Advances in the History of Psychology

Adrian Brock of University College Dublin has set up a website full of the writings of the noted historian of psychology Kurt Danziger. Though he is now long-retired from York University (Toronto), and is no longer attending conferences, Danziger has continued to write and conduct research. His most recent book, Marking the Mind: A History of Memory was just published in October 2008. Many of his essays and talks, however, have not been easily accessible. Brock, a former student of Danziger’s, has established www.kurtdanziger.com to collect these “lost” writings together and make them available to the general public.

Brock writes in his announcement:

One of the highlights [of the website] is a new web book that Kurt has put together:

“Problematic Encounter: Talks on Psychology and History”

It contains 12 talks which, for the most part, have never been
published or were published in outlets with a limited readership, such
as newsletters and conference proceedings. Kurt has revised some of
these talks, grouped them together according to common themes, and
written a new introduction to them. Access is completely free.

The web site is still under construction and I will be adding more
material to it over the next few months, including other previously
unpublished work.

The Archives of the History of American Psychology (AHAP) is moving to a new, bigger building. The famous research center, the largest of its kind in the world, has for many years been holed up in the basement of the Polsky Building at the University of Akron, in Ohio. But thanks to the efforts of its director, David Baker, and the contributions of many generous donors, the archives will, this weekend, be moving to a new four-storey building near the UA campus that will house not only its collections, but also offer better facilities to its users and staff, as well as meeting space for workshops and conferences. There will also be a gallery to highlight some of AHAP more notable treasures, such as Stanley Milgram’s simulated shock machine, Albert Bandura’s Bobo Doll, and a door from Philip Zimbardo’s “prison.”

One can find an interview with Dr. Baker about the new facilities here.

The website behaviortherapist.com has posted an interview with Irving Kirsch (pictured right), the well-known critic of the efficacy of antidepressant pharmaceuticals. Kirsch made a name for himself with a series of studies that showed that most of the effect commonly attributed to antidepressants is actually a placebo effect. Although the difference between the effect of antidepressants and placebo alone attains statistical significance, the size of the difference is, Kirsch says, “vanishingly small.” He also argues that this near-non-effect holds for different levels of depression, and for different classes of antidepressants,such as SSRIs (e.g., Prozac) and  SSRE(nhancer)s. He says the reasons for the widespread belief in the effectiveness of antidepressants include (1) the lack of placebo control groups in early research, (2) the typical clinician’s inability to distinguish between placebo effect and real pharmaceutical effect in any given patient, and (3) the fact that a large amount of (presumably negative) research data has never been made public by the pharmaceutical companies that sponsored the research.

Kirsch argues that the effects of cognitive-behavioral therapy are better (perhaps not surprisingly, given the sponsor of the interviewer), but he also claims that simple physical exercise has an important effect on depression.

The interview runs about 30 minutes in length.

I think this counts as an event worthy of breaking AHP’s summer silence.

The American Psychological Association (APA) has come out in favor of stripping James Mitchell of his license to practice. Mitchell (pictured right) is one of the psychologists who worked for the CIA developing and applying controversial “enhanced” interrogation techniques that were used against terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay prison and other “black sites” that the CIA maintains around the world. An Associated Press article about the APA’s actions can be found here.

The is move surprising because the APA has been heavily criticized both from within its membership and without for being evasive in efforts to forbid its members from participating in such activities. First it issued directives with ambiguous wording. When the membership voted overwhelmingly in favor of a more direct statement against torture, the APA Board came under fire for dragging its feet in  implementing the resolution.

We are very pleased to announce that an interview with Jacy Young, the editor of Advances in the History of Psychology, has been published in the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest Blog. The interview is a part of an ongoing series called “The Bloggers Behind the Blogs.”

Other bloggers interviewed in the series include Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks, Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily, and the reverse-eponymously named “Neuroskeptic,” among others.

The June 2010 issue of Isis, the official journal of the History of Science Society, has just been released online. Included in this issue are a number of articles of interest to historians of psychology, many of them featured as part of a Focus section dedicated to New Perspectives on Science and the Cold War.

