Psychology in communist countries other than the USSR.

Discusses the prevalence of Pavolvianism in Communist countries other than the USSR. The author asserts that Pavlovianism is being propagated with full force throughout the Communist world--through numerous translations of Soviet textbooks, special magazines devoted to the dissemination of Soviet science and culture, special Pavlov pamphlets, specially convoked Pavlovian conferences, large-scale intervisiting of Soviet and other Communist countries' psychologists and psychophysiologists, and other means and media of influence. There is not a semblance of doubt that Soviet theorists are determined that there be only one psychology in the whole Communist world and that this psychology be the one of Pavlov. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychology in the States.

Gustad reports on the establishment of a Department of Mental Health in Iowa, a program of voluntary certification in Massachusets, and the participation of the New Jersey Psychological Association in the 2nd Legistative Forum on health and welfare. Information on the New York State Psychological Association and the Oregon Psychological Association are also presented. The establishment of more mental hygiene clinics in Suffok County, NY, certification legislation in Pennsylvania, and action oriented programs in Texas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychology Without Boundaries: Crossing the Longest Undefended Border in the World.

The abolition of boundaries dividing subfields of psychology is made difficult by, among other forces, different reward systems and overwhelming amounts of information. The current collection of papers is an interesting demonstration of the values of transporting intellectual goods across one set of such boundaries: those between I/O psychology and clinical, social/personality, and cognitive/neuropsychological research and theory. Although because of space limitations the demonstration is incomplete, it should encourage more cross-boundary thinking and the recognition that academic and applied psychologists have much to offer to, and to gain from, each other's fields of endeavour. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Amateur Psychology.

Comments on a recent article in The Reporter (Feb. 16, 1962), where Marya Mannes, a staff writer of this publication, praises Joyce Brothers for her ability to answer complex psychological problems in simple language "so simple in fact that she might be a new form of computer." In this computerization into simple language, however, not only the poetry of the problem, but its very individuality is lost. Somebody writes in, or talks to Dr. Brothers and gets the computer answer. The commentator states that such simplicity is easy to achieve because the dispenser of psychological and psychoanalytical generalities, of truisms and "untruisms," has only one theory into which, like into the legendary bed of Procrustes, the unfortunate party must fit. Lastly, according to the commentator, Miss Mannes has some misgivings lest the simplicity might simply be psychological quackery. She asks politely whether these shows are the soil in which wisdom may flower, and she calls this an open question. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Nature of Social and Personality Psychology as Reflected in JPSP, 1965-2000.

A bibliometric analysis of the first 36 years (1965-2000) of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) is presented. The authors analyzed the structure of JPSP on the basis of contents and other aspects related to productivity, such as growth in the number of articles and authors, and "invisible colleges." In 2001, JPSP articles were cited over 23,000 times. An increasing number of older, classic articles are cited, suggesting that there are an accumulating number of citations whose influence endures over time. JPSP articles have grown in length, number of studies included, number of references, and number of authors and have become more international with an increasing proportion of authors from outside the United States. The pattern of findings suggests an increasingly complex and mature science. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Tale of Two Visions: Can a New View of Personality Help Integrate Psychology?

Personality psychology studies how psychological systems work together. Consequently, the field can act as a unifying resource for the broader discipline of psychology. Yet personality's current fieldwide organization promotes a fragmented view of the person, seen through such competing theories as the psychodynamic, trait, and humanistic. There exists an alternative--a systems framework for personality--that focuses on 4 topics: identifying personality, personality's parts, its organization, and its development. This new framework and its view of personality are described. The framework is applied to such issues as personality measurement, psychotherapy outcome research, and education. The new framework may better organize the field of personality and help with its mission of addressing how major psychological systems interrelate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Giving Psychology Away Is Expensive.

Comment on "Does Psychology make a significant difference in our lives?" by P. Zimbardo (see record 2004-16479-003). We deeply appreciate the documentation and inspiration provided by Zimbardo on how psychology is reaching out to the public by "giving psychology away" (p. 340). We totally agree that psychology has much, much more to offer that could be used to improve human lives. We believe that in addition to a sincere desire to give psychology away, there needs to be a recognition of the realities of living in a capitalist society. In a market-driven economy, it is the value of intellectual property in the form of revenue generated that will determine whether psychological knowledge is widely disseminated and used. Zimbardo made a very good case for using the media to obtain free advertising; however, we believe a more radical approach is needed. The authors go on to discuss their views. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Undergraduate Psychology: An Extreme View.

