Chen Li: China's elder psychologist

Chen Li is one of a small group of psychologists in China who trained abroad early in their careers, returned to teach and do research, and continued doing so into later life beyond normal retirement age. His contacts with a number of prominent psychologists in England and Germany in the 1930s, and his inadvertent position at the center of a political row in China in the 1960s, leading to the shutting down of psychology for 10 years, made him historically important. Known for his work in organizational psychology and education, he is a distinguished psychologist and educational leader. Although trained as an experimentalist, he now embraces a broader view of psychology but remains emphatic it should be applied to real-life problems.     

“As his name indicates”: R. S. Woodworth's letters of reference and employment for jewish psychologists in the 1930s

Letters of reference from Robert S. Woodworth identified some psychologists as Jews and reveal an implicit stereotype of Jewish “objectionable traits.” I examine these conceptions of “Jewish character” in the context of Woodworth's general views on individual differences and in the broader context of Jewish immigration to America and enrollment at Columbia University in the early 1900s. Constructing the exclusion of Jews from academic psychology in terms of the personality and social behavior of the individual and dividing of Jews into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” allowed for a face-saving gloss on the generally antisemitic hiring practices in 1930s American academia.     

Shaping of scientific psychology in Japan

Japanese scientific psychology began with Y. Motora's lecture on pyschophysics at the University of Tokyo in 1888. He had just received his PhD under G.S. Hall at Johns Hopkins University, in the USA. He became the first professor of psychology in 1890 and founded the first psychological laboratory at the University of Tokyo in 1903. He studied many psychological problems, including attention, experimentally and theoretically. One of his first students, Matataro Matsumoto, founded the second psychological laboratory at Kyoto University and then succeeded to Motora's position in Tokyo. Matsumoto was interested in experimental studies of human performance and their applications. He trained many able psychologists and organized the Japanese Psychological Association in 1927. Some of his students founded more psychological laboratories in major universities of Japan. They introduced psychological tests, Gestalt psychology, and behaviourism in the 1920s and 1930s. Psychoanalysis was introduced through mainly nonacademic roots and became familiar to Japanese psychologists in the 1930s. After World War II, a strong influence of American psychology came to Japanese psychologists who had already trained in scientific methodology. The areas of research and applications have been greatly widened and the number of psychologists has increased rapidly up to the present day. Promotion of international interactions and indigenous traditions are both expected.     

Social categories guide young children’s preferences for novel objects

To whom do children look when deciding on their own preferences? To address this question, 3‐year‐old children were asked to choose between objects or activities that were endorsed by unfamiliar people who differed in gender, race (White, Black), or age (child, adult). In Experiment 1, children demonstrated robust preferences for objects and activities endorsed by children of their own gender, but less consistent preferences for objects and activities endorsed by children of their own race. In Experiment 2, children selected objects and activities favored by people of their own gender and age. In neither study did most children acknowledge the influence of these social categories. These findings suggest that gender and age categories are encoded spontaneously and influence children’s preferences and choices. For young children, gender and age may be more powerful guides to preferences than race.     

Life satisfaction in old age: linking social psychology and history

A life course perspective on aging assumes that adaptation is governed by factors beyond the immediate situation. Using longitudinal data on 79 women from the 1900 generation of the Berkeley Guidance Study, we examined how social and psychological factors interact over time in the course of successful aging, as expressed by life satisfaction. The consequences of adaptive resources in early adulthood vary in relation to social class. Intellectual skills in 1930 indirectly predict life satisfaction in old age for women from the working class, whereas emotional health is more influential in the life satisfaction of women with higher class origins. Social activity in old age makes a difference only in the lives of women from the working class. Finally, adaptation to old age is related to women's experiences with past stressful events. Middle-class women in 1930 showed gains attributable to Depression hardship (1930s), whereas the life satisfaction of women from the working class was diminished by such hardships. Several mechanisms are discussed that may link widely separated problem situations and life events across the life course. The analysis provides empirical support for the proposition that the influence of social change on life trajectories is contingent on what individuals bring to change situations.     