In the first section of the issue, Deborah Blythe Doroshow explores how classical conditioning principles were used by psychologists in the 1930s to create a bedwetting alarm. The Focus section includes three articles on social science during the Cold War. These tackle the nature of social science during the Cold Ward, mathematical models of rationality that developed during this period, and the science fiction-esque goals of social science. All the articles featured in the Focus section are currently available online for free. Titles, authors, and abstracts follow below.

“An Alarming Solution: Bedwetting, Medicine, and Behavioral Conditioning in Mid-Twentieth-Century America,” By Deborah Blythe Doroshow, Program in the History of Science and Medicine, Yale University. The abstract reads:

This article explores the history of the bedwetting alarm, invented in 1938 by two psychologists to cure enuresis, or bedwetting, using the principles of classical conditioning. Infused with the optimism of behaviorism, the bedwetting alarm unexpectedly proved difficult to implement in practice, bearing a multitude of unanticipated complications that hindered its widespread acceptance. Introduced as a medical and psychological technology, in practice the alarm was also a child-rearing device, encouraging the kind of behavioristic attitudes that had prompted its initial development, while simultaneously promoting the child-centered approach that would become dominant in the early 1950s. The life story of the bedwetting alarm muddies the traditional account of how childrearing theories progressed in tidy succession, suggesting both that behavioristic approaches did not die out in the 1930s and that elements of permissive child-rearing were being considered earlier than we traditionally assume.

“Mathematical Models, Rational Choice, and the Search for Cold War Culture,” by Paul Erickson, Department of History, Wesleyan University. The abstract reads:

A key feature of the social, behavioral, and biological sciences after World War II has been the widespread adoption of new mathematical techniques drawn from cybernetics, information theory, and theories of rational choice. Historians of science have typically sought to explain this adoption either by reference to military patronage, or to a characteristic Cold War culture or discursive framework strongly shaped by the concerns of national security. This essay explores several episodes in the history of game theory—a mathematical theory of rational choice—that demonstrate the limits of such explanations. Military funding was indeed critical to game theory’s early development in the 1940s. However, the theory’s subsequent spread across disciplines ranging from political science to evolutionary biology was the result of a diverse collection of debates about the nature of “rationality” and “choice” that marked the Cold War era. These debates are not easily reduced to the national security imperatives that have been the focus of much historiography to date.

“Social Science in the Cold War,” by David C. Engerman, Department of History, Brandeis University. The abstract reads:

This essay examines ways in which American social science in the late twentieth century was—and was not—a creature of the Cold War. It identifies important work by historians that calls into question the assumption that all social science during the Cold War amounts to “Cold War social science.” These historians attribute significant agency to social scientists, showing how they were enmeshed in both long-running disciplinary discussions and new institutional environments. Key trends in this scholarship include a broadening historical perspective to see social scientists in the Cold War as responding to the ideas of their scholarly predecessors; identifying the institutional legacies of World War II; and examining in close detail the products of extramural—especially governmental—funding. The result is a view of social science in the Cold War in which national security concerns are relevant, but with varied and often unexpected impacts on intellectual life.

“’Hypothetical Machines’: The Science Fiction Dreams of Cold War Social Science,” by Rebecca Lemov, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University. The abstract reads:

The introspectometer was a “hypothetical machine” Robert K. Merton introduced in the course of a 1956 how-to manual describing an actual research technique, the focused interview. This technique, in turn, formed the basis of wartime morale research and consumer behavior studies as well as perhaps the most ubiquitous social science tool, the focus group. This essay explores a new perspective on Cold War social science made possible by comparing two kinds of apparatuses: one real, the other imaginary. Even as Merton explored the nightmare potential of such machines, he suggested that the clear aim of social science was to build them or their functional equivalent: recording machines to access a person’s experiential stream of reality, with the ability to turn this stream into real-time data. In this way, the introspectometer marks and symbolizes a broader entry during the Cold War of science-fiction-style aspirations into methodological prescriptions and procedural manuals. This essay considers the growth of the genre of methodological visions and revisions, painstakingly argued and absorbed, but punctuated by sci-fi aims to transform “the human” and build newly penetrating machines. It also considers the place of the nearly real-, and the artificial “near-substitute” as part of an experimental urge that animated these sciences.

