The long past and the short history of social psychology

In 1908 Ebbinghaus distinguished between the long past and the short history of psychology. The short history dated from 1879 when Wundt established a psychological laboratory at Leipzig. The long past concerns the time when psychology was a branch of philosophy. Implicit in such a break with the past is a positivist philosophy of science. I show how this philosophy of science distorts the historical record. I then analyse the history of social psychology. Unwittingly Lindzey and Aronson (1985) distinguish between the long past of social psychology as part of the Western intellectual tradition and its short history as an experimental science that is mainly American. Murchison's Handbook of Social Psychology (1935), whilst marking the boundary between the long past and the short history, belongs to the long past. The break with tradition came in 1954, when Lindzey published the first Handbook in the modern series. There is a self-conscious need, in the post World War II era, to train a whole new generation of social psychologists. The Lindzey series of Handbooks meets that need. The ‘progress’ of modern social psychology is now measured in terms of its distance from the Murchison milestone of 1935.     

The long past and short history of the vocabulary of Anglophone psychology

How do particular words come to be part of the vocabulary of Anglophone psychology? The present study sampled 600 words with psychological senses from the Oxford English Dictionary, which not only gives the number of senses for each word but also the date and author for the earliest known occurrence of each sense. Analogous information for the same words was taken from PsycINFO. One can distinguish between words for which their psychological sense is the first to occur in the history of the written language (primary psychological words) and words for which their psychological sense only emerges after one or more other senses have become established in the written language (secondary psychological words). To use a distinction made famous by Ebbinghaus, secondary psychological words have both a past and a history in psychology, while primary psychological words only have a history. Secondary psychological words have more connections to other words and occur more frequently in PsycINFO than do primary psychological words. For secondary psychological words, it is possible to trace a process of metaphoric polysemy that provides a basis for the eventual occurrence of the psychological sense of a word. Some primary psychological words are now developing secondary, nonpsychological senses, showing that they are subject to the same metaphoric process as are any other words.     

A short personal memoir

The history of the formation of the different analytical psychology groups in Britain is briefly described to illustrate the recurring splitting that has taken place throughout the development of the profession of analytical psychology. The author discusses her role as editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology.     

Now and then: Hand choice is influenced by recent action history

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Action choices are influenced by recent past and predicted future action states. Here, we demonstrate that recent hand-choice history affects both current hand...     

A short measure of economic beliefs

Although there exist a number of self-report measures aimed at determining general social and political attitudes, there exists no scale specifically aimed at measuring economic beliefs. This paper reports the development of an Economics Beliefs Scale based on the Wilson and Patterson (1968) format. The scale was shown to have satisfactory reliability and validity statistics as well as being an economic measure in its own right.     

A brief history of negation

The history of scholarship on negation tracks and illuminates the major developments in the history of metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, from Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle through Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein to contemporary formal theorists. Our perspective focuses on the catalytic role played by the 20th century philosopher of language Paul Grice, whose views on negation serve as a fulcrum for his attempt to bridge the (neo-)Traditionalist and Formalist traditions in logical thought. Grice's remarks on negation and speaker meaning and the elaboration of his ideas by subsequent neo-Griceans are summarized and situated within a broader picture of the role of contradictory and contrary negation in the frameworks of Aristotelians, Medievals, early modern schoolmaster-logicians, 19th and early 20th century neo-Idealists and Formalists, Oxford ordinary-language analytics, practitioners of classical and non-classical logics, and a range of other philosophers and linguists. Particular attention is paid to the relations between negation and the other operators of propositional and predicate calculus. Implications for accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language are also pursued and extensive references to related work are provided.     

A short measure of Eriksonian ego identity

Developed a new measure of Erikson's (1950, 1959) concept of ego identity which would meet the following criteria: (a) that it be short, with an acceptable level of reliability; (b) that it be objective and easily scored; and (c) that it be free of response set contamination. A 12-item scale (Ego Identity Scale) with a forced choice format was constructed. Two further studies were conducted to test the validity of the scale. These studies showed that the Ego Identity Scale correlated as predicted with measures Of locus of control, intimacy, dogmatism, Tomkins' Left, occupational commitment, and political commitment. It also correlated in the predicted direction with measures of interpersonal trust and moral commitment though these correlations did not reach statistical significance.