Category Archives: Anniversaries

CfP: 50th Anniversary Meeting of Cheiron, June 21-24, 2018, Akron, OH

Call for Papers: 50th Annual Meeting of Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences
Conference Date: June 21-24, 2018
Conference Location: University of Akron, Akron, Ohio
Submission Due Date: January 15, 2018, 5pm CST
Websitehttps://www.uakron.edu/cheiron/

Papers, posters, symposia/panels, or workshops are invited for the 50th annual meeting of Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences. The conference will be held at the University of Akron, in Akron, Ohio, with Cathy Faye as local host. The University of Akron is the home of the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, home to the National Museum of Psychology and the Archives of the History of American Psychology.

The Akron-Canton Airport is about a 20-minute drive from campus.  Cleveland Hopkins International Airport is a 45-minute drive from campus. Dormitory accommodations will be available at a very affordable price, along with local hotel options. Further travel details will provided in the coming months.

Submissions may deal with any aspect of the history of the human, behavioral, and social sciences or related historiographical and methodological issues. For this year’s 50th meeting, we particularly encourage submissions that address changes in historiography in the behavioral and social sciences over the past half century. All submissions should conform to the guidelines listed below.

All submissions must be received by 5pm CST, January 15, 2018. Please email your proposals to the 2018 Program Chair, Robert Kugelmann, at kugelman@udallas.edu.

Guidelines 

All papers, posters, and proposed symposia/panels should focus on new and original work, i.e. the main part of the work should not have been published or presented previously at other conferences.

To facilitate the peer review and planning process, please provide a separate page that includes: a) title; b) author’s name and affiliation; c) author’s mail and email address and phone number; d) audio/visual needs. In all types of proposals below, names of authors/presenters should not be indicated anywhere but on the separate cover page for the submission.

Papers: Submit a 700-800 word abstract plus references that contains the major sources that inform your work. Presentations at the meeting will be 20-25 minutes in length.

Posters: Submit a 300-400 word abstract plus references that contains the major sources that inform your work.

Symposia/Panels: Organizer should submit a 250-300 word abstract describing the symposium as a whole and a list of the names and affiliations of the participants. Each participant should submit a 300-600 word abstract plus references that contains the major sources that inform your work.

Workshops: Organizer should submit a 250-300 word abstract describing the workshop and, if applicable, a list of the names and affiliations of those participating.

Special Events for Cheiron’s 50th

To celebrate Cheiron’s 50th meeting, some special events are planned.  Kathy Milar is in charge of the Anniversary Planning Committee. Special events are in the planning stages and anyone with ideas should contact Kathy at kathym@earlham.edu for further information.

Travel Stipends & Young Scholar Award

Travel Stipends: Cheiron will make funds available to help defray travel expenses for students, as well as other scholars facing financial hardship, who present at the conference. We encourage everyone to apply for support from their home institutions. The Travel Stipend is limited to $100 to $300 per accepted submission; stipends for co-authored presentations must be divided among the presenters. If you wish to be considered for the Travel Stipend, please apply by sending the Program Chair a separate email message, explaining your status, at the same time that you submit your proposal.

Young Scholar Award: Since 2008, Cheiron has awarded a prize for the best paper or symposium presentation by a young scholar. To be eligible for consideration, the young scholar must be the sole or first author on the paper and must be responsible for the bulk of the work of the paper. The young scholar must be a student currently or must have completed doctoral work not more than 5 years prior to the meeting.

About three weeks after the meeting, applicants for this award will submit a copy of the presented paper (rather than the abstract); it may include further, minor changes. Submissions go to the Cheiron Executive Officer, who sets the exact deadline, and the entries will be judged by members of the Program Committee and the Review Committee. The winner will receive a certificate from Cheiron and will be asked to submit the paper to the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences within a reasonable period of time. The Award winner may ask Cheiron for assistance in preparing the paper for submission to JHBS. If the paper is accepted by JHBS for publication, the winner will receive a $500 honorarium from the publisher, Wiley-Blackwell, in recognition of the Cheiron Young Scholar Award. Please note that the award committee may choose not to grant an award in any given year and that the honorarium depends on publication in JHBS, in addition to winning the Award.

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CONTACT INFORMATION:

Concerning meeting program, or the Travel Stipend, contact the 2018 Program Chair:
Robert Kugelmann, Psychology Department, University of Dallas
kugelman@udallas.edu
Telephone: 972-721-5268 (office)
For questions about local arrangements, contact Cathy Faye at cfaye@uakron.edu
For questions about the Young Scholar Award or general organizational issues, contact David K. Robinson, Cheiron Executive Officer: drobinso@truman.edu
Anyone wanting to contribute ideas for the 50th anniversary, contact Kathy Milar: kathym@earlham.edu

Leo Postman and George Miller in the New AJP

L-R: Harry F. Harlow, Judson S. Brown, and Leo J. Postman. Copyright: Department of Psychology, UNL.