Book Review:

John C. Burnham. Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age. Reviewed by Robert W. Seidel.

The June 2010 issue of History of Psychiatry, dedicated to “A Hundred Years of Evolutionary Psychiatry (1872-1972),” has just been released online. This special issue features a number of articles of interest to historians of psychology, including, among others, an article on Harry Harlow (left) and the nature of love by Marga Vicedo of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and an article on the work of Lauretta Bender and the African American psyche by Denis Doyle. Titles, authors and abstracts to these and the other articles in the June issue follow below.

“The evolutionary turn in psychiatry: A historical overview,” by Pieter R. Adriaens and Andreas De Block. The abstract reads:

Ever since Darwin, psychiatrists have been tempted to put evolutionary theory to use in their efforts to understand and explain various aspects of mental disorders. Following a number of pivotal developments in the history of evolutionary thought, including degeneration theory, ethology and the modern synthesis, this introductory paper provides an overview of the many trends and schools in the history of ‘psychiatric Darwinism’ and ‘evolutionary psychiatry’. We conclude with an attempt to distinguish three underlying motives in asking evolutionary questions about mental disorders.

“Schizophrenia, evolution and the borders of biology: On Huxley et al.’s 1964 paper in Nature,” by Raf De Bont. The abstract reads:

In October 1964, Julian Huxley, Ernst Mayr, Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer co-published a controversial paper in Nature, in which they tried to explain the persistence of schizophrenia from an evolutionary perspective. This article will elucidate how the reputed authors composed this paper to make it a strong argument for biological psychiatry. Through a close reading of their correspondence, it will furthermore clarify the elements which remained unspoken in the paper, but which were elementary in its genesis.The first was the dominance of psychoanalytical theory in (American) psychiatry — a dominance which the authors wanted to break. The second was the ongoing discussion on the boundaries of biological determinism and the desirability of a new kind of eugenics. As such, the Huxley et al. paper can be used to study the central issues of psychiatry in a pivotal era of its history.

“‘This excellent observer…’: The correspondence between Charles Darwin and James Crichton-Browne, 1869-75,” by Alison M. Pearn. The abstract reads:

Between May 1869 and December 1875, Charles Darwin exchanged more than 40 letters with James Crichton-Browne, superintendent of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, Wakefield, Yorkshire. This paper charts their relationship within the context of Darwin’s wider research networks and methods; it analyses the contribution that Crichton-Browne made to the writing of Expression, arguing that the information he provided materially affected Darwin’s thesis, and that it was partly the need to assimilate this that led Darwin to publish Expression separately from Descent. The letters help to reconstruct Crichton-Browne’s early research interests, and document Darwin’s little-explored role as a patron. Both men are revealed within a collaborative scientific network, with each of them at various times a beneficiary or a promoter.

“‘Birdwatching and baby-watching’: Niko and Elisabeth Tinbergen’s ethological approach to autism,” by Chloe Silverman. The abstract reads:

Biographers have largely dismissed Nikolaas ‘Niko’ Tinbergen’s late research into the causes and treatment of autism, describing it as a deviation from his previous work, influenced by his personal desires. They have pointed to the incoherence of Tinbergen’s assertions about best practices for treating autism, his lack of experience with children with autism, and his apparent embracing of psychogenic theories that the medical research community had largely abandoned. While these critiques have value, it is significant that Tinbergen himself saw his research as a logical extension of his seminal findings in the field of ethology, the science of animal behaviour. The reception of his theories, both positive and negative, was due less to their strengths or faults than to the fact that Tinbergen had inserted himself into a pre-existing and acrimonious debate in the autism research community. Debates about the relative role of environmental and hereditary factors in the aetiology of autism, and the implications of both for the efficacy of different treatments, had political and material significance for the success of parent organizations’ lobbying efforts and financial support for research programmes. Tinbergen’s approach was welcomed and even championed by a significant minority, who saw no problem with his ideas or methods.

