Teaching the introductory course in psychology circa 1900

Teachers of introductory courses in psychology and those who wrote the textbooks for the courses at the start of the 20th century represented the new psychology that replaced the old psychology of mental philosophy. Teachers and texts presented psychology as a natural science of the mind and mental processes, described its methods, and suggested its potential applications to practical concerns. Textbooks and teachers varied in their approaches to psychology, their priorities among its methods, and their emphases on applying psychology. The introductory course in psychology accurately reflected the state of the discipline at the turn of the century.     

Contributions of American mental philosophers to psychology in the United States

Professors of mental philosophy who taught and wrote textbooks in colleges and universities in the United States before the Civil War contributed significantly to the development of the new psychology that replaced mental philosophy in the last quarter of the 19th century. Their contributions have been neglected in textbooks on the history of psychology, even those devoted to the history of psychology in the United States. These mental philosophers eased the transition to, and influenced the nature of, the new psychology in the United States by establishing a place in the curriculum for mental philosophy that the new psychology came to occupy; by identifying the topics for laboratory methods to address; by pursuing an empirical, inductive, scientific approach to the study of the mind; and by their tradition of functional analysis that came to characterize psychology in the United States.     

The unbearable dispersal of being: Narrativity and personal identity in borderline personality disorder

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by severe disturbances in a subject’s sense of identity. Persons with BPD suffer from...     

Innovative ordinariness and ritual change in a Jerusalem Minyan

In this article, I present an ethnographic analysis of ritual change in the communal prayers of a Jerusalem congregation that promotes gender equality within the framework of Orthodox-oriented halakha. While scholars have examined how ritual change in Jewish communities develops through the reinterpretation and reutilization of religious texts, practices and objects, my fieldwork reveals how change is shaped by people’s habitus – their ways of being in the world. Communal prayers in this congregation exemplify what I call an “innovative ordinariness” of religious change. Members view and experience their communal rituals as “ordinary” due to their perception of their prayer hall as a familiar spatial and auditory environment. This ordinariness facilitates creative and innovative uses of religious practices. The data outlined here are based on field research during which I participated in the congregation’s services and communal activities, and held interviews and informal conversations with members. This case study depicts ways in which members of Israeli Orthodox society apply their cultural toolkit to create religious spaces that accommodate their gender-egalitarian values, beliefs and lifestyles and, at the same time, produce religiosity that is experienced and understood as legitimate. By doing so, I argue, they assign new meanings to traditional Orthodox categories.     

Psychology and “The Babe”

Psychologists and baseball players were among those Americans who formed professional associations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Psychologists used laboratory tasks to quantify mental and behavioral processes while sportswriters and baseball organizers measured individual and team performance. The most popular baseball player of the 1920s, George Herman “Babe” Ruth, possessed superior batting skills that were evident in the statistical indices of baseball performance. In 1921, he was brought to the psychological laboratory at Columbia University to perform standard laboratory tasks in an effort to discover the basis for his success in hitting home runs and to suggest the potential of tests for identifying future baseball stars. Baseball's addiction to quantitative indices of performance was thus brought together with a new science devoted to quantitative assessment and a desire to make such assessments useful. The attempt to analyze the basis of Ruth's batting skills is part of the history of applied psychology, sport psychology, and popular interest in the science of psychology. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Attack and defense in conspecific fighting in tree shrews (Tupaia belangeri)

Principles of conspecific defense have been analyzed for rodents, in which specific target sites for biting by attackers on defenders serve as an important determinant of the actions involved in both attacker and defender behavior. In an effort to determine the generality of these principles, attack and defensive behaviors and target sites for biting attack were evaluated in a nonrodent species, the tree shrew (Tupaia belangeri). Brief daily and repeated conspecific dyadic encounters between adult, socially experienced males (dominants, attackers), and adult, socially naive males (subordinates, defenders) that had been transferred into the territory of the dominants, produced a polarization of attack and defense. The dominant males showed chase, chase attack, jump attack, and biting behaviors, while the subordinates displayed flight and freezing. The vast majority of bites, as well as wounds and bruises, were on the subordinates’ backs. These patterns are very similar to those previously found in rats and mice and suggest that the organization of fighting, with targets of biting (or other painful) attack serving as an important determinant of both attacker (dominant) and defender (subordinate) behavior, may show considerable generality across nonrodent as well as rodent species. Although relatively few wounds were found after 28 days of repeated and daily encounters, the subordinate tree shrews show a variety of behavioral, neuroendocrine, and central nervous changes, indicating that they are stressed by these encounters per se. Aggr. Behav. 27:139–148, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

The biopsychosocial approach to chronic pain: scientific advances and future directions

The prevalence and cost of chronic pain is a major physical and mental health care problem in the United States today. As a result, there has been a recent explosion of research on chronic pain, with significant advances in better understanding its etiology, assessment, and treatment. The purpose of the present article is to provide a review of the most noteworthy developments in the field. The biopsychosocial model is now widely accepted as the most heuristic approach to chronic pain. With this model in mind, a review of the basic neuroscience processes of pain (the bio part of biopsychosocial), as well as the psychosocial factors, is presented. This spans research on how psychological and social factors can interact with brain processes to influence health and illness as well as on the development of new technologies, such as brain imaging, that provide new insights into brain-pain mechanisms.     

Time-space learning in homing pigeons (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Columba livia</Emphasis>): orientation to an artificial light source

Time-space learning reflects an ability to represent in memory event-stimulus properties together with the place and time of the event; a capacity well developed in birds. Homing pigeons were trained in an indoor octagonal arena to locate one food goal in the morning and a different food goal in the late afternoon. The goals differed with respect to their angular/directional relationship to an artificial light source located outside the arena. Further, the angular difference in reward position approximated the displacement of the sun's azimuth that would occur during the same time period. The experimental birds quickly learned the task, demonstrating the apparent ease with which birds can adopt an artificial light source to discriminate among alternative spatial responses at different times of the day. However, a novel midday probe session following successful learning revealed that the light source was interpreted as a stable landmark and not as a surrogate sun that would support compass orientation. Probe sessions following a phase shift of the light–dark cycle revealed that the mechanism employed to make the temporal discrimination was prevailingly based on an endogenous circadian rhythm and not an interval timing mechanism.