Which Of The Following Perspectives Dominated American Psychology For Decades

Applied Psychology In The 1920s

Raymond Dodge Studied with Benno Erdmann at the University of Halle, Germany: discovered saccadic eye movements. President of the American Psychological Society and a model for the development of experimental psychology in the United States.

Hugo Münsterberg William Jamess hand-picked choice to lead the Psychology Laboratory at Harvard, Münsterberg, holder of doctorates in both psychology and medicine, was one of the most potent forces in developing an applied experimentalism, especially in the areas of industry and forensics.

Morris Viteles Influential American industrialorganizational psychologist whose 1932 book Industrial Psychology defined the modern dimensions of the field.

The 1962 Symposium On The Us Army’s Limited

A significant event, immediately preceding Camelot’s launch, was a March 1962 conference, funded by the army’s chief of research and development and hosted by SORO, which brought over three hundred social and behavioral scientists together in Washington, D.C. Never before had the armed forces “rolled out such a massive welcome mat for the professors.” There were many flattering mentions of psychological expertise and its military record, and generals and colonels repeatedly expressed much eagerness to be enlightened in the matter of counterinsurgency. “Recognition of the need for social science research within the military establishment,” they assured their guests, “is quite widespread today.” Courses in military psychology, leadership, and human relations were, after all, on the required list at West Point special warfare had had its own school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, since 1952 and psychologically sensitive courses in counterinsurgency were being offered all over the world, in numerous languages, by the U.S. Army.

Military planners talked at great length, leaving little room for guesswork about what kind of ammunition they were looking for: “The kind of underlying knowledge required is the understanding and prediction

than the translation of military conflict into an endless series of opportunities for cultural design and mediation?

War On The Enemy Mind

1. The best general secondary source on psychology in world war is James Herbert Capshew, “Psychology on the March: American Psychologists and World War II” . Other useful overviews are Peter Buck, “Adjusting to Military Life: The Social Sciences Go to War, 1941-1950,” in Military Enterprise and Technological Change, ed. Merritt Roe Smith , 203-252, and Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self , pt. 1.

2. J. McKeen Cattell, “Retrospect: Psychology as a Profession,” Journal of Consulting Psychology I :1.

3. For a discussion of how World War I advanced the professionalization efforts of psychologists, see Thomas M. Camfield, “Psychologists at War: The History of American Psychology and the First World War” Franz Samelson, “Putting Psychology on the Map: Ideology and Intelligence Testing,” in Psychology in Social Context, ed. Allan R. Buss , 103-168 and Franz Samelson, “World War I Intelligence Testing and the Development of Psychology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 13 :274-282. For a consideration of World War I testing that focuses specifically on the negotiating process between psychological experts and the military, see John Carson, “Army Alpha, Army Brass, and the Search for Army Intelligence,” Isis 84 :278-309.

4. For background on Yerkes’s work, see Donna Haraway, “A Pilot Plant for Human Engineering: Robert Yerkes and the Yale Laboratories of Primate

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 541.

10. Capshew, “Psychology on the March,” 45.

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Apa Internship Crisis For Graduate Students

The APA is the main accrediting body for U.S. clinical and counseling psychology doctoral training programs and internship sites. APA-accredited Clinical Psychology PhD and PsyD programs typically require students to complete a one-year clinical internship in order to graduate . However, there is currently an “internship crisis” as defined by the American Psychological Association, in that approximately 25% of clinical psychology doctoral students do not match for internship each year. This crisis has led many students to re-apply for internship, thus delaying graduation, or to complete an unaccredited internship, and often has many emotional and financial consequences. Students who do not complete an APA accredited internships in the U.S. are barred from certain employment settings, including VA hospitals, the military, and cannot get licensed in some states, such as Utah and Mississippi. Additionally, some post-doctoral fellowships and other employment settings require or prefer an APA accredited internship. The APA has been criticized for not addressing this crisis adequately and many psychologists and graduate students have petitioned for the APA to take action by regulating graduate training programs.

Biopsychology And Evolutionary Psychology

As the name suggests, biopsychology explores how our biology influences our behavior. While biological psychology is a broad field, many biological psychologists want to understand how the structure and function of the nervous system is related to behavior . As such, they often combine the research strategies of both psychologists and physiologists to accomplish this goal .

The research interests of biological psychologists span a number of domains, including but not limited to, sensory and motor systems, sleep, drug use and abuse, ingestive behavior, reproductive behavior, neurodevelopment, plasticity of the nervous system, and biological correlates of psychological disorders. Given the broad areas of interest falling under the purview of biological psychology, it will probably come as no surprise that individuals from all sorts of backgrounds are involved in this research, including biologists, medical professionals, physiologists, and chemists. This interdisciplinary approach is often referred to as neuroscience, of which biological psychology is a component .