Cultivating the field of psychology. Psychological journals at the turn of the century and beyond

Prominent psychologists, including G. Stanley Hall, James Mark Baldwin, and James McKeen Cattell, cultivated the field of psychological publishing with privately owned and managed journals. Hall's journals, including the American Journal of Psychology and Pedagogical Seminary, reflected his view of psychology as the empirical study of human nature and his support for applied psychology. Baldwin and Cattell's periodicals, including Psychological Review and Psychological Monographs, reflected a narrower scientific and academic view of psychology. Baldwin and Cattell were more successful editors than Hall and strategically linked their journals to the American Psychological Association (APA). The Psychological Review journals were purchased by APA in 1925. The narrower vision represented in these journals may have contributed to applied psychologists' dissatisfaction with APA during the late 1920s and early 1930s.     

Age differences in stress and coping processes

The dramatic increase in the numbers of people who are living into old age has been accompanied by a growing interest among psychologists and health care professionals in their sources of stress and how they cope with them. Despite this interest, little is known about normative stress and coping patterns and the ways in which these patterns differ in older and younger people. This study, which draws on stress and coping theory, compares younger and older community-dwelling adults in daily hassles and eight kinds of coping. Two interpretations of age differences are evaluated: a developmental interpretation, which says that there are inherent, stage-related changes in the ways people cope as they age, and a contextual interpretation, which says that age differences in coping result from changes in what people must cope with. The findings indicate that there are clear age differences in hassles and coping. Overall, the findings tend to support the developmental interpretation, although the contextual interpretation also applies.     

Chills and thrills: Does radio harm our children? The controversy over program violence during the age of radio

A review of the popular and scientific periodical for the 1930s and 1940s revealed that the controversy surrounding the radio “thriller” and its possible harmful effects on young listeners was one of radio's most highly publicized issues during its golden years of broadcasting. Many of the questions raised concerning this issue were similar to those asked later during the age of television. Relying heavily upon the psychoanalytic emphasis on emotion, catharsis, and intrapsychic dynamics, expert opinion voiced in various popular periodicals and newspapers of the day suggested that the violence and excitement portrayed in many of the crime and adventure programs was harmless, and perhaps beneficial, for most listeners. However, research in support of this conclusion was sparse, and psychologists evidenced little interest in the issue. Not until the advent of television, and the emergence of social learning theory in the early 1960s, did psychologists direct significant research effort towards evaluating the effects of media violence. © 1998 John Wiley &Sons, Inc.     

On not "giving psychology away": the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and public controversy over testing in the 1960s

Psychological tests, especially the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, became the center of public controversy and Congressional scrutiny during the 1960s. This unwanted attention actually helped American psychologists more than they imagined. Assisted by those on Capital Hill, psychologists were able to defend their science in a manner that avoided imposed forms of public accountability. Social questions were reformulated as technical problems. The need to adjust intelligence and aptitude tests reinforced psychologists' control over them. Conversely, personality tests were not made more transparent and nonintrusive, unless psychologists thought these changes were scientifically necessary. This episode prompted tighter regulation of test use and demonstrated that traditional forms of testing were far too important to popularize and "give away".     

The convergence of behavioral biology and operant psychology: Toward an interlevel and interfield science

Behavioral biology and operant psychology have developed in parallel but separate paths since their origins in the 1930s. In the first three decades, both fields dealt with microscopic (or molecular) controlling variables and qualitative data. Since about 1960, both have primarily focused on macroscopic (or molar) controlling variables. Their shared interest in foraging in the 1980s suggests a limited convergence beween biologists and psychologists in data, methods, and theories. We draw on accounts of intertheoretic relations from the philosophy of science, including both interlevel theory and interfield theory, to understand this convergence. However, our greater emphasis on methods of data collection and analysis leads us to characterize the convergence as not only one of interfield theory but one of interfield science.     

