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Self-regulation is of interest both to psychologists and to teachers. But what the word means is unclear. To define it precisely, two studies examined the American Psychological Association's system of controlled vocabulary--specifically, the 447 associated terms it presents--and used techniques from the Digital Humanities to identify 88 closely related concepts and six broad conceptual clusters. The resulting analyses show how similar ideas are interrelated: self-control, self-management, self-observation, learning, social behavior, and the personality constructs related to self-monitoring. A full-color network map locates these concepts and clusters relative to each other. It also highlights some of the interests of different audiences, which can be described heuristically using two axes that have been labeled "abstract versus practical" and "self-oriented versus other-oriented."

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.

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]

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]