instrument Commission of the International Union of to hold its first American meeting on September 21-25, 1990; Venue of the sixteenth Colloquium on Nineteenth-Century French Studies; Establishment of the"Prizer Award"; Invitations for nominations for the 1990 Sarton Medalist and the 1991 Sarton Lecturer by the Executive Committee of History of Science Society.

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]

The Enlightenment brought with it a greater scientific interest in and attention to a wider range of human behavior, in 1789. There emerged during the French Revolution a case of what would be today called multiple personality disorder which came under the care of a local physician, Dr. Eberhard Gmelin. Gmelin had only recently become interested in mesmerism and tried this procedure with this patient. So started an ongoing and gradually increasing exploration of the role of hypnosis in multiple personalities. This paper contributes to the historical background or such psychodynamic concepts as dissociation, splitting, repression, consciousness, sub- conscious, and unconscious. [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]

Presents books on behavioral science. "American Doctors and German Universities: A Chapter in International Intellectual Relations, 1870–1914," by Thomas Neville Bonner; "Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science," by Peter Clark and Crispin Wright; "The Triumph of Evolution: American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy," by Hamilton Cravens; "Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History," by John Demos; Others.

How did a new science initially promoted by only a few individuals eventually become a widespread cultural phenomenon practiced and known by thousands of people? Following a transnational approach, this article traces the introduction of psychical research into China during the first two decades of the 20th century. Known in the Republican period (1912–1949) as Spiritual Science (xinling kexue or xinling yanjiu), psychical research flourished between the 1920s and 1930s, playing a key role in the popularization of applied psychology and mind‐cure across China. This article takes a step back from the heyday of Spiritual Science by looking at the period that immediately preceded and helped define it. Focused on wide‐circulation newspapers, popular manuals, and stage performances, it teases out the ways in which Chinese popular culture translated European, American, and Japanese psychical research to local Chinese audiences in the midst of China's search for modernity. By naturalizing the reality of psychic powers, spiritual scientists blurred the boundaries between science and superstition in a period when these were posited as diametrically opposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article calls for abstracts on topics related to the history of the human, behavioral, and social sciences for the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences' Seminar for the History of Science to be held on July 12 to 14, 2017 at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy. The conference will reportedly focus on several topics including the history of ESHHS, history and new trends in human sciences' historiography, and laboratory science and professionalization.

The article offers information on several behavioral science conferences worldwide as of April 2017 including one on the exploration Yucatan, Mexico to be held in Yucatan, another on the impact of computers on the society in Pennsylvania, and one on medical history in Scotland.

The article offers information on the July 30 to August 2, 2013 annual conference of the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences (ESHHS) at the University of Würzburg, Germany, with more information at www.eshhs.eu, along with a call for papers for the ESHHS Early Career Award.