Artificial organisms as tools for the development of psychological theory: Tolman’s lesson

In the 1930s and 1940s, Edward Tolman developed a psychological theory of spatial orientation in rats and humans. He expressed his theory as an automaton (the "schematic sowbug") or what today we would call an "artificial organism." With the technology of the day, he could not implement his model. Nonetheless, he used it to develop empirical predictions which tested with animals in the laboratory. This way of proceeding was in line with scientific practice dating back to Galileo. The way psychologists use artificial organisms in their work today breaks with this tradition. Modern "artificial organisms" are constructed a posteriori, working from experimental or ethological observations. As a result, researchers can use them to confirm a theoretical model or to simulate its operation. But they make no contribution to the actual building of models. In this paper, we try to return to Tolman's original strategy: implementing his theory of "vicarious trial and error" in a simulated robot, forecasting the robot's behavior and conducting experiments that verify or falsify these predictions.     

The relationship of Clark L. Hull's hypnosis research to his later learning theory: The continuity of his life's work

What has been missing in previous historical accounts of Clark L. Hull is a view of his life's work as an integrated whole. This paper contributes to that end by relating his hypnosis research and theory during the years 1921 to 1933 to the developing behavioral orientation of his learning theory. In addition, this paper relates his work historically and conceptually to the theory of idemotor action endorsed by William James and a number of other nineteenth-century psychologists, and transmitted by Hull into the stimulus-response terminology of the 1930s.     

Two Steps Forward,One Step Back: The Presence of Female Characters and Gender Stereotyping in Award-Winning Picture Books Between the 1930s and the 1960s

Since the late 1960s, there has been steady, progressive change in the depiction of gender in award-winning picture books for children (e.g., Clark, Almeida, Gurka, & Middleton, 2003). Female characters in Caldecott winners and runners-up have become increasingly visible and gender stereotyping has become decreasingly evident. In this article we consider whether this steady change can be projected back into the decades before the 1960s, or whether local, temporal variation in gender norms affected less monotonic change. We found that Caldecotts of the late 1940s and the late 1960s had fewer visible female characters than Caldecotts of the late 1930s and the late 1950s, but that characters in the 1940s and 1960s were less gender stereotyped than the characters of the 1930s and 1950s. We interpret these findings in terms of the greater level of conflict over gender roles that existed in the 1940s and 1960s, as well as the relatively greater status enjoyed by American women in those decades.     

母亲积极养育行为对儿童顺从行为的早期预测与双向作用:从婴儿到学步儿

顺从是儿童早期重要的社会化成就。传统理论关注父母控制策略对顺从的作用,但实证结果表明其解释率有限;当前理论更加关注积极养育行为在顺从发展中具有发展适宜性的作用机制。本研究采用追踪设计考察了84个家庭从儿童6个月到3岁时母亲的敏感性和鼓励自主两种积极养育行为与学步儿顺从发展的关系。结果表明:(1)1岁前母亲敏感性对学步儿2岁时的合作性顺从有正向预测作用,对2岁到3岁合作性顺从的变化没有预测作用;(2)1岁前母亲敏感性对学步儿2岁时的情境性顺从和2岁到3岁的情境性顺从的变化均有负向预测作用;(3)在2岁到3岁期间,母亲的鼓励自主与学步儿的合作性顺从水平有双向正向预测作用,但与情境性顺从不存在双向预测关系。     

Children's strategy preferences for resolving contradictory story information under two social conditions