“The evolution of Harry Harlow: From the nature to the nurture of love,” by Marga Vicedo. The abstract reads:

Harlow deserves a place in the early history of evolutionary psychiatry but not, as he is commonly presented, because of his belief in the instinctual nature of the mother-infant dyad. Harlow’s work on the significance of peer relationships led him to appreciate the evolutionary significance of separate affectional systems. Over time, Harlow distanced himself from the ideas of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth as well as from Konrad Lorenz’s views about imprinting and instincts. Harlow’s work did not lend support to Bowlby’s belief in an innate need for mother love and his thesis that the mother was the child’s psychic organizer. Nor did Harlow agree with Lorenz’s view of instincts as biological, unmodifiable innate needs, unaffected by learning.

“‘Racial differences have to be considered’: Lauretta Bender, Bellevue Hospital, and the African American psyche, 1936-52,” by Denis Doyle. The abstract reads:

This paper examines one US psychiatrist’s engagement between 1936 and 1952 with a racialist strain of evolutionary thought. When Lauretta Bender began working with Bellevue Hospital’s disproportionately black population, the psychiatric literature still circulated the crude evolutionary proposition that blacks remained stuck at a more primitive stage of development. In the 1930s, drawing insights from holistic, mechanistic and environmentalist thinking on the relationship between mind and body, Bender developed her own more circumspect racialist position. Although she largely abandoned her underdetermined version of racialism in the 1940s for an approach that left out race as an active factor of analysis, this paper contends that she probably never wrote off black primitivity as a theoretical possibility.

Here’s a quickie. For full info, go here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed/future_histmed

The Future of Medical History

International Conference 15th - 17th July 2010 Goodenough College, Bloomsbury, London

The Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine is hosting a three-day international conference on the future of the history of medicine. Papers are invited on the disciplinary and methodological challenges facing the field in all aspects of research and resourcing, not excluding media technologies and publishing.

Session Themes

‘The Neurological Turn’
‘The Place of Non-Humans in the project of Medical Humanism’
‘Intra AsiaEurope: Technologies of self and substance’
‘Global Health’

Surprise! I’m back already!

APA Monitor has published a great little piece by Larry Stern of Collin College (TX) about James McConnell of U. Michigan and his various attempts to show that memories are encoded by specific molecules in the brain. McConnell tried to demonstrate this by conditioning planaria  (flatworms) to respond to stimuli, and then feeding the trained worms’ nervous systems to other worms, in the hopes that the training would be expressed by the naive worms. In the end, the theory did not stand up, but for a long while there were enough positive results that it was not clear whether or not McConnell had found the elusive key to how memories are stored in the brain.

Stern writes:

The story of “McCannibal and his Mau Mau” hypothesis has become part of the folklore of psychology…. But folklore tends to caricature people and events and is lousy history….  McConnell’s planarian studies spawned a 15-year episode that tells us much about the workings of science when it is confronted — as it always is — with claims that depart in significant ways from prevailing views. Equivocal results are typical in such episodes and to jump to the conclusion that those who championed a losing cause must be poor scientists is hazardous at best. In fact, by the time the dust had settled roughly 200 independent research teams — many in the upper tiers of science — conducted memory transfer experiments, using dozens of learning paradigms and 23 types of subjects including, in addition to the flatworm and standard lab rat, octopuses, praying mantes, baby chicks, kittens and honey bees.

As much a part of the story as the unconventionality of McConnell’s theory was his flamboyance as a scientist. Shedding the typical somber self-presentation, McConnell started his own journal called the Worm Runners Digest, he regularly referred to his worms as “cannibals,” and he made extravagant claims about the possibility of memory pills in the near future.

The whole article can be found on-line here.

We at AHP are going to go on a bit of a hiatus for the summer. First of all, I want to thank you, our readers, who have supported the blog over the past year. We now have 700 subscribers on a regular basis. Astonishingly, that is larger than the entire membership of APA’s Society for the History of Psychology!