Women's participation in the work force shifted markedly throughout the twentieth century, from a low of 21 percent in 1900 to 59 percent in 1998. The influx of women into market work, particularly married women with children, put pressure on the ideology of domesticity: an ideal male worker in the outside market married to a woman taking care of children and home (Williams, 2000). Here, we examine some moments in the early-to-mid-twentieth century when female psychologists contested established norms of life-work balance premised on domesticity. In the 1920s, Ethel Puffer Howes, one of the first generation of American women psychologists studied by Scarborough and Furumoto (1987), challenged the waste of women's higher education represented by the denial of their interests outside of the confines of domesticity with pioneering applied research on communitarian solutions to life-work balance. Prominent second-generation psychologists, such as Leta Hollingworth, Lillian Gilbreth, and Florence Goodenough, sounded notes of dissent in a variety of forums in the interwar period. At mid-century, the exclusion of women psychologists from war work galvanized more organized efforts to address their status and life-work balance. Examination of the ensuing uneasy collaboration between psychologist and library scholar Alice Bryan and the influential male gatekeeper E. G. Boring documents gendered disparities in life-work balance and illuminates how the entrenched ideology of domesticity was sustained. We conclude with Jane Loevinger's mid-century challenge to domesticity and mother-blaming through her questioning of Boring's persistent focus on the need for job concentration in professional psychologists and development of a novel research focus on mothering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the development of the National Anthropological Film Center as an outgrowth of the Smithsonian's efforts to promote a multidisciplinary program in 'urgent anthropology' during the 1960s and 1970s. It considers how film came to be seen as an ideal tool for the documentation and preservation of a wide range of human data applicable to both the behavioral and life sciences. In doing so, it argues that the intellectual and institutional climate facilitated by the Smithsonian's museum structure during this period contributed to the Center's initial establishment as well its eventual decline. Additionally, this piece speaks to the continued relevance of ethnographic film archives for future scientific investigations within and beyond the human sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British-born psychologist William McDougall (1871-1938) spent more than half of his academic career in the United States, holding successive positions after 1920 at Harvard and Duke universities. Scholarly studies uniformly characterize McDougall's relationship with his New World colleagues as contentious: in the standard view, McDougall's theory of innate drives clashed with the Americans' experimentation into learned habits. This essay argues instead that rising American curiosity about inborn appetites-an interest rooted in earlier pragmatic philosophy and empirically investigated by interwar scientists-explains McDougall's migration to the United States and his growing success there. A review of McDougall's intellectual and professional ties, evolving outside public controversy, highlights persistent American attention to natural agency and complicates arguments voiced by contemporaries in favor of nurture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fall of Communism is now universally agreed to be what the philosopher Hegel called a world historical event—one that few predicted but nearly everyone saw as inevitable after it happened. In the aftermath many lives—and worldviews—changed, not only, but also in the human sciences. These remarks attempt to address in a preliminary way both the impact of the fall of Communism on psychology in former East Germany (including changes in personnel and approach) and the ways in which these sciences were employed as resources for reflection on the Communist past as well as the transition to new social and political regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the development of Polish psychology from the perspective of the most important intellectual formation in Poland—the Lvov‐Warsaw School of Kazimierz Twardowski. The representatives of the school played an extraordinary role in the history of Polish psychology in the first half of the 20th century. Unfortunately, this influence was halted by the outbreak of the war in 1939 and by communist oppression and propaganda after the war. After 1989, Polish psychology underwent a deep transformation in the spirit of Western psychology but with no continuation of the most significant achievements of Twardowski's School. Although this process has integrated Polish psychologists into the mainstream of psychology in the world, it has not led to the integration of one of the most original European psychological traditions into world psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on several conferences including the Society for the Social History of Medicine Summer Conference to be held in September 2012, a graduate symposium to be held by Rutgers University in March 2012 and a conference to be held by Purdue University in April 2012.

Presents information on books dealing with behavioral sciences. "Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Writing on Women's Lives," by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl; "Minding Minds," by Radu J. Bogdan; "Verbal Behavior," by B. F. Skinner.

Elisabetta Basso, author of I Young Foucault i , has long been the most important guide to Foucault's relation to Binswanger. Michel Foucault published very little before the I History of Madness i in 1961. With the publication of Foucault's manuscripts from the 1950s, and their planned English translation with Columbia University Press in the series Harcourt edits, a new phase of Foucault scholarship is beginning. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of Foucault's intellectual development, focusing on the box 46 manuscripts, all written while Foucault was teaching in Lille between 1952 and 1955. [Extracted from the article]

The article offers information on several 2012 conferences and workshops including the Cheiron-ESHHS annual conference in Montreal, Quebec, the CFP: Regulating Research Workshop at the Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany, and the CFP: Integrated History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Athens in Greece.

Information is provided on the joint meeting of the European Society for the History of Human Sciences (ESHHS) and the International Society for the History of Behavioural and Social Sciences (CHEIRON) to be held in Barcelona, Spain in June-July 2016.