The author opines that Buxton's "Issues in Undergraduate Education in Psychology" (American Psychologist, 1956, 11, 84-95; see record 1957-02112-001) has very properly raised a number of provocative questions that need careful and considered attention. He feels compelled to offer some clarification on whether psychological teaching should be directed at "the whole man" or primarily at intellectual aspects of the student's development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Division of Philosophical Psychology.

Comment regarding the necessity of establishing a Division of Philosophical Psychology in the APA. There are several clear indications that other disciplines and particular scholars in our own discipline are taking cognizance of this problem. Feigl's (see record 1960-03715-001) article "Philosophical Embarrassments of Psychology" is suggestive of the growing concern. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

One Hundred Years of Social Psychology Quantitatively Described.

This article compiles results from a century of social psychological research, more than 25,000 studies of 8 million people. A large number of social psychological conclusions are listed alongside meta-analytic information about the magnitude and variability of the corresponding effects. References to 322 meta-analyses of social psychological phenomena are presented, as well as statistical effect-size summaries. Analyses reveal that social psychological effects typically yield a value of r equal to .21 and that, in the typical research literature, effects vary from study to study in ways that produce a standard deviation in r of .15. Uses, limitations, and implications of this large-scale compilation are noted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality factors in the selection of civilians for isolated northern stations.

An investigation of personality characteristics associated with favorable adjustment to northern isolated living, and the usefulness of psychological tests in the selection of personnel for northern posting. 197 electronic technicians already screened on other psychological tests completed MMPI, Edwards Personal and Brainard Preference tests, and General Information and Arctic Interest questionnaires prior to 1 year of isolation duty on the mid-Canada Line. Adequacy of work and social adjustment was associated with 11 of 35 test variables and 3 of 26 questionnaire items. The discriminating function of the MMPI was reduced by the use of the K correction. It was suggested that despite the highly select nature of the sample used, the test battery has potential value in the selection of civilians to work in the far north.—(17 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Toward a Psychology of the Scientist.

Reviews the book, Toward a Psychology of the Scientist by Sonja C. Graver (1981). The major themes of this highly condensed 92 page book are that all sciences are philosophic and that psychological research provides insight into how scientists formulate and revise theories. The author further contends that the development of science would be enhanced if all scientists (including psychologists) understood the primary importance of the role of theory, imagination and creativity in experimentation. The scientific model suggested is that progress in science occurs by way of reformulations of arbitrary world views, and that scientific activities would be enhanced if the subjective and psychological, particularly cognitive, aspects were stressed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Training clinical students in personality theory.

In training graduate clinical psychology students at the University of North Dakota, "Using Hall and Lindzey's Theories of Personality as a basic text, the student studies each of the major theorists and is required to write a confidential personality evaluation of himself within the framework of the theory under consideration… . Aside from making the course more meaningful personally, students are found to become more introspective and to raise questions about their role in the clinical situation without ever having been exposed to such notions as counter-transference in any formal sense. The positive transfer to the course in projective techniques is also noteworthy." The student seems to approach clinical report writing in a more mature manner; he recognizes the advantages and inadequacies of a variety of personality theories. "To us it seems that a course in personality theory is one of the most fundamental in the training of clinical psychologists and can be enriched by relating the formulations of various theorists to the personal life of the student." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Taking the theorizing in personality theories seriously: Comment.

Comments on "A tale of two visions: Can a new view of personality help integrate psychology?" by J. D. Mayer (see record 2005-05480-001). Mayer's attempt to find ways to use personality emphases as integrative tendencies in psychology is welcome. Certainly, it would help if the research and practice efforts of psychologists were coordinated more clearly than they are now. The comment author finds Mayer's rather ambiguous and scattered suggestions to be disconcerting. The comment author proposes alternatives he hopes will further Mayer's goals. He believes that emphasizing core, developmental, and peripheral statements is important in envisioning the personality system. The comment author does not agree with Mayer's (2005) assertion that emphasizing existing personality theories is necessarily damaging because of their specific content disagreements. There are, of course, many personality theories, but their diversity can be reduced to a more manageable level by inducing from them the basic models of personality theorizing. When the comment author engages in this process, what emerges is the conflict, fulfillment, and consistency models, each with two subtypes. Psychologists need to collaborate with each other in formulating comparative analytic research that can resolve the fundamental issues arising from the differences between these three models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Implications of 'Psychological Injuries' for Clinical Psychology Training Programs.

