The reception of Kurt Lewin in Spanish psychology: A study through specialized journal publications.

Analyzed 75 references to K. Lewin's work in 20 psychological journals, as a measure of Lewin's impact on Spanish psychology from 1920 to 1989. Results show a growing impact of his work, solidly asserting itself from the 1970s onwards in the Spanish psychological scene. Knowledge of Lewin's writings in Spain is quite wide and representative of his production as a whole. Lewin's presence is most visible in social psychological journals, works, and authors, although it may also be found in other areas, notably experimental psychology, educational psychology, and the history of psychology. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Kurt Lewin as filmmaker and methodologist.

K. Lewin made films for 3 often interchangeable purposes: as a methodological tool for analyzing human (social) behavior, as a rhetorical device for illustrating his presentations and aiding the dissemination of his theoretical concepts, and as personal records of family and friends. The linkage of these films to key concepts such as life-space is described. A recently re-discovered feature-length documentary, "Das Kind und die Welt" (1931), whose production Lewin supervised, dramatizes the development of the child, in keeping with Lewinian concepts and the broader contextual concerns at the time for the world of the child in a big city such as Berlin. Finally, Lewin's meetings with Russian filmmaker S. Eisenstein while this film was in production are detailed, along with a discussion of their mutual influences in psychology and filmmaking. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The complete social scientist: A Kurt Lewin reader.

Reviews the book, The complete social scientist: A Kurt Lewin reader edited by Martin Gold (1999). Although he is often acknowledged as one of the primary founders of American social psychology, and despite frequent (seemingly routine and obligatory) citations in the literature, the actual ideas of Kurt Lewin seem to have been—more often than not—ignored or disregarded by most psychologists over the course of the last half century. Fortunately, there are a number of indications that this clearly unacceptable, decades-long neglect of Lewin is being rectified. One such indication is this very thoughtfully and comprehensively assembled volume published by APA books and edited by Martin Gold. Offered as a companion volume to the also recently issued one-volume edition of two previous Lewin anthologies, Resolving Social Conflicts and Field Theory in Social Science, this anthology brings together fifteen additional articles that have been until now especially difficult for scholars to obtain. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rediscovering the history of psychology: Interview with Kurt Danziger.

Kurt Danziger is a senior scholar whose innovative contributions to the history of psychology have received widespread international recognition. This wide-ranging interview covers every aspect of Danziger's work since the 1970s, including his early work on Wundt, his work on psychological methods that culminated in the book Constructing the Subject (1990), and his more recent work on psychological objects in Naming the Mind (1997). It also includes his thoughts on history of psychology in general and the related subject of historical psychology. The interviewer is a former student of Danziger and coeditor of a recent book on Danziger's work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A survey of high school psychology in Iowa.

Surveyed 116 teachers of high school psychology (PSY) in Iowa to determine their teaching activities, the characteristics of their courses, and their educational backgrounds. Most Ss taught one or more other courses in addition to PSY. 51% described their PSY courses as being a combination of PSY as an approach to understanding life and PSY as a science; 65% combined lecture and discussion teaching methods. Only 12% had majored in PSY in college, although 29% had taken 5–6 PSY courses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

External validity and scientific psychology.

Comments on the article by Stanley Sue (December 1999; see record 1999-15532-003), in which he eloquently described a persistent problem in psychological research: the relative lack of research on ethnic minorities. Sue traced the source of this problem to how science is practiced and, in particular, to scientific psychology's emphasis on internal validity over external validity. He argued that researchers' assumption that causal inferences drawn from a given study are generalizable across individuals from different ethnic backgrounds ultimately masks true differences among diverse ethnic groups and hinders research to determine whether such differences exist. Sue recommended that researchers increase their emphasis on external validity in study designs and embrace methodological pluralism in adopting more qualitative and ethnographic approaches to complement traditional scientistic methods used in psychological research. If scientific psychology is to serve the public interest, its findings must be valid and generalizable and must promote the translation of research into informed public policy. This will be possible only when psychologists stop assuming generality across population subgroups, across settings, and across times. Judicious prioritization of external validity above internal validity will build a better scientific psychology and inform public policy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Health psychology: Continuity and change.