This paper attempted to examine how children, when confronted with a literary implicature, resolve this implicature under two types of social conditions. More specifically, this paper identified five types of strategies which people employ to resolve text anomalies arising when old information in a story setting is incompatible with new information in a story ending. Two experiments demonstrated that third graders (8.4 and 8.6 years) and sixth graders (12.5 and 12.8 years) consistently selected certain strategies for resolving old and new, empirical and value, contradictory information. Although third and sixth graders demonstrated a similar strategy preference for resolving contradictory old and new information in formal conditions, the principal difference was that third graders modified old information to fit new information while sixth graders modified new information to fit old information. In contrasting the formal and informal conditions, third graders shifted their strategy preferences so as to minimize the amount of text restructuring in the formal condition; sixth graders, on the other hand, shifted their strategy preferences so as to maximize the amount of text restructuring in informal conditions. These findings suggest that story schema structures are more interpretive than story grammar psychologists presently assume.     

God’s categories: The effect of religiosity on children’s teleological and essentialist beliefs about categories

Creationism implies that God imbued each category with a unique nature and purpose. These implications closely correspond to what some cognitive psychologists define as an essentialistic and teleological stance towards categories. This study assessed to what extent the belief in God as creator of categories is related to the mappings of these stances to categories in different domains. Israeli secular and orthodox Jewish 1st and 5th graders responded to questions assessing these three types of beliefs. The results revealed that secular children did not differ from orthodox children with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of animal category membership, and their teleological construal of artifacts. In turn, secular children did differ from orthodox children with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of social category membership, and their teleological construal of both animal and social categories. These findings intimate that while essentialist beliefs about animals, and teleological beliefs about artifacts do not require cultural input in order to emerge, essentialist beliefs about social categories, and teleological beliefs about both animal and social categories do.     

The experimental psychology of attitude change and the tradition of classical rhetoric

Social psychologists might be surprised to learn that their discipline has been cut off from a vast and ancient family tree. The study of attitude change in the context of experimental social psychology began around 1918. It developed into a defined discipline in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly through the work of Carl Hovland and his associates. Unlike earlier specialties in experimental psychology, social psychology emerged well after the 19th-century split between psychology and philosophy in college curricula. Before this period of growth in empirical teaching and practice, the study of persuasion in classical rhetoric was a bedrock of higher education for more than 2000 years. Because of social psychology's late development in empirical science, there is a historical disconnect between experimental social psychology and its ancient philosophical counterpart, classical rhetoric. This article demonstrates similarities and differences between Hovland's findings and the theoretical groundings of classical rhetoric. We suggest areas where modern social psychology might benefit from a look at the older, more holistic theories of the art of rhetoric.     

Continuity and Change in Role Definitions and Training Models of School Psychologists in Israel

Abstract

In accordance with one of the major challenges of psychology research and practice worldwide, school psychology in Israel has setas its aim the promotion of the emotional well-being of students. These aims are achieved through psychological evaluation and intervention, at the systemic and individual-student level. School psychology emerged in Israel in the 1930s, as a relatively narrow field, focused mainly on the placement of students in special education settings. Over the decades, major changes occurred in Israeli society, including waves of immigration, coping with security situations and additional socio-political challenges. In light of these transformations, the discipline grew and broadened, encompassing additional areas of professional practice. The training of school psychologists evolved in relation to these processes. From unsystematic training procedures, mostly embedded in child-clinical psychology and relying on on-the-job training, to a well-established system of graduate school programs producing dozens of school psychologists every year. Academic pre-service training is followed by a post-graduate internship in the public-school system. The developments in the field of school psychology brought about a host of challenges and dilemmas. These issues are discussed in relation to the broad aim of school psychology in Israel: the promotion of the emotional well-being of all students.     

Women's marital-familial statuses and work histories: Some conceptual considerations

Although vocational psychologists and sociologists have a long history of researching occupational choice, their theoretical postures have almost always been shaped in light of information on males, with little consideration for females. This article is an addition to others which attempt to correct this shortcoming in the literature. The article reviews the dominant conceptual schemes used to study occupational choice, considers potentially female-specific variables, and provides a typology for the analysis of women's marital-familial statuses and work modes.