The real F. M. Urban

F.M. Urban made important contributions in psychometry and is best known for his introduction of a correction in the "Müller-Urban weights." Born in Austria, he came to the University of Pennsylvania where he made most of his contributions in psychology. He was trapped in Europe by World War I and never returned to the United States. Myriad hardships forced him to abandon his original project of a study of the entire field of probability and its application to other sciences. Whenever possible, however, he pursued his interests in psychometry and psychophysics and strove to remain active in psychology.     

Ivan Pavlov on communist dogmatism and the autonomy of science in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. 1923.

On 25 September, 1923, two days before his 74th birthday, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov stood before a class of medical students assembled in the auditorium of his Alma Mater, the Military Medical Academy in Leningrad. Pavlov, the recipient of the Nobel prize in medicine in 1904 for his work in physiology, was about to address his first class of the new academic year, and, as was his custom, he had prepared his first lecture on a general theme. This was an especially significant address, however, for in it Pavlov reviewed the impressions he had gathered during his travels in Western Europe and the United States in the summer of 1923, and he criticised the prevailing ideology of Soviet communism by attacking the ideas of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, then the leading expositor of Bolshevik Marxism. An English translation of the lecture is printed below.     

‘Too black or not black enough’: Social identity complexity in the political rhetoric of Barack Obama

The election of the first African‐American President of the United States, Barack Obama, has been widely recognised as an extraordinary milestone in the history of the United States and indeed the world. With the use of a discursive psychological approach combined with central theoretical principles derived from social identity and self‐categorisation theories, this paper analyses a corpus of speeches Obama delivered during his candidacy for president to examine how he attended to and managed his social identity in his political discourse. Building on a social identity model of leadership, we examine specifically how Obama mobilises political support and social identification by building an identity for himself as a prototypical representative of the American people, notwithstanding the protracted public debate within both the White and Black American communities that had questioned and contested Obama's identity. Moreover, we demonstrate how Obama managed the dilemmas around his identity by actively crafting an in‐group identity that was oriented to an increasingly socially diverse America—a diversity that he himself exemplified and embodied as a leader. As an ‘entrepreneur’ of identity, Obama's rhetorical project was to position himself as an exceptional leader, whose very difference was represented as ‘living proof’ of the widely shared collective values that constitute the ‘American Dream’. Drawing on social identity complexity theory, we suggest that by providing more inclusive and complex categories of civic and national identity, Obama's presidency has the potential to radically transform what it means to be a prototypical in‐group member in America. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE BIOLOGIST AS PSYCHOLOGIST: HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN'S EARLY MENTAL ABILITY INVESTIGATIONS

In the early 1880s, biologist Henry Fairfield Osborn conducted some of the first questionnaire research in American psychology. This article details how he came to distribute Francis Galton's questionnaire on mental imagery in the United States, as well as how he altered it to suit his own burgeoning psychological research interests. The development and circulation of questionnaires at the very beginning of American scientific psychology, first by Osborn and later by G. Stanley Hall, is discussed in terms of the new psychology's often‐overlooked methodological plurality. Further, Osborn's late nineteenth century interest in individual variation and group differences in mental imagery ability are discussed in relation to his pervasive educational and social concerns, as well as his eventual status as a prominent eugenicist in the twentieth century United States. This research into mental imagery ability foreshadows the eugenic‐oriented intelligence testing that developed in the early twentieth century.     

Psychology strikes out: Coleman R. Griffith and the Chicago Cubs

Coleman R. Griffith is widely known as the father of sport psychology in the United States. He directed the Research in Athletics Laboratory at the University of Illinois in the late 1920s and early 1930s and produced many articles and books on the psychology of sport. In 1938, P. K. Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, hired him to help improve the team's performance. Griffith and an assistant filmed and measured the players' skills, attempting to build a "scientific" training program for the team. Many of Griffith's subjects, most notably the managers, objected to his interference (as they saw it) and attempted to undermine his work. Griffith wrote more than 600 pages of reports on his work with the Cubs between 1938 and 1940. This article examines the content of those reports and the reasons for the failure of Griffith's project.     

Primary and secondary memory: multistore versus process models of memory

Healy, et al. recently distinguished between recency and "penultimate" effects when contrasting recall performance. They argued that the penultimate effect was significantly different from the typical recency effect, which point was taken as support for distinguishing between primary and secondary memory systems. The current study adapted the Healy, et al. methodology to control for the occurrence of intentional learning strategies. 40 participants were asked to recall the names of 42 U.S. Presidents by their term in office (secondary memory) or in a pseudorandom order (primary memory); the recency and penultimate effects were observed for each condition. With intentional learning controlled for, contrast analyses yielded a pattern of performance similar to that observed by Healy, et al.     