This issue of Health Psychology marks a transition in editorship. I assumed the role as editor-in-chief for Health Psychology on January 1, 2005. However, editorial transitions typically require some time to clear the backlog of articles accepted by the previous editor. Because this is one of the first issue including articles accepted by the current editorial board, we now take the opportunity to outline some of the new directions that we have planned. Our overall goal is to increase the impact of the journal on theory, research, and practice relevant to health and behavior. To accomplish this goal, we want to publish the highest quality science. Although psychologists remain the most common authors for Health Psychology, we encourage articles from multidisciplinary teams and from authors in other disciplines. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Career change within psychology: Retraining nonclinical psychologists in clinical psychology.

Collected the 1st reported empirical data concerning opportunities for career changes within psychology. 124 directors of American Psychological Association-approved clinical and counseling programs were asked, via questionnaire, if they would consider for clinical training students with backgrounds in general–experimental psychology. Of the clinical program directors, 13% answered Yes, 37% No, and 42% Under special circumstances. Of the counseling program directors, 48% answered Yes, 9% No, and 26% Under special circumstances. Seven university programs are discussed that provide a 2-yr program of clinical training for persons from nonclinical areas. Recommendations are made concerning future developments in this area of career change. (4 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The development of scientific reasoning in knowledge-rich contexts.

In this study of the development of scientific reasoning, 10 5th–6th-grade children ( 5 boys and 5 girls) and 10 noncollege adults conducted experiments over 6 half-hour sessions to explore the causal structure of 2 physical science domains. Feedback in these systems, though relevant to discriminating among hypotheses, was noisy as a result of varying effect sizes and measurement error. After 2 hr on each task, both age groups demonstrated changes in their understanding of the content and in their strategies for generating and interpreting evidence. In general, the adults outperformed the children. Neither valid strategies nor correct beliefs alone was sufficient to guarantee success, suggesting that regarding experimentation either as domain-general induction or as domain-specific learning may oversimplify its complexity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Scholarship in psychology: Conversations about change and constancy.

Mounting pressures on higher education led the Task Force of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology to propose changes in the way the work of faculty is defined and in the criteria used to identify scholarship (D. F. Halpern et al., 1998). Prominent psychologists representing undergraduate universities, research institutions, and professional schools of psychology contributed commentary on the proposals in the Task Force Report. Although there was disagreement concerning some of the recommendations made by the Task Force, there was general agreement on the need to reflect on the roles and rewards of psychology faculty, with special emphasis on the diversity of institutional missions and faculty needs and abilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Journal citations and scientific eminence in contemporary psychology.

Investigated the validity and reliability of publication citations as a measure of scientific eminence in psychology. Citations from 14 representative English language journals, published from 1962-1967, were examined. Results were compared with other indices of eminence, i.e., being listed in American Men of Science, receiving scientific contribution awards, election to presidency of the American Psychological Association, etc. Results suggest that journal citation provides an index that is correlated with other measures of eminence. Difficulties from high journal citation and low eminence and the reverse of this are discussed. (30 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive psychology and social change.

E. E. Sampson's (see record 1982-04617-001) charges that the cognitive perspective denies reality, depicts mental acrobatics as substituting for effective action, and necessarily serves the existing social order can only be made by selectively ignoring the contributions of the Gestalt psychologists and of other prominent proponents of the cognitive perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultural psychology as metatheory.

Examines the nature and uses of metatheory. Current needs for metatheoretical understanding are discussed in the context of increased skepticism about grand narratives. A focus on the lived meanings of existing metatheory and meta discourse points to the importance of cultural psychology in addressing some of the conceptual, methodological, and axiological problems being faced. It is proposed that cultural psychology can illuminate the semantic sources and pragmatics of academic discourse in the social sciences and facilitate a reflexive understanding of ways of being and knowing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Tectonic change: The qualitative paradigm in psychology.