There are many areas of human behavior for which evolution can make predictions. Examples include memory, mate choice, relationships between kin, friendship and cooperation, parenting, social organization, and status .

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Theoretical Building Blocks: The Psychological Basis Of Racial Identity And Prejudice

Unleashed by pressing wartime concerns about anti-Semitism and urban doting, and stimulated by the appearance of An American Dilemma, a flood of studies about the psychology of racial identity and prejudice appeared during the years that followed World War II. Whereas the bulk of psychological research on racial issues prior to World War II had been limited to investigatingand frequently verifyingdifferences in intelligence, postwar researchers cast their net widely, grappling with new topics and promoting a decidedly environmentalist approach that toppled conventional assumptions about the existence and permanence of white racial superiority. Otto Klineberg’s “Tests of Negro Intelligence,” a literature review written for Myrdal’s project, set the postwar tone. It directly repudiated biased mental testing experiments , challenged the notion that psychological tests could even measure innate intelligence, emphasized education as a key social variable, and identified “rapport” as a central methodological question. It emphasized psychological experts’ obligation to go beyond uncovering the facts, making the design and creation of a nonracist social environment the special responsibility of behavioral scientists.

Wertheimer Koffka Khler And Gestalt Psychology

Max Wertheimer , Kurt Koffka , and Wolfgang Köhler were three German psychologists who immigrated to the United States in the early 20th century to escape Nazi Germany. These men are credited with introducing psychologists in the United States to various Gestalt principles. The word Gestalt roughly translates to whole a major emphasis of Gestalt psychology deals with the fact that although a sensory experience can be broken down into individual parts, how those parts relate to each other as a whole is often what the individual responds to in perception. For example, a song may be made up of individual notes played by different instruments, but the real nature of the song is perceived in the combinations of these notes as they form the melody, rhythm, and harmony. In many ways, this particular perspective would have directly contradicted Wundts ideas of structuralism .

Structuralism, Freud, and the Gestalt psychologists were all concerned in one way or another with describing and understanding inner experience. But other researchers had concerns that inner experience could be a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry and chose instead to exclusively study behavior, the objectively observable outcome of mental processes.

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Toward A Functional Psychology

While Titchener and his followers adhered to a structural psychology, others in America were pursuing different approaches. William James, G. Stanley Hall, and James McKeen Cattell were among a group that became identified with functionalism. Influenced by Darwins evolutionary theory, functionalists were interested in the activities of the mindwhat the mind does. An interest in functionalism opened the way for the study of a wide range of approaches, including animal and comparative psychology .

William James is regarded as writing perhaps the most influential and important book in the field of psychology, Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. Opposed to the reductionist ideas of Titchener, James proposed that consciousness is ongoing and continuous it cannot be isolated and reduced to elements. For James, consciousness helped us adapt to our environment in such ways as allowing us to make choices and have personal responsibility over those choices.

Amending The Ethics Code

In February 2010, the APA’s Council of Representatives voted to amend the association’s Ethics Code to make clear that its standards can never be interpreted to justify or defend violating human rights. Following are the two relevant ethical standards from the Ethics Code, with the newly adopted language shown in bold:

1.02, Conflicts Between Ethics and Law, Regulations, or Other Governing Legal Authority

If psychologists’ ethical responsibilities conflict with law, regulations, or other governing legal authority, psychologists clarify the nature of the conflict, make known their commitment to the Ethics Code and take reasonable steps to resolve the conflict consistent with the General Principles and Ethical Standards of the Ethics Code. Under no circumstances may this standard be used to justify or defend violating human rights.

1.03, Conflicts Between Ethics and Organizational Demands

If the demands of an organization with which psychologists are affiliated or for whom they are working are in conflict with this Ethics Code, psychologists clarify the nature of the conflict, make known their commitment to the Ethics Code, and take reasonable steps to resolve the conflict consistent with the General Principles and Ethical Standards of the Ethics Code. Under no circumstances may this standard be used to justify or defend violating human rights.

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The Gender Problem And The Black Family

Psychological and psychoanalytical approaches to containing and preventing prejudice leaned toward reforming childhood

socialization practices, parenting patterns, and family relations of authority for reasons that were both theoretical and practical, as noted above. Given this bias, the deep concern with gender roles and their development that pervaded the postwar literature on race is not very surprising. Mothers, it was clear, were strategically positioned as cultural architects because families were personality factories. To the extent that the United States succeeded in overcoming its social problems, mothers could be credited. To the extent that social crises remained unresolved, or even worsened, mothers could be blamed. And they often were.

