History of Psychology最新文献

Arthur R. Jensen (1923-2012) defended the idea that racial differences in intelligence were biologically based. He based his ideas on what he claimed were sound population genetics and evolutionary biology. Viewing his work through the lenses of those disciplines reveals that his arguments for biological racial differences did not meet the minimum evidentiary requirements needed to show that socially defined races were genetic populations. His evidence was from 19th-century race science and the race science of the Nazi regime. His reliance on such evidence supported Jensen's fears that the country was in danger of collapse because of dysgenic breeding by those of low intelligence. Jensen's well-known associations with scientific racists were not incidental to his scientific work, but central because he cited their work throughout his career. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Italian academic psychology found its first location in the Anthropological Museum of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Rome, where in 1890 a Laboratory of Experimental Psychology was established. In 1905, the first three Chairs of Experimental Psychology at the Universities of Turin, Rome, and Naples were created. These were followed in the subsequent years by others, until 1930, in other academic institutions. After many years and a long period of crisis linked to the fascist regime, only after the World War II (WWII), with the rebirth of the country, did psychology gradually rebuild its status as a scientific discipline. Within this framework of the renewal of society and university studies, in 1971, two degree courses were instituted in Rome and Padua. Based on research in central and local academic archives and on an analysis of the secondary literature, the gestation phase of the 4-year degree course in Psychology, the progressive establishment of the Psychology Departments, and the 5-year reform of the courses up to the birth of the first Faculty of Psychology at an Italian university are reconstructed. The aim of this article is to propose a well-founded discontinuist historiographical reading of the process of sedimentation of psychological experimentation that, after being born in the Faculty of Sciences and later transferring to the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, also led to important developments in the Faculty of Education, with the recognition of an autonomous academic space of scientific discipline with a degree course, departments and finally the Faculty of Psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Anatol Rapoport's decision to leave the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor has sometimes been portrayed as an act of protest against United States involvement in the Vietnam War. However, he personally viewed this decision as an "escape from responsibility" (Rapoport, 2000, pp. 145-147). This article reviews his writings before his departure to better understand why he decided to leave. Though he came to see political organization and civil dissidence as the only effective means of opposition, his writings reveal that at one point he felt optimism about a particular form of activism rooted in his scientist role. However, as demonstrated by his debates with the "strategist" community, the limits of the antiwar teach-in movement and the results of the AAAS survey on science and values, his attempts to renegotiate the boundaries between "scientific deterrence" and "moral pacifism" seemingly struggled to overcome the constraints of professional academic discourse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

In 1878, Sigmund Freud produced his first scientific publication while a medical student in Vienna, a physiological and histological analysis of Szymon Syrski's claim to have discovered the long-sought testes of the European eel. Though he would eventually come to be known as the father of psychoanalysis, a closer look at Freud's earliest scientific publication demonstrates that he was initially positioned on the cutting edge of neo-mechanistic physiology, and academic Darwinism. Not only was the young Freud a methodologically capable physiologist, he was conceptually grounded by the anti-Lamarckian and anti-Haeckelian Darwinism of his first mentor, Carl Claus. Scholarship on Freud's life and ideas is copious and far-reaching, and yet the stature of his psychoanalytic legacy remains a significant barrier for reappraisals of his early foundations. By analyzing his first publication and the context in which it came to be, this article seeks to revisit the place of Darwin in Freud's earliest scientific work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

This article presents a contextualization and revaluation of competing narratives concerning the history of psychology in Nazi Germany. Since the 1980s, this debate revolves around the supposed "professionalization" of the discipline from Hitler's rise to power until the end of World War II. The question whether or not academic psychology has profited from collaborating with the Nazi regime during the war is not just of historical interest, but also carries strong political and moral implications. Recently, the established narrative concerning the professionalization of German psychology under National Socialism was called into question by Wolfgang Schönpflug. According to his argumentation, psychology did not benefit from the war, but had to suffer considerable losses on terms of personnel and quality in teaching and research. After reconstructing the historical context and the political implications of the debate, we propose to take a different perspective on the question of "professionalization." Three case examples of psychologists from Austria whose career advanced significantly during the war are provided to shed light on the multitude of opportunities that emerged for those who offered their psychological expertise during the war. In conclusion, it is argued that professionalization should be understood as a theoretical framework that stimulates further historical research on a local level, not as a dogmatic judgment about the state of the discipline as a whole. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

After Rome became the capital of Italy in 1871, prestigious scientists arrived at the University of Rome. One of these scholars was the pedagogical philosopher Luigi Credaro (1860-1939). He was one of the rare Italian students of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) when he went to Leipzig and attended the Institute for Experimental Psychology in the academic year 1887-1888. There he also followed the pedagogical seminars and considered the usefulness of establishing sections of practical pedagogy in Italian magisterium schools, which were teacher-training institutions. In 1904, he founded in Rome the Scuola Pedagogica (Pedagogical School). Through the school, Credaro proposed the concept of a scientific pedagogy based on the application of the results of experimental sciences in the educational field. We can suppose that this approach influenced the first generation of Italian scholars interested in experimental psychology in Rome, in particular Sante De Sanctis (1862-1935) and Maria Montessori (1870-1952). The article thus considers the hypothesis of the formation of a so-called Roman school of psychology, which created in the field of pedagogy a ground on which to develop its research and applications. It should be noted that Credaro devoted himself to the potential applications of experimental psychology in the context of the modernization of the liberal states of the 20th century. Specifically, scientific pedagogy constituted a field of application and development for Roman psychology. At the end, the foundation of psychology in Rome was influenced by a particular version of the Wundtian psychology promoted by his pupil Credaro. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

This short research report focuses on psychologist Leon Kamin, who is best known for his research on what became known as the Kamin (blocking) effect. In the 1970s and 1980s he became prominent both inside and outside of psychology, not for laboratory research but for his writings on the heritability of intelligence. Kamin was no stranger to political activism. He joined the Communist Party U.S.A. at age 17, when he was a sophomore at Harvard. By 1949, he was writing for the Daily Worker (pen name: Leo Soft) and was employed as its New England editor in 1949-1950. In January 1954, Kamin was called to testify by Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist Senate subcommittee, which was visiting Boston and justified its interest in Harvard by citing its winning research grants from the U.S. Department of Defense. Kamin refused to "name names" and he was indicted for contempt of the Senate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

On December 17, 2021, The Interamerican Society of Psychology (ISP) celebrated its 70th anniversary. This article briefly describes ISP's history, discussing its organizational structure, and the contributions of the working group history of psychology, to honor this important event. The history of psychology division within ISP remains committed to facilitating encounters of Ibero American psychologists who wish to further examine the history of psychology. Lastly, we analyzed the growth and the contemporary challenges in the field of history of psychology in Latin America. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Clinical psychology emerged in the United States during the first decades of the 20th century. Although they focused on intelligence tests, starting around 1905 certain clinical psychologists pursued personality assessment through a specific, nonintellectual kind of test: the word association test as devised by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) at the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich. The test was a key device in the professionalization of North American psychiatry and psychology during the early 20th century: from 1905 onward it was acknowledged, discussed, and applied by experimental and clinical psychologists. However, Jung's original experiments and the development of the test itself have received only superficial or casual attention by historians of science. This article attempts to provide a critical, streamlined, and detailed account on the origin, development, and substance of the Zurich word association experiments. By drawing on heretofore overlooked primary sources, I offer a new, critical perspective on the emergence and development of Jung's test while engaging with its main theoretical and methodological aspects. I show that the test was neither Jung's sole creation nor did it consist of a simple, straightforward set of tasks. Contrarily, it was the result of a highly collaborative, multilayered institutionalized research program on linguistic and mental associations. The program, its data and its assumptions fueled several debates and data-driven discussions at Zurich, precluding the test from achieving a stable, standardized character. As a result, the history of Jung's program reflects both the advances and the limitations of early 20th-century personality testing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).