Katharine B. Davis was an important progressive‐era figure, a pioneering professional, an innovative penologist, and an iconoclastic sexologist. Although scholars have long been aware of Davis's tolerant attitude toward same‐sex relationships at the New York State Female Reformatory at Bedford Hills, where she was Superintendent from 1901 to 1913, and her open discussion of same‐sex attraction in her study of "normal" women's sexuality, published in 1929, little has been known about Davis's personal life. Thus, it was a feminist biographer's dream come true to gain access to what Davis called her "autobiographical biography," the never‐finished, never‐published, story of her life. Or so I thought. As it turns out, my quest to understand Davis's personal life and how it informed her professional trajectory has been a bit more complicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While writing a book on the history of postpartum depression in the United States, I became interested in an ongoing study about possible genetic markers of postpartum mental illness. I participated in the first step, an online survey. When I qualified for the next step, saliva collection, I was torn over whether or not to continue. Making this decision required reflecting on some overlapping issues: gender, medicalization, genetic research, and the political functions of DNA donation. In this perspectives essay, I explore tensions around situating myself in my historical research project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the duality of the Black psychology movement in the United States as both a distinctly American and a postcolonial approach to mental health. The Westside Community Mental Health Center in San Francisco served as the organizational hub for the Association for Black Psychologists (ABPsi) in the 1970s. The Westside clinicians understood forensic psychology as a kind of preventative care as California, more so than any other state, was seduced by the eugenic dream of human improvement through therapeutic interventions in schools and prisons intended to correct the wayward deviant. Their community's mental wellbeing required dismantling the interlinked disciplinary apparatus which disproportionately surveyed, tracked, and confined young Black men. These psychologists mounted a legal challenge to the use of intelligence testing to sort Black children in schools, seeking to replace standardized tests with "dynamic assessments" inspired by Israeli psychologist Reuven Feuerstein's work with refugee children. They consulted on the voir dire process in the highly politicized Angela Davis trial to minimize the presence of racially prejudiced jurors. They offered expert testimony on the psychological damage of solitary confinement on behalf of prison activists. The Westside team artfully developed and deployed the psychological concept of "bias" in their confrontations with local manifestations of the American carceral state. In their theoretical writings, these psychologists reflected upon their historical positionality, understanding themselves as products of the decolonial moment. Bay Area encounters with Third World internationalism, the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Nation of Islam, and community‐led substance abuse programs shaped clinical care at Westside and inspired the Afrocentric consciousness many came to espouse. ABPsi initially had a significant impact on the historically white American Psychological Association's training practices. However, the two organizations split over the IQ controversy at a moment when psychologists became increasingly enmeshed in the criminal justice system [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines epistemic logics in 18th‐century German empirical psychology and distinguishes three basic patterns at play throughout the century. First, as empirical psychology was introduced in the 1720s, it relied on the Aristotelian‐scholastic conception of experience as universal and evidently true propositions of how things typically behave in nature. Empirical psychology was here a matter of defining and demonstrating the general nature, structure, and functions of the soul by referring to experiences that most people could recognize as universally and evidently true. Second, around midcentury this logic was challenged as a new generation of philosopher‐physicians launched an empirical psychology based on extraordinary medical cases. Rather than focusing on the general and universal, this new strand of case‐based empirical psychology charted the individual, unique and often abnormal. Third, from the early 1770s, the interest in the individual was complemented by a new discourse on psychological method. Adopting the epistemic techniques developed within natural and experimental philosophy, empirical knowledge of the soul was seen as the result of rigorously conducted singular observations that were frequently repeated and carefully documented and analyzed. Rather than replacing one another sequentially, these three epistemic logics should be understood as cumulative. That is, despite sometimes profound differences, each new logic was layered on top of the existing ones, thereby broadening and increasing the epistemic complexity of empirical psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biography of Franz Samelson, a historian of psychology, is presented. It discusses his birth and childhood years in Germany, his educational background, the event that attracted him to the possibilities of social research, Franz's dissertation in 1956, his involvement with social justice movements, and his impact on historians and on his students.

