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Over the course of psychology’s first several decades, the language used to convey the subject matter gradually shifted from being free and literary to being strictly constrained and disciplined by increasingly focused theoretical demands. The project described here, “Disciplining Psychology,” aimed to depict this transformation by generating images of the faces of three highly influential psychologists—William James, Sigmund Freud, and B. F. Skinner. Each image is composed of the words used in one of each individual’s most important books. The tightening of the disciplinary vocabulary is revealed in the differences among the three arrays of words themselves, but I have also striven to reflect it in the aesthetic aspects of each image. The method used here could easily be extended to a wider array of authors, texts, and psychological topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychology has a long tradition of creating lists of the most eminent members of the discipline. Such lists are typically created under the assumption that there is a general answer to the question of eminence, covering all psychologists everywhere. We wondered, however, to what degree perceived eminence depends on the individual's particular demographic situation. Specifically, are different historical figures “eminent” to people of different genders, ages, and geographical locations? We tested this by asking a wide swath of people – mostly psychologists – who they think has had the most impact on the discipline of psychology, historically. We used an online game in which “players” were shown a series of pairs of significant figures from psychology's past and asked to select which had had the greater impact. We then converted these selections into a ranked list using the Elo rating system. Although our overall rankings had considerable similarity with traditional efforts, we also found that rankings differed markedly among different demographic groups, undermining the assumption of a general measure of eminence that is valid for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has used networks of scholarly journal articles to investigate the intellectual structure of the discipline of psychology from the later 1880s to the early 1920s. Here, instead, we examined the networks of philosophical journals that were closely aligned with psychology-The Monist, Philosophical Review, and The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods-between 1890 and 1913. We discovered that, although the first 2 of these journals published a great deal of psychologically relevant material up to 1903, material of that sort seemed to evaporate after the launch of the third journal in 1904. It was not so much that material migrated from the old journals to the new one. It was rather that the new journal was able to attract new trends in American philosophical psychology, while interest in traditional approaches seemed to dry up. The result was that psychology moved into a new and expansive era, while America philosophy was left somewhat destabilized as it attempted to reconfigure its disciplinary identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the role that digital approaches to the history of psychology are likely to play in the near future. A tentative hierarchy of digital methods is proposed. A few examples are briefly described: a digital repository, a simple visualization using ready-made online database and tools, and more complex visualizations requiring the assembly of the database and, possibly, the analytic tools by the researcher. The relationship of digital history to the old "New Economic History" (Cliometrics) is considered. The question of whether digital history and traditional history need be at odds or, instead, might complement each other is woven throughout. The rapidly expanding territory of digital humanistic research outside of psychology is briefly discussed. Finally, the challenging current employment trends in history and the humanities more broadly are considered, along with the role that digital skills might play in mitigating those factors for prospective academic workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

G. Stanley Hall was one of the leading American psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He is best known today for his administrative accomplishments—founding the first psychology research laboratory in the US, launching theAmerican Journal of Psychologyand other journals, presiding over Clark University, and assembling the American Psychological Association, among other things. In his time, though, he was also well known for his pioneering work in what came to be called developmental psychology. The theoretical foundation of this research was the recapitulationist evolutionary theory of his contemporary, Ernst Haeckel. Whereas Haeckel proposed that the embryonic development of each organism follows the evolutionary history of its species, Hall argued that the postnatal developmental path of the child’s mind and behaviour follows the evolutionary path of the human species as a whole. Thus, according to Hall, children are psychologically similar to “primitive” humans, and “primitive” humans are psychologically akin to our children of today. This article explores the relationship between Hall’s work and Haeckel’s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the structure of early American Psychology from 1894 until 1908 based on various articles published in the journal "Psychological Review". Other topics mentioned in this article include the role of vocabulary, the role of editorship, and the role of the publishing industry.

The article, which was originally published online on July 1, 2013, presents the results of an exploratory digital analysis of the contents of the psychological journals "American Journal of Psychology" (AJP) and "Pedagogical Seminary" (PS) founded by U.S. psychologist Granville Stanley Hall. It discusses whether Hall's goals for the periodicals were met, the methodologies employed by contributors to the journals, and the diversity of research subjects published by the journals.

Traditionally, American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century has been framed as a competition among a number of 'schools': structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, etc. But this is only one way in which the 'structure' of the discipline can be conceived. Most psychologists did not belong to a particular school, but they still worked within loose intellectual communities, and so their work was part of an implicit psychological 'genre,' if not a formalized 'school.' In this study, we began the process of discovering the underlying genres of American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century by taking the complete corpus of articles from the journal Psychological Review during the first decade of its publication and conducting a statistical analysis of the vocabularies they employed to see what clusters of articles naturally emerged. Although the traditional functionalist school was among the clusters we found, we also found distinct research traditions around the topics of color vision, spatial vision, philosophy/metatheory, and emotion. In addition, momentary clusters corresponding to important debates (e.g., the variability hypothesis) appeared during certain years, but not others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American functionalist psychology constituted an effort to model scientific psychology on the successes of English evolutionary theory. In part it was a response to the stagnation of Wundt's psychological research program, which had been grounded in German experimental physiology. In part it was an attempt to make psychology more appealing within the highly pragmatic American context and to facilitate the application of psychology to domains outside of the scientific laboratory. Applications of psychology that emerged from the functionalist ethos included child and developmental psychology, clinical psychology, psychological testing, and industrial/vocational psychology. Punctionalism was also the ground within which behaviorism rooted and grew into the dominant form of psychology through the middle of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses early American psychology. Topics discussed include article published in periodical "Psychological Review", psychology journals and history of psychology. Other topics such as psychological specialties, theoretical psychology and American Psychological Association are also discussed.