Qualitative methods are presented as a candidate for a new paradigm in psychology. T. Kuhn's (1970) ideas about the role of paradigms and their stagnation and replacement in science are applied to 20th century events in psychology--principally the shifts from structuralist introspection to behaviourism and then to cognitive science. For heuristic purposes, I suggest that the quantitative emphasis, with its identified shortcomings, may have reached the replacement stage with so-called big-Q research as the new paradigm. Following Kuhn's analysis, I discuss the reasons why new paradigms are difficult to accept even though they may, in the end, answer questions left untouched by ossified approaches. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The two disciplines of scientific psychology.

"No man can be acquainted with all of psychology today." The past and future place within psychology of 2 historic streams of method, thought, and affiliation—experimental psychology and correlational psychology—is discussed in this address of the President at the 65th annual convention of the APA. "The well-known virtue of the experimental method is that it brings situational variables under tight control… . The correlation method, for its part, can study what man has not learned to control or can never hope to control… . A true federation of the disciplines is required. Kept independent, they can give only wrong answers or no answers at all regarding certain important problems… . Correlational psychology studies only variance among organisms; experimental psychology studies only variance among treatments. A united discipline will study both of these, but it will also be concerned with the otherwise neglected interactions between organismic and treatment variables. Our job is to invent constructs and to form a network of laws which permits prediction." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Toward one discipline of scientific psychology.

Discusses views on the possibility of joining correlational and experimental psychology. The works and opinions of L. J. Chronbach are cited in particular. Presents the idea of outlining a paradigm for research which combines the major concerns of both correlational psychologists and experimentalists, and which employs, as a modus operandi, the subgrouping of Ss on the basis of their patterns of prior experience. The feasibility of employing such a paradigm as an operational plan brings at least 2 major operational concerns into consideration: (1) the subgrouping of Ss must have some consistency across samples, and (2) the entire scheme of classifying Ss to subsets must have something approximating generalized validity. It is stressed that the interactive research suggested can be expanded to include many different areas in psychology and other disciplines. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reaction: A broader scientific base for professional psychology.

Much of the opposition in qualitative research is predicated on the belief that psychology is a science and should proceed in obtaining knowledge using the methods of the "hard" sciences. There is, however, a growing awareness of the subjectivity of traditional empirical methods. Attention to qualitative research designs, including journal space, could broaden the scientific base and encourage new professionals to use different methodologies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Historical intersections of psychology, religion, and politics in national contexts.

Various types of psychology have come into existence in and have been interacting with a plurality of contexts, contexts that have been radically varying in different states or nations. One important factor in the development of psychology has been the multiple relationships to the Christian religion, whether understood as an institution, a worldview, or a form of personal spirituality. The articles in this issue focus on the intertwinements between institutional religion and national political structures and on their influence on developing forms of psychology in four different national contexts: Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Within these four settings, aspects of the ways in which varying forms of Christian religion coconstituted, facilitated, and shaped psychology, theoretically, practically, and institutionally, are examined. The formative power of the religions was not independent of the relationships between religion and political power, but rather mediated by these. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The scientific status of American psychology in 1900.

In 1900, psychologists were attempting to define themselves and searching for their role among both academic and nonacademic publics. The success of experimental methods served to advance their position as exemplary scientists, although, as the authors argue in this article, other factors were also important. First, the issue of measurement involved many disagreements about the tools needed to measure psychological constructs or even whether psychologists should measure anything at all. Second, the relationship between the brain and psychological constructs enhanced psychology's status for some, whereas others felt that psychologists should stay away from such topics. Parallels with present-day concerns among psychologists are addressed at the end of the article. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Beyond the two disciplines of scientific psychology.

Aptitude * Treatment interactions are demonstrated with reference to G. Domino's studies (1968 and 1971) of instructor demand and student personality and J. K. Majasan's (1972) study which found that achievement in college psychology was greatest when the student's position on a scale of beliefs regarding behaviorism and humanism were similar to his instructor's. Further evidence on interactions in social psychology, personality, learning, and experimental psychology is cited. It is suggested that higher order interactions make it unlikely that social scientists will be able to establish generalizations applicable beyond the laboratory or that generalizations established in the field work will be maintained. Social research should be less concerned with hypothesis testing and more concerned with interpreting findings in local contexts. (59 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)