LeDoux asserted the intellectual connection between Darwin and Tomkins, focussing on the universalism of emotions in the human brain as well as the universalism of expressions (p. 119). The most curious thing about Frank and Wilson's book on the work of Silvan Tomkins is that it is presented as a "handbook", an entry point for the student to understand and start to use affect theory while remaining tethered to its originator. The authors distance Tomkins from Darwin, focusing on Darwin's I Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals i (1872), which has itself been made to serve Ekman's basic emotions model. [Extracted from the article]

Provides information on several books on behavioral and social sciences. "The Witch in History. Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations," by Diane Purkiss; "The American Culture Wars: Current Contests and Future Prospects," edited by James L. Nolan, Jr.; "Repensando a Psicologia," by Antonio Gomes Penna; "Fear and Conventionality," by Elsie Clews Parsons.

Presents news briefs as they relate to behavioral science. Prize competition announced by the Forum for History of Human Science; Changes made by the `International Journal of Neuroscience'; Meeting and programs scheduled from April 1997 to June 1998.

The article invites submissions for papers, posters, symposia or workshops at the annual conference of the European Society for the History of Human Sciences to be held at University of Angers, France from July 7-10, 2015.

The American-Canadian psychologist Mary Ainsworth (1913-1999) developed the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) to measure mother-child attachment and attachment theorists have used it ever since. When Ainsworth published the first results of the SSP in 1969, it seemed a completely novel and unique instrument. However, in this paper we will show that the SSP had many precursors and that the road to such an instrument was long and winding. Our analysis of hitherto little-known studies on children in strange situations allowed us to compare these earlier attempts with the SSP. We argue that it was the combination of Ainsworth's working experience with William Blatz and John Bowlby, her own research in Uganda and Baltimore, and the strong connection of the SSP with attachment theory, that made the SSP differ enough from the other strange situation studies to become one of the most widely used instruments in developmental psychology today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk's famous visual cliff experiment is one of psychology's classic studies, included in most introductory textbooks. Yet the famous version which centers on babies is actually a simplification, the result of disciplinary myth-making. In fact the visual cliff's first subjects were rats, and a wide range of animals were tested on the cliff, including chicks, turtles, lambs, kid goats, pigs, kittens, dogs, and monkeys. The visual cliff experiment was more accurately a series of experiments, employing varying methods and a changing apparatus, modified to test different species. This paper focuses on the initial, nonhuman subjects of the visual cliff, resituating the study in its original experimental logic, connecting it to the history of comparative psychology, Gibson's interest in comparative psychology, as well as gender-based discrimination. Recovering the visual cliff's forgotten menagerie helps to counter the romanticization of experimentation by focusing on the role of extrascientific factors, chance, complexity, and uncertainty in the experimental process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of animals as experimental organisms has been critical to the development of addiction research from the nineteenth century. They have been used as a means of generating reliable data regarding the processes of addiction that was not available from the study of human subjects. Their use, however, has been far from straightforward. Through focusing on the study of alcoholism, where the nonhuman animal proved a most reluctant collaborator, this paper will analyze the ways in which scientists attempted to deal with its determined sobriety and account for their consistent failure to replicate the volitional consumption of ethanol to the point of physical dependency. In doing so, we will see how the animal model not only served as a means of interrogating a complex pathology, but also came to embody competing definitions of alcoholism as a disease process, and alternative visions for the very structure and purpose of a research field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Joint Commission on the Mental Health of Children (JCMHC) was a sprawling, multidisciplinary project that took shape in the years immediately after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Participants included child psychiatrists, educators, psychologists, social workers, philanthropists and other laypeople and professionals interested in the plight of children. While the original inspiration for the JCMHC was to address the potential for violence from disturbed children and adolescents, its findings and recommendations were an indictment of American society itself in which poor children went hungry, minority children were oppressed and there were not sufficient resources dedicated to the mental health of the nation's population of young people. The task forces and committees of the JCMHC spent significantly more time addressing prevention and mental health rather than mental illness. Two years into the work of the JCMHC, the leadership formed a committee to specifically examine issues related to race. The final report, published in popular book form as Crisis in Child Mental Health, arrived after the unraveling of the liberal consensus that had fueled President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. Most of the proposed solutions for government intervention were ignored by the Nixon administration. The focus on mental health and the willingness to take a critical look at the detrimental effects of racism had represented child psychiatry at that time. In the decades that followed, however, child psychiatrists turned away from issues about prevention, race and environment and instead focused on the problems of mental illness in individual children., (© 2023 The Authors. Journal of The History of the Behavioral Sciences published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