The Fall 2017 issue of the American Journal of Psychology features two articles marking the journal’s 130th anniversary. The first explores the work of experimentalist Leo Postman and the second, the contributions of George Miller to the American Journal of PsychologyFull details below.

“Leo J. Postman: Master Experimentalist,” by James S. Nairne and Michelle E. Coverdale. Abstract:

Leo J. Postman was an internationally recognized experimental psychologist whose work after World War II helped frame the modern empirical study of perception, memory, and other psychological processes. Postman was important to The American Journal of Psychology, serving as a frequent contributor, and the journal remained important to him throughout his career; in fact, he ended his research career as its co-editor. In this article, we briefly review some of his contributions to the journal and try to identify the consistent themes that defined his work. His views and his choice of topics tracked the significant theoretical issues of his time and remain a model of theoretical and empirical rigor.

“Breaking Into the Mind: George A. Miller’s Early Work in the American Journal of Psychology,” by William D. Raymond and Alice F. Healy. Abstract:

Reviewed here are the 9 scholarly articles written by George A. Miller for The American Journal of Psychology (AJP), all dated from 1944 to 1958. These articles include studies on discrimination, temporal judgments, auditory patterns, operant conditioning, animal behavior, verbal recall, and language structure. There are empirical and theoretical investigations and investigations combining both experiments and theory. Despite their breadth and the variety of subjects and procedures, all of the Miller studies in AJP can be viewed as following with behaviorist traditions rather than dealing with more complex cognition. During this time Miller’s view of psychology was changing; these studies, with their inventive methods, can also be seen as initial attempts to break into the mind, or to uncover and understand cognitive processes, in a way that had been discouraged by behaviorist traditions. The studies all also point to the need to consider the immediate contexts and long-term histories of the observer’s experiences, which implicate the broader statistical learning mechanism that is now considered to underlie human learning. The AJP articles reviewed here foreshadow the wide-ranging and profound influence Miller had on psychology and related fields of study. Miller has been described as a founder or pioneer of a number of fields, including psycholinguistics, mathematical psychology, applied psychology, cognitive science, and computational approaches to linguistic analysis. Because of his huge impact on so many areas and his eagerness to communicate psychology’s importance to others, Miller can be considered an ambassador of psychology to a wider audience.

Reimaging Human Relations in Our Time: 4-Day Festival Celebrating 70 Years of the Tavistock Institute

The Tavistock Institute is hosting a 4 day festival, Reimagining Human Relations in Our Time, October 17th-20th to mark its 70th anniversary. For those interested in the history of the Tavistock Institute events on Thursday October 19th are on the theme of “In the Shadow and Light of the Archive.” As the Festival’s site notes “This theme takes a historical lens to reflect on the meaning of the Tavistock Institute’s work including the ways in which our archive contributes to organisational development practice; moving from the seminal work as shadows towards standing on the shoulders of giants.” More generally,

Reimagining Human Relations in Our Time is a festival celebrating 70 years of the Tavistock Institute. At the heart of the festival is the Institute’s archive which over the last two years has been intricately and delicately catalogued at Wellcome Library. These two things coinciding, our anniversary and the launch of the archive, are a great cause for celebration in particular the insights of our forebears as they tackled past societal challenges and their application to our work today. For instance how can we respond to an environment at tipping point, ageing and social care, displaced people and populations, crises in faith, identity and leadership, our wellbeing at work?

The festival website is the starting place for you to begin your research and participation with access to a rich programme which offers opportunities to take part, reflect, dream, debate, consider, and perform. With its online booking system and easy to view programme you will be able to curate your own festival experience.

Find out more about this anniversary festival, including full programming details, here.

New Book: 125 Years of the American Psychological Association

To mark the 125th anniversary of the American Psychological Association (APA) the APA is releasing 125 Years of the American Psychological Associationan updated version of a volume first released in 1992 to mark the association’s centenary. Edited by Wade Pickren and Alexandra Rutherford, the volume

demonstrates how the Association has evolved over the years in response to intellectual, cultural, political, economic, and other historical developments.

Chapters describe the personalities and events that transformed APA from a tiny organization of 26 members to one of the largest professional associations in the world.

Key topics include the changing role of women in the APA, and the organization’s considerable contributions to social change.

From its origins in the late nineteenth century, through the two World Wars and a major reorganization, to the social and cultural turbulence of the 1960s and the economic uncertainties of the 1970s and 1980s, APA’s development has mirrored the growth of psychology as a discipline in the United States.

This special 125th anniversary edition describes the unique challenges and triumphs that have marked APA’s early years of the twenty-first century.