This paper uses the psychological and legal concept of "psychological injury" as an illustration of the evolving market for psychological knowledge and of necessary changes in the graduate and internship training of clinical psychologists. Our current graduate and internship training fails many of our students through neglecting important areas of knowledge and experience. In this paper, I discuss the importance of exposing graduate students to: a) the economics of mental health; b) professional roles involving knowledge dissemination outside traditional academia; c) information needs of direct and indirect consumers of psychological knowledge; and, d) communication skills necessary when interacting with nonpsychologists. Suggestions are made for the improvement of our graduate training programs, including more explicit acknowledgement of the likely career paths of most of our graduates. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inescapable moralities: Psychology as public philosophy.

Critical psychologists repeatedly lament the fact that we spend most of our time criticizing, unmasking and deconstructing prevailing psychological models, and rather less time rebuilding and reinventing them. Of course, important contributions have been made by theorists who present concrete alternatives to the theories and practices we challenge. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to articulate a guiding vision or visions of what we should be doing. This article discusses a symposium that was organized as an attempt to press beyond the "debunking" phase. All of the papers embody attempts to move into the less-travelled territory of moral conversation. They are predicated upon certain fundamental assumptions about the moral and political situatedness of psychology. The five papers that follow are offered with the recognition that they are neither the first nor the last word on the normative dimensions of psychological discourse. In addition to the specific contribution made by each author, the collective aim of the panel is both to highlight the ongoing moral situations in which we are all caught, and, perhaps most importantly, to invite further conversation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rethinking Fragmentation and Diversity in Psychology.

Comments on the article by M. W. Katzko (see record 2002-12457-021) regarding a unification theory for psychology. In this comment, the author suggests possible causes and cures for fragmentation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Metaphor in Personality Theory.

Because the more advanced sciences, in their present state of development, are largely concerned with highly formalized and precise statements of relationship among phenomena, many psychologists take it as their immediate task to develop such formalized statements in psychology. In order to pursue such a course, they prefer to bypass those more primitive stages of thinking through which other sciences have progressed. One such mode of primitive thinking is metaphorical. Metaphor frequently permits, even induces, a new conception to unfold. Such a germinal metaphor, especially when unrecognized by the thinker, may be obscure or confused; but this very lack of clarity may give rise to tensions within the thinker which act to resolve the ambiguities in the metaphor. The instability of a metaphor can thus serve to broaden the thinker's horizon beyond the limits of what is given here and now and to sharpen his appreciation of the possibilities for further theoretical development. The history of psychology has been enriched by metaphor. For example, metaphors were a fruitful influence in generating the personality theories of McDougall and of Freud. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Boundaryless Psychology: A Discussion.

Comments on the articles by G. P. Latham and P. A. Heslin (see record 2003-07215-006), G. H. Seijts and B. W. Latham (see record 2003-07215-007), and R. G. Lord et al (2003) which examined the concept of a boundaryless psychology, focusing on industrial/organizational psychology. This article is divided into three parts. In the introduction, I echo the case for breaking down boundaries. In the Article Critiques, I point out some of the good points and some concerns about each of the empirical articles in this section. In the General Comments, I design a two-dimensional matrix to help researchers decide how to best break down barriers in their research. This matrix has Order of Distance Between Fields on one axis and Theory Development on the other. In order of proximal to distal, the former axis is divided into target subdiscipline, other like-paradigm subdisciplines, other subdisciplines, other broad category sciences, and other sciences. In order of moving away from one's own discipline, the later axis is divided into statistical methodologies, philosophy of science, history of science, humanities, vicarious experience, and personal experience. Finally, I give a hypothetical example to illustrate how a researcher could use this matrix to break down barriers in psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)