In 1920, the psychiatrist Abraham Myerson published a self-help book titled The Nervous Housewife. In his book, he argued that the living conditions in urban-industrial America were responsible for a significant increase in the number of housewives who suffered from nervous symptoms. He also warned that women were consequently becoming increasingly discontent with the role and were beginning to desire a life outside motherhood and housewifery. Accordingly, The Nervous Housewife offered housewives and their husbands directions on how to improve her living conditions. This would allow readers to manage and prevent the emergence of nervous symptoms so that women would continue to desire a life as housewife and mother. Throughout the 1920s, Myerson would continue to publish health advice for housewives on how they could manage and eliminate their nervous symptoms. This article analyzes how Myerson connected the everyday experiences and conditions of the housewife's life to her nervousness in his texts and reveals how his motivation was to keep women satisfied with what he deemed was their proper societal role, that of housewife and mother. In doing so, it will also compare his work to other self-help texts on nervousness to illuminate how his how-to guide was innovative, while examining both scholarly and popular reviews of his book to reveal what his peers and readers perceived as the benefits of his advice., (© 2023 The Authors. Journal of The History of the Behavioral Sciences published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

This paper examines the Chicago sociologist William F. Ogburn's (1886-1959) views about technological unemployment, which were intimately connected to his analysis of the social impacts of technological developments and resulting social problems due to cultural lag. We trace the development of his views as seen through his well-known 1922 book, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature, his important contributions to the President's Research Committee on Social Trends (1933), and his lesser-known pamphlets designed for a broader audience-Living with Machines (1933), You and Machines (1934), and Machines and Tomorrow's World (1938). He used these pamphlets to educate the public about the dangers of new machines and technological unemployment. In doing so, he drew upon sociological analysis in his professional scholarly writings and his long-standing personal interests in social betterment and social reform. Our analysis also calls into question the adequacy of existing scholarship on Ogburn that has emphasized his commitment to a statistical, dispassionate, and "objectivist" approach to social science research. We call for a revised, richer, and more complex view of Ogburn's work and legacy as one of the nation's leading social scientists during the first half of the 20th century., (© 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Presents a letter to the editor regarding issues related to the book, "A Whisper of Espionage," by Ronald Ley.

This study is a reflective piece that grew out of the Archival Kismet Conference in April of 2021. What happens when you find your "archival kismet"—the document that is essential to your research—and it is restricted? In conjunction with archival silences, how do these restrictions affect our ability to understand the past? I begin with these questions and use two case studies to challenge and complicate the practice of restricted access in archives. Using a dialogic approach, I provide a set of questions and considerations groups can use to begin to probe materials with archival restrictions. I urge a reflective and collaborative approach between archivists, public historians, and community to re‐evaluate the practice of archival restrictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Franz Joseph Gall's (1758–1828) doctrine of many faculties of mind with corresponding cortical organs led him to be accused of materialism, fatalism, and even atheism. Yet little has been written about the specific charges he felt forced to respond to in Vienna, while visiting the German States, or in Paris, where he published his books. This article examines these accusations and Gall's responses. It also looks at what Gall wrote about a cortical faculty for God and religion and seeing intelligent design in the functional organization of the brain. Additionally, it presents what can be gleaned about his private thoughts on God and organized religion. We conclude that Gall was sincere in his admiration for and belief in God the Creator, but that as an enlightened scientist was recognizing the need to separate metaphysics from the laws of nature when presenting his new science of man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]