Contents

I. History of the American Psychological Association

  1. The Historical Roots of the American Psychological Association
    Thomas C. Cadwallader
  2. Origins and Early Years of the American Psychological Association: 1890 to 1906
    Michael M. Sokal
  3. Growing Pains: The American Psychological Association From 1903 to 1920
    Rand B. Evans
  4. The American Psychological Association and World War I: 1914 to 1919
    Thomas M. Camfield
  5. The American Psychological Association Between the World Wars: 1918 to 1941
    Franz Samelson
  6. The Power of Service: World War II and Professional Reform in the American Psychological Association
    James H. Capshew and Ernest R. Hilgard
  7. Rapid Growth and Change at the American Psychological Association: 1945 to 1970
    Meredith P. Crawford
  8. Growth, Conflict, and Public Policy: The American Psychological Association From 1970 to 1985
    Michael S. Pallak
  9. The American Psychological Association: 1985 to 1992
    Raymond D. Fowler

II. Essays on the American Psychological Association at 125

  1. Challenges to the American Psychological Association and Paths for the Future
    Wade E. Pickren and Alexandra Rutherford
  2. Women in the American Psychological Association
    Elizabeth Scarborough and Alexandra Rutherford
  3. The American Psychological Association in Relation to Social Responsibility and Social Justice
    M. Brewster Smith and Wade E. Pickren
  4. The American Psychological Association Knowledge Dissemination Program: An Overview of 125 Years
    Gary R. VandenBos

Call for papers for a Special Thematic Section of the Revista de Psicología

Call for papers for a Special Thematic Section of the Revista de Psicología

Research in History of Psychology: Celebration of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Teaching of Psychology at the University of Chile (1947-2017)

Psychology in Latin America in general, and in Chile in particular, goes through a historically significant moment, several years since the installation of the first programs of undergraduate training in Psychology in the region have passed, since the beginnings at the middle of the 20th century. Precisely, the anniversary of the creation of the first undergraduate program to train psychologists in Chile, in 1947 at the Universidad de Chile, led to the organization of a special section on Research in History of Psychology that can reflect the meaningful historical path of Psychology as a science and profession, in Latin America and the world.

In the last decades, the field of history of psychology became an area of growing professionalization worldwide, with a large number of active researchers, several research lines, celebration of special events, the creation of specific societies, the organization of historic archives and museums, edition and publication of thematic books, among others. The editors of Revista de Psicología (ISSN 0719-0581, http://revistapsicologia.uchile.cl/) believes that it is important to give visibility to the projects in History of Psychology, so necessary to critically evaluate the past of the discipline and analyze the constitutive elements of the professional identity of psychologists. That said, we invites researchers and professionals interested in historical issues to submit their contributions to the special section.

This is a call for papers reporting historiographical studies from the “Psi Disciplines” (Psychology, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and others) and “Behavioral Sciences” (Neuropsychology, Psychobiology, Neurosciences, and others). We hope to receive contributions that highlight the management of primary sources and that include a proper methodological treatment to various historical subjects. Papers received will be subjected to all regular evaluation mechanisms of the journal, which will involve specialized reviewers.

Guest Editors

Vanetza E. Quezada (Universidad de Chile, Chile)
Miguel Gallegos (Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina)
Rodrigo Lopes Miranda (Universidade Católica Dom Bosco, Brasil)

Deadline:  September 1st, 2017. Submissions should be send to: revista.psicologia@facso.cl

130th Anniversary of The American Journal of Psychology

Psychological Laboratory, Cornell University,1900

The first issue of the 130th volume of The American Journal of Psychology includes a couple articles marking the occasion. Full details below.

“The Synthetic Experiment: E. B. Titchener’s Cornell Psychological Laboratory and the Test of Introspective Analysis,” by Rand B. Evans. The abstract reads,

Beginning in 1900, a major thread of research was added to E. B. Titchener’s Cornell laboratory: the synthetic experiment. Titchener and his graduate students used introspective analysis to reduce a perception, a complex experience, into its simple sensory constituents. To test the validity of that analysis, stimulus patterns were selected to reproduce the patterns of sensations found in the introspective analyses. If the original perception can be reconstructed in this way, then the analysis was considered validated. This article reviews development of the synthetic method in E. B. Titchener’s laboratory at Cornell University and examines its impact on psychological research.

“The Method of Negative Instruction: Herbert S. Langfeld’s and Ludwig R. Geissler’s 1910–1913 Insightful Studies,” by Robert W. Proctor and Aiping Xiong. The abstract reads,

Herbert S. Langfeld and Ludwig R. Geissler published insightful articles during the period of 1910–1913 using what they called the Method of Negative Instruction, which anticipated much current research on action control and the role of instructions. We review their studies and relate the findings to contemporary research and views concerning task-irrelevant congruency effects and deception, concluding that their work has not received the credit it warrants. We also call for contemporary researchers to revisit prior studies, especially ones conducted before the cognitive revolution in psychology, to enrich their knowledge of the field and improve the quality of their research.