The “unavailable mother”unwed, indigent or surviving on welfare payments, socially deprived, economically deprived, intellectually deprived, often friendless, depressed, mentally disturbed, lonely, frightened, unable to supply the needs of a newborn child, already burdened with children she has rejectedthe unavailable mother produces the unreachable child. This is the woman who needs the attention of the social welfare world. . . . We know that the damage to the infant takes place long before he sees the dirt, the drunks, the drug addicts, the spilled garbage of the slum the damage takes place when the unavailable mother brings her child home from the hospital and realizes she hates him for being alive.

What They Did And What They Learned

The wartime psychological work detailed in this chapter and the next is nonclinical. Many practitioners who worked in areas such as “human management” and enemy morale were social psychologists or other social scientists deeply influenced by psychological theory. Social interests notwithstanding, they considered themselves as firmly committed to rigorous scientific practices as colleagues located at the more physiological end of the professional spectrum. For the most part, experimentalists who were interested in such problems as sensation and perception were involved in “man-machine” engineering problems during the war. A visible example was the Harvard Sound Control Project, which significantly improved earplug technology with a huge staff of psychologists and a $2 million government contract. Psychological

scientists also conducted laboratory and field experiments designed to produce more user-friendly gunsights, improve night vision, and increase the efficiency of cargo handling, among other things. The young B. F. Skinner even spent the war years trying to prove the military value of behaviorist principles by demonstrating that living organismspigeons, to be precisecould be as dependable as machines when it came to guiding missiles to their targets.

Although human relations advisors, specialists in psychological war-

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Which Of The Following Perspectives Dominated American Psychology For Decadesa Neuropsychologyb Behaviorismc Cognitive Theoryd Social Psychology

Which of the following perspectives dominated American psychology for decades?

A neuropsychology

Privacy Overview

The State As Healer: Mental Health As Public Policy

Taking charge of unpredictable emotions and reactions in persons and populations had not been merely, or even mainly, a humanitarian effort during the war years, nor would it be one after 1945. If at times it was presented as a matter of sheer altruism, it really was not. The job of maintaining mass emotional control was decisively taken up by the federal government in the postwar decades because it was understood that mental health was necessary to the efficacy of the armed forces in the short run and national security, domestic tranquillity, and economic competitiveness in the long run. Who could forget the shocking epidemic of emotional disorder and disability exposed during World War II? Ensuring a sufficient threshold of mental stabil-

ity, because that threshold undergirded the integrity of social institutions, became a new and important sphere of federal action in the postwar decades.

Above all, federal mental health policy after 1945 was built on and furthered the integration of clinical and social-scientific insights, helping to merge the concerns of emotional guides and social engineers, so that by the late 1960s, movements for community mental health had effectively undermined the legitimacy of distinctions between private emotions and public policy, between clinical work and the business of politics and government.

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The Family Story: Two Teenagers

Both Rose and Harry were lucky to have encountered psychology that made a real difference in their lives. For Rose, though she was bright, was a reserved and sometimes stubborn child that didnt let many people get too close to her. Her immigrant status, especially in her new school in Queens, where she stood out from her peers by contrast, was another problem that could have resulted in a less-than-favorable school experience. Harry, on the other hand, was an obviously troubled young person. He had, by the time he was 15, several encounters with the police, and had begun hanging around with a gang in his old lower Manhattan neighborhood. It was only a step upward to real crime from petty youth vandalism and loitering, and it was one that was easy for Harry to take, since he had developed a hard toughness while trying to deal with the loss of his father.

John Dewey One of the most visible and influential American philosophers of the early 20th century, best known for his theories of education.

Edward Lee Thorndike Advanced an influential early view of learning as a trial-and-error process, based on experiments with cat escape behavior. Later a theorist of education and values.

William Lowe Bryan One of the earliest American experimental psychologists who published, with Noble Harter in 1897, a definitive work on the time course of learning. Eventually became President of the University of Indiana, 19021937.

National Character: Personality Diagnosis And Treatment On An International Scale

World War II underscored the real difficulties involved in distinguishing between friends and enemies. Because the war’s ideological clashes made it impossible to trust such tangible indicators of loy-

Figure 2. Princeton Listening Center. Photo: Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center.

alty as what people said and how people behaved, understanding the deep mental state of German and Japanese populations became a prerequisite to good military strategy. To this challenge, psychological experts brought the innovative concept of national character. Nurtured by the neo-Freudian movement to revise psychoanalytic orthodoxies considered insufficiently attentive to the impact of social context on psychological development, writings by Franz Alexander, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan had already attracted a lot of attention by the early 1940s. So had similar theoretical work by cultural anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Gorer, Margaret Mead, and Edward Sapir.

Exploring the concept in detail and in a hurry was a military imperative, as well as an intriguing theoretical exercise, as Geoffrey Gorer, a major proponent of national character, pointed out.

In one neat package, the notion of national character oriented psychology toward understanding and affecting important public issues, without sacrificing the traditional language of sickness, health, and di-

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