Zero Anaphora: Transfer of Reference Tracking Strategies from Chinese to English

English contains many nominals that would be absent in Chinese because Chinese makes greater use of zero anaphora, which is an empty grammatical slot in a sentence standing for a previously mentioned referent. Native Chinese and native English speakers were compared in comprehending modified English passages from a standardized reading test with nominals deleted that would be absent in Chinese. In three experiments, Chinese speakers showed superior comprehension as measured by objective multiple-choice questions in this case, but not when no words were deleted or when nominals were deleted that would not be absent in Chinese. These results imply that native Chinese speakers develop reference tracking strategies that they transfer to comprehending English.This research was supported in part by United States Army Research Institute Contracts MDA903-93-K-0010, DASW01-96-K-0010, DASW01-99-K-0002, and DASW01-03-K-0002 to the University of Colorado (Alice Healy, Principal Investigator).We thank Lyle Bourne and Barbara Fox for stimulating discussions about this research. We are also grateful to the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado for their support of this research.Experiments 1 and 2 were reported at the International Conference on Functional Approaches to Grammar, Albuquerque, NM, July 25, 1995, and at the 37th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Chicago, IL, November 3, 1996, and all three experiments were reported at the 2001 American Association for Applied Linguistics conference, St. Louis, MO, February 24, 2001.     

Ivan Pavlov on communist dogmatism and the autonomy of science in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s

On 25 September, 1923, two days before his 74th birthday, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov stood before a class of medical students assembled in the auditorium of his Alma Mater, the Military Medical Academy in Leningrad. Pavlov, the recipient of the Nobel prize in medicine in 1904 for his work in physiology, was about to address his first class of the new academic year, and, as was his custom, he had prepared his first lecture on a general theme. This was an especially significant address, however, for in it Pavlov reviewed the impressions he had gathered during his travels in Western Europe and the United States in the summer of 1923, and he criticised the prevailing ideology of Soviet communism by attacking the ideas of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, then the leading expositor of Bolshevik Marxism. An English translation of the lecture is printed below. This article was originally published inMinerva, vol. 29, no. 4 (Winter 1991). Published by permission ofMinerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy, 19 Nottingham Road, London SW17 7EA, and by permission of the Rockeller Archive Center, North Tarrytown, N.Y.     

Fifty years of American polarization and the changing roles of faith communities

The 2016 election of Donald Trump as president and the first year of his administration have been accompanied by intensified social and political divides in the United States. A comparison of today's polarization with that during the Vietnam War and civil rights movement of the 1960s suggests strategies for bridging the divides—and in particular for an expanding role by faith communities.     

The failure of endogenous growth

Fifteen years have passed since Paul Romer published his seminal paper that launched the field of endogenous growth. Today seems like an appropriate time to reflect back on this field and assess its contribution. My own assessment is that this line of research has not proven useful for understanding the most important question faced by economists today, namely, why isn’t the whole world rich? Exogenous growth theory, in contrast, is. Endogenous growth may prove useful for understanding growth in world knowledge over time, but it is not useful for understanding why some countries are so poor relative to the United States today.     

Australian influences on Elton Mayo: the construct of Revery in industrial society

Elton Mayo was born in Australia and spent most of his first 42 years living in that country. This article explores the Australian context in which he developed his views views of Australia compared with that of the United States during the time that Mayo developed his approach to psychology and the role of workers in industry. In addition, the social context in which Mayo established his career was shaped by significant political events in Australia. The construct of revery, which describes a specific state of consciousness, is central to Mayo's early theorizing and was developed by Mayo partly in reaction to political and industrial conflict occurring in Australia.     

Association of birthdate with success of nationally ranked junior tennis players in the United States

The objective was to assess the effect of birthdate on successful performance in tennis by junior tennis players in the United States and to address the question of whether "birthdate effect" persisted with ongoing age toward adulthood. The national rankings and birthdates of junior tennis players in each age division were obtained from the United States Tennis Association. The number of male and female junior tennis players ranked within the top 100 in their respective age divisions with birthdates in the first half of the year were counted and compared with the number of junior athletes born in the second half of the year. A significant chi squared for birthdate by success in tennis was present in the 14 years and under and 16 years and under age divisions for boys. This effect was less for older ages. Among girls, the effect of birthdate on tennis ranking was not significant in any age group. Among male junior tennis players in the 14 years and under and 16 years and under age divisions, athletes born in the first half of the year had an advantage over those born in the second half, but not for girls.     

