Prominent Psychologists Research Articles

A Citation Analysis of Who's Who in Introductory Textbooks

Given the many changes in the introductory psychology textbook market in the past 2 decades and the lack of a recent citation study of introductory texts, we conducted a citation analysis of a stratified random sample of current texts. To provide a more comprehensive picture of current citation emphases, we extended our analysis to the top 60 authors. As expected, historically prominent psychologists dominated the top 15, with Freud cited most often. We also found that the citation patterns reflected recent changes in the prominence of various schools of scientific psychology with cognitive psychology well represented. We discuss the role of these data in students' perceptions of psychology and in helping introductory teachers to make course content choices.

Reductionism in the Comments and Autobiographical Accounts of Prominent Psychologists

Many of the researchers in the field of psychological science use strategies and methods in which human actions and experiences are reduced to behavioral contingencies, statistical regularities, neurophysiological states and processes, and computational functions and models. However, many psychologists talk readily and easily about how their research might assist human agents to solve problems, cope, make decisions. self-regulate, and more generally “make a difference” and “take control.” The authors considered informally selected comments by several eminent psychologists, and more formally, 73 autobiographical accounts of prominent psychologists to see what could be learned about the attitudes of these psychologists toward reductionism in their own work and in the field of psychology in general. In interpreting these comments and accounts, the authors posit a gap between many psychologists' contemplation of their work and their actual research practices. The authors also suggest that such a gap may be related to psychologists' educational experiences and their scholarly and professional socialization, as well as to their subdisciplinary attachments and contexts.

Current Research in Advanced Cockpit Display Concepts

A major portion of the research conducted throughout the history of aviation psychology has been devoted to the analysis and design of cockpit displays. Military and commercial aviators, as well as the travelling public, have significantly benefited from many years of research that have produced displays that facilitate safe and effective crewmember performance. As Koonce (1984) pointed out, the human performance issues raised in the early days of aviation attracted the research attention of some of the most prominent experimental psychologists of the day. As we enter the 21st century, aviation psychology remains one of the most vital areas in applied psychological research, and the design of advanced cockpit displays still serves as a focal point for innovative research programs and paradigms.

Psychology and gender at the turn of the century.

The turn of the 20th century in America was a period of changing gender ideals. The younger generation of women pressed for economic independence and political rights. Men became caught up with the virility and physicality of the new standard of passionate manhood. These gender shifts were reflected in turn-of-the-century American psychology. With men dominating the discipline, