Advances in the History of Psychology

The edited volume, Psychology Gets in the Game, has just been released by the University of Nebraska Press. Edited by Christopher D. Green and Ludy T. Benjamin Jr., the book’s chapters explore sports-related research conducted by a number of late-nineteenth and early twentieth century psychologists.

Each chapter recounts a different episode in the history of sports psychology research including: the background of Norman Tripplett’s bicycling research, archery research conducted by John B. Watson and Karl Lashley, research on fencing and other sports by E.W. Scripture at Yale University, football research conducted at Stanford University by Walter Miles, the use of hypnotism by the St. Louis Browns‘ baseball team in an effort to improve their performance, football coach Paul Brown’s use of psychological tests to improve his teams’ performance, the pioneering athletic research laboratory established by Coleman Griffith at the University of Illinois, and the psychomotor evaluation of Babe Ruth done in Columbia University’s psychology lab (which was recently replicated by Albert Pujols). Read the rest of this entry »

The Sources, Research Notes, and News section of History of Psychology is currently seeking submissions. The official request for submissions, from the section editor Kelli Vaughn-Blount, follows below.

Dearest Colleagues,

Please consider submitting items of interest to the News section to be included in the February issue of History of Psychology. The News section publishes information relevant to both national and international history of psychology communities, including recent publications (books, translations, etc), upcoming conferences, calls for papers, recaps of events and conferences, and community member news about their awards, moves, passings, and accomplishments.

The deadline for inclusion is November 20, 2009.

Please email submission to: news.editor@historyofpsych.org Read the rest of this entry »

The Science Book Club of United Kingdom newspaper the Guardian, is currently discussing Stephen Jay Gould’s volume, The Mismeasure of Man. Gould’s book, published in 1981 and revised in 1996 in response to Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, looks at the history of intelligence research and race. Tim Radford, in his article for the Gaurdian, Race and Intelligence: A Sorry Tale of Shoddy Science, asserts that, “What Gould’s book reminds us over and over again is that even very clever, generous and thoughtful people who are raised with a set of ingrained assumptions are likely to find evidence to support those assumptions.” Those wishing to follow the Guardian’s discussion on The Mismeasure of Man can do so here.

In a four part series which begins airing today, CBC Radio’s Ideas explores the development, reception, and legacy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a volume celebrating the 150th anniversary of its publication this year. Produced by York University Department of Film professor Seth Feldman, this series, “The Evolution of Charles Darwin,” explores the import of Darwin’s idea of natural selection from its initial proposal to modern times. The series includes interviews with a number of prominent Darwin scholars, including Darwin biographers Janet Browne and James Moore, as well as historian of Victorian science Bernard Lightman. Also interviewed are current evolutionary scientists, including Niles Eldridge of the American Museum of Natural History, as well as Rosemary Grant and Peter Grant, professors emeritus at Princeton University.

The description of the program asserts that,

Darwin showed us how and why all life is change; that nothing stays the same; that over time all living things adapt and evolve, or perish; and that above all, this is a Natural Process, not the result of Divine Intervention. Darwin’s theory - of evolution through Natural Selection - completely changed the way we see the world.

It is this altered world view, one that Darwin helped to bring about, that the series explores over its four episode run. Read the rest of this entry »

In the August issue of Theory & Psychology, philosopher and historian of psychology John D. Greenwood argues that early American psychology was based on the notion of “strong psychological continuity.” Greenwood, of the Philosophy Department of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, presents his views in an article entitled, “Materialism, strong psychological continuity, and American scientific psychology.” This article builds on previous work by Greenwood, in which he argues for a re-evaluation of the import of the theory of evolution by natural selection for early American psychology. Read the rest of this entry »

In the latest issue of the Journal of the History of Biology philosopher of science Richard Creath (pictured at right) discusses “The role of history in science.” For those interested in the history of psychology, Creath’s article can easily be interpreted in terms of the role of history in psychology. In Creath’s view, “The study of history and the study of laws are not mutually exclusive but unavoidably linked. Neither can be pursued without the other.” The mutual interdependence of science and history is attributed to what Creath sees as the ubiquitity of historical knowledge in the sciences generally. It is historical knowledge that delimits the boundaries of the unknown, of the yet to be explored areas of a science. Related to this, are “historical judgements” that occur throughout scientific practice, as scientists seeks to ensure the originality and importance of their line of research. Read the rest of this entry »

Claude Lévi-Strauss — the French structuralist anthropologist who was a leading light of the 1950s and 1960s — has passed away at the age of 100. Here are obituaries by Le Monde and by the New York Times.

According to the Times, “Levi-Strauss was widely regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing new concepts concerning common patterns of behavior and thought, especially myths, in primitive and modern societies. During his 6-decade-long career, he authored many literary and anthropological classics, including ”Tristes Tropiques” (1955), ”The Savage Mind” (1963) and ”The Raw and the Cooked” (1964).

Breaking News: Two years ago, in August 2007, AHP reported the finding that “infants don’t learn language well from instructional videos.”  This has since led to legal claims against Walt Disney Corporation and its Baby Einstein DVD product.

Now Disney is offering to refund all purchases made in US, going back five years.  This provides an opportunity to look back at our original coverage, which examined the issue from the perspective of parents’ hopes to help their children become as gifted as possible.  This also included a detailed bibliography of histories of giftedness.  What has happened since?

Most notably, in terms of linking this story to the typical interests of AHP readers, Kathleen Ann Scott (2007) completed a dissertation comparing print and video as educational media for teaching the development of historical thinking.  Although her efforts were not directed at infants, the resulting study can be conceived as setting some limits on how much the scepticism regarding the value of instructional videos can be generalized.  She concludes: “readers manifested more and deeper historical understandings in their responses than did their counterparts in the movie group.”  And she suggests this is as a result of the greater investment of attentional effort in reading as compared to watching television, which seems consistent with the criticisms of the instructional DVDs.

Several other studies have also been published in the past two years, Read the rest of this entry »

A new issue of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences just been released online. Included in the October issue of the journal is an article detailing how post-World War II social scientists, associated with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), “consciously sought to create a scientific way of knowing that would bring unity to diversity” (p. 309) and thus reinforce democratic governance. Also featured is an article that recounts the the late-nineteenth century aesthetic research undertaken by Vernon Lee, a pseudonym adopted by British writer Violet Paget (pictured to the right). Finally, this issue of JHBS includes an account of the work of the the Social Science Research Council’s Advisory Committee on Personality and Culture (1930-1934), an interdisciplinary committee that included among its members a number of notable social scientists and clinicians, including Adolf Meyer, Edward Sapir, and Harry Stack Sullivan, among others.

Eight all-new book reviews can also be found in this issue of JHBS, including a review of Alexandra Rutherford’s Beyond the Box: B. F. Skinner’s Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life, 1950s-1970s, by Ludy T. Benjamin Jr. Beyond the Box has previously been discussed on AHP here and here Read the rest of this entry »

According to legend, on this date in 1850, Gustav Theodor Fechner arose from his sleep armed with wholly new method to attack the problem studying the mind. Rather than relying on introspective reports of what was going on in people’s minds, scientists could, instead, vary the intensity of some external physical stimulus and ask the “participant” (as we now call them) whether s/he could detect any difference perceptually. For instance: “Does this weight seem heavier than that one?” “Does this light seem brighter or greener than that one?” “Does sound seem louder or higher than that one?” Read the rest of this entry »