TIMOTHY LEARY'S MID‐CAREER SHIFT: CLEAN BREAK OR INFLECTION POINT?

The psychologist Timothy Leary (1920–1996), an iconic cultural figure in the United States in the 1960s and afterward, has received comparatively scant attention in the history of psychology. This may be due to perceptions that, after a major career shift centering around his experimentation with psychedelic substances and his subsequent dismissal from Harvard in 1963, Leary parted company with the field. While there are several good reasons to adopt this view, examination of his entire career as well as his intellectual ancestry reveals unacknowledged continuities, suggesting that a more prominent place be accorded to him in the history of psychology, as well as to the challenges he poses.     

Meyer's dealings with Jones: A chapter in the history of the American response to psychoanalysis

Although Adolf Meyer, first director of the Phipps Clinic at John Hopkins, did much to promote a knowledge of psychoanalysis in the United States, he never identified his views with those of Freud. Using unpublished letters and documents, the present paper seeks to clarify Meyer's attitude towards psychoanalysis by focusing on his dealings with one of Freud's most gifted followers, Ernest Jones, at a critical moment in the reception of psychoanalysis in America. In particular, an effort is made to identify some of the personal, intellectual, and institutional factors that shaped Meyer's response to Freud.     

Developing a Buddhist approach to pastoral care: a peacemaker's view

As the United States becomes a more multicultural and multireligious society, the ranks of healthcare chaplains are no longer being limited solely to Judeo-Christian clerics. In an effort to increase interfaith understanding and ecumenical awareness, the author presents one model of healthcare chaplaincy that derives itself from a Buddhist perspective and how he uses it in his daily work at a large medical center in the United States.     

Toward a racial abyss: eugenics,Wickliffe Draper,and the origins of The Pioneer Fund

The Pioneer Fund was created in 1937 "to conduct or aid in conducting study and research into problems of heredity and eugenics . . . and problems of race betterment with special reference to the people of the United States." The Fund was endowed by Colonel Wickliffe Preston Draper, a New England textile heir, and perpetuates his legacy through an active program of grants, some of the more controversial in aid of research on racial group differences. Those presently associated with the Fund maintain that it has made a substantial contribution to the behavioral and social sciences, but insider accounts of Pioneer's history oversimplify its past and smooth over its more tendentious elements. This article examines the social context and intellectual background to Pioneer's origins, with a focus on Col. Draper himself, his concerns about racial degeneration, and his relation to the eugenics movement. In conclusion, it evaluates the official history of the fund.     

J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Faith Development Portrait

J. Robert Oppenheimer was among the most important and enigmatic figures in 20th century science. He is best known for successfully directing the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Subsequently, he became a scientist and statesman who advised the United States government in the areas of atomic weapons development and public policy. He later became subject to an investigation in 1954 into his previous political affiliations and his personal behavior that ended in the revoking of his security clearance. This essay seeks to chronicle Oppenheimer’s coming of age as a public intellectual with a view toward his own psychological history and most especially in relationship to the stages of faith development articulated by James Fowler and colleagues. Moreover, though not conventionally religious, Oppenheimer’s life and thought were permeated with themes and ideas of a religious and ethical nature that shaped his adult character and informed his view of the world. This essay was originally presented at The Richardson History of Psychiatry Research Seminar at Weill Cornell Medical College.     

Curt Richter: psychobiology and the concept of instinct

Curt Richter is at the origins of psychobiology in the United States. For Richter the concept of instinct was central to his research. While he had diverse interests that traversed a great range of psychobiology, the concept of instinct was fundamental to his research on specific hungers and the regulation of the internal milieu. Debates about the concept of instinct would last the bulk of Richter's experimental career, culminating in an international conference a decade after the Second World War.     

What did the early American presidents really look like? Gilbert Stuart portraits as a "Rosetta Stone" to the pre-photography era

The American painter Gilbert Stuart (1755 - 1828) painted many prominent individuals, including the first six presidents of the United States, and several of his later subjects were also photographed. We compared these photographs to Stuart's portraits of the same individuals and characterized the differences between Stuart's representations and his subjects' actual appearances. This allows us to create more photographic likenesses of other Stuart subjects, including individuals who lived before the invention of photography.     

Determining the degree of inconsistency in a set of paired comparisons

Consistency in paired comparison data is defined. Two types of inconsistency which may arise are defined. Computational formulas for these types of inconsistency are derived, and examples illustrating the use of these formulas are presented.These ideas were developed while the first author was on the staff of the Research Center for Human Relations. The work was made possible by the ONR contract NONR 285(10). The authors are indebted to Jack Moshman for his helpful critical suggestions. The United States Government is authorized to reprint this article in whole or in part.