Tag Archives: Yerkes

August HoP: Sex, Mesmerism, Addiction, & More

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The August 2012 issue of History of Psychology is now online. Included in this issue is a Special Section: Beyond Kinsey, Sex and American Psychology, which examines some of the psychological research funded by the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex. Stay tuned to AHP later in the week for a special interview with Peter Hegarty, Michael Pettit, and David Serlin, the authors whose articles make up this section.

In addition to the Special Section: Beyond Kinsey, Sex and American Psychology, the issue includes article that address the history of addiction interventions, the roots of psychology in Italy, behavior analysis in Brazil and its pedagogical connections, Lurena Brackett and mesmerism in the nineteenth century United States, and Jean Piaget’s psychological factory. Full titles, authors, and abstracts follow below.

Special Section: Beyond Kinsey, Sex and American Psychology.

“Beyond Kinsey: The committee for research on problems of sex and American psychology,” by Peter Hegarty. The abstract reads,

This introduction to the Special Section of History of Psychology argues for greater attention to psychological research on sex in the decades before the publication of the Kinsey volumes. Drawing on scholarship by Adele Clarke, Donna Haraway and Wade Pickren, this introduction argues for the centrality of the psychological research projects funded by the Committee for Research on Problems of Sex (CRPS), chaired by psychologist Robert Yerkes after 1921. The three individual papers all speak to opposition to the functionalist approach to sex often attributed to Yerkes’ CRPS.

“Getting miles away from Terman: Did the CRPS fund Catharine Cox Miles’s unsilenced psychology of sex?” by Peter  Hegarty. The abstract reads, Continue reading August HoP: Sex, Mesmerism, Addiction, & More →

Robert Yerkes & the First 100 Chimpanzees

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The website The First 100 provides details of the first 100 chimpanzees bred at the primate research centre established by psychologist Robert Yerkes (right). In the 1910s, Yerkes called for the creation of a primate research institute. Throughout the following decade, Yerkes conducted research on the animals and paid a visit to a primate colony in Cuba, where he observed chimpanzees. In 1930, Yerkes’s successful research with chimpanzees allowed him to obtain the institutional and financial support – from Yale University, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation – to establish a primate centre: the Yale Laboratories for Primate Biology. As described on the Center’s website,

The chimpanzee colony included four animals that Dr. Yerkes had in Connecticut, 13 chimpanzees that were donated by a prominent Cuban citizen and 16 apes that were a gift from the Pasteur Institute of France. The same year, the first chimpanzee birth occurred at the Center; the offspring, named Alpha, provided Dr. Yerkes with the first detailed observations of a chimpanzee’s development and reproductive processes.

Although initially affiliated with Yale University and based in Orange Park, Florida, the Centre later came under the ownership of Emory University in 1956 and in 1965 moved from Florida to Georgia. Today the Center continues to operate as the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

The First 100, created by philosopher Lori Gruen of Wesleyan University, memorializes the first 100 chimpanzees bred at Yerkes’s primate research institute, providing details on their lives and lineages, as well as on Yerkes and the institute itself. As Gruen describes on the site‘s opening page,

In 1925, Robert M. Yerkes began an ambitious experiment: to institutionalize the scientific use of chimpanzees in the United States. In 1930, in Orange Park, Florida, the first captive experimental breeding colony of chimpanzees was opened and research as underway. Today an estimated 1,300 chimpanzees are in research laboratories in the U.S. Many of them are descendants of the original colony.

The site is described as the outcome of a larger project:

While doing research for her forthcoming book on human relations to captive chimpanzees, Dr. Lori Gruen became interested in the genealogy of chimpanzees in the United States. R. M. Yerkes, a rather elaborate list maker, left behind many incomplete lists that Gruen began filling in while working through archival materials. One document in particular captured her attention — “Complete List of Chimpanzees: Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology.”

This list provided the initial basis for Gruen’s site, which details the lives of Bill through Flora, and the 98 chimpanzees born in between. Go to The First 100 and explore the lives of Jenny, Pan, Gamma, twins Tom and Helene, and others.

Thanks to Michael Pettit for bringing this site to AHP’s attention.

 

Yerkes’ Multiple-Choice Apparatus

General,

yerkes.JPGRobert Yerkes is probably best known for his work developing the WWI Army Alpha and Beta intelligence tests or his later work with primates. Earlier in his career, however, when he served as the director of psychological research at the Boston State Psychopathic Hospital, Yerkes developed a multiple choice method for measuring ideational behaviour.

As Fuchs & Trewin describe in the winter edition of the American Journal of Psychology, Yerkes defined “ideational behaviour” as:

“a series of reactive tendencies that a person displays when confronted with solving a problem. He believed that ideational behavior was innate, yet unlike other behaviorists of the period, he also believed that behavior was more complex than “our time honored classification of activities as reflex, instinctive, impulsive, habitual, voluntary”. Yerkes understood behavior as being guided by intelligence, but intelligence could not be measured directly. By measuring ideational behavior, Yerkes hoped to obtain a better understanding of intelligence and to apply that understanding to mapping phylogenic relationships both within and between species.” (p. 645-646).

Continue reading Yerkes’ Multiple-Choice Apparatus →