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In the United States, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is seeking to encourage researchers to move away from diagnostic tools like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM). A key mechanism for this is the "Research Domain Criteria" (RDoC) initiative, closely associated with former NIMH Director Thomas Insel. This article examines how key figures in US (and UK) psychiatry construct the purpose, nature, and implications of the ambiguous RDoC project; that is, how its novelty is constituted through discourse. In this paper, I explore and analyze these actors' accounts of what is new, important, or (un)desirable about RDoC, demonstrating how they are constituted through institutional context and personal affects. In my interviews with mental health opinion leaders, RDoC is presented as overly reliant on neurobiological epistemologies, distant from clinical imaginaries and imperatives, and introduced in a top-down manner inconsistent with the professional norms of scientific research. Ultimately, the article aims to add empirical depth to current understandings about the epistemological and ontological politics of contemporary (US) psychiatry and to contribute to science and technology studies (STS) debates about "the new" in technoscience. Accordingly, I use discussions about RDoC as a case study in the sociology of novelty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the establishment of child psychology at the end of the 19th century and with its applied uses in the field of physical education. During this period psychology evolved from a philosophical field content with generalised statements about the human soul to a scientific field concerned with measuring and individuating the psyche, This paper focuses on how while psychology quickly laid claim to establishing the contours of normative menial health it was simultaneously deployed in the service of identifying and bolstering normative physical health. As interiority was systematically brought within the realm of science, the traditional metonymic connection between physicality and morality materialised into a new relationship between the self and its numerical existence. This relationship is explored here through an examination of physical-health testing in New York schools during the Progressive Era. My aim is to draw out the manifold ways in which psychological technologies were absorbed into spatial practice, supporting the claim of this theme issue that the proliferation of psychology can be traced through multiple governing practices and into specific geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]