Second, I want to thank Jacy Young, who has been serving as editor of the blog for the past year, and congratulate her on all the great work she has done. She is currently off to an internship at the Archives of the History of American Psychology.

I  will be heading off to a variety of conferences, and I have some things to write that I have been putting off for the last little while. I may still find the time to post an item now and then over the course of the summer.

We hope to come back stronger than ever in the fall, with some new writers and new things to write about.

Happy summer!

The inaugural issue of Psychologia Latina, a new outlet for scholarship on the history of psychology in Spain, Portugal and Latin America, has been published online. An e-supplement of The Spanish Journal of Psychology, the journal accepts submissions in either Spanish, Portuguese, or English. The first issue includes five articles, two of which are available in English:

“Fray Martín Sarmiento (1695-1772) en la Historia de la Psicología Infantil,” by Xosé Ramón García Soto.

“Art and Science in Sorolla’s Painting A Research in Dr. Simarro’s Lab,” by José Javier Campos Bueno.

“La Teoría del Origen Trófico del Conocimiento de Ramón Turró: Un Ensayo sobre su Trasfondo Histórico-filosófico y sus Posibilidades de Desarrollo Teórico en el Sentido de una Concepción (Neo)Aristotélica de la Vida,” by Juan B. Fuentes.

“An Introduction to Carles M. Espinalt’s Psycho-esthetics: A Psychology of the Mutual Influences between Form and Essence,” by Carmen Giménez-Camins and Josep Gallifa. (Carles M. Espinalt is pictured at the right.)

“Os primeiros anos dos Laboratórios de Análise do Comportamento no Brasil,” by Rodrigo Lopes Miranda and Sérgio Dias Cirino.

The full content of Psychologia Latina is available free online here.

Thank you to Alexandra Rutherford for bringing this to AHP’s attention.

According to a blog post by psychologist and anti-torture activist Jeff Kaye, the APA may have been altering and deleting articles from on-line versions of its own publications that documented its participation in torture workshops co-mounted with the CIA and the Rand Corporation.

Kaye cites articles from the APA’s Science Policy Insider News website and from APA’s Spin that have been previously cited in major publications such as Vanity Fair, but whose URL’s now only bring up a “page is not available” message. He says that the originals can now be found only through “a web archive search engine.”

Kaye concedes that  “the scrubbing of the page describing truth drugs and sensory overload could be attributed to some normal archiving decision, or the victim of a web do-over” but insists that “the excision of the text and link to the site on the referring page cannot be an accident.” (Indeed, the APA launched a major overhaul of its web site in the past year.) Kaye continues:

APA has a history of bad faith on such issues. Recently, they rewrote a problematic section of their ethical code, dubbed the Nuremberg loophole by some, which allowed psychologists to violate their ethical rules if done to comply with “law, regulations, or other governing legal authority.”

Kaye’s blog item item has been picked up by the website of Harper’s magazine.

(Thanks to Ron Sheese for alerting me to this.)

In 1947, Kenneth and Mamie Clark published as study in which children were shown two dolls, one black and one white, and asked a number of questions about them: who was good and bad, who was pretty and ugly, who the children themselves most wanted to be like. The results were that both white and even African-American children preferred the white doll on most dimensions. The study, and others like it, were used as evidence in the Brown v. Board Supreme Court case of 1954 that stuck down segregated schooling in the US.

The study was replicated in 2006 by Kiri Davis, a high school student form New York. Davis found essentially the same result as the Clarks, and presented her study in her award-winning video, “A Girl Like Me.”

Now CNN has commissioned a replication by the University of Chicago child psychologist, Margaret Beale Spencer. Her “pilot study” (133 participants were used) found many of the same prejudices among white children, but seemed to show that many African-American children now have a more positive attitude toward children of their own race. You can read about the CNN study and see some video clips of the study here.

Tip o’ the hat to the Society for the History of Psychology Facebook site, which alerted me to this item.

TEDTalks has just posted a 4.5 min. clip of a 1972 video of neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl lecturing on the importance of the search for meaning in life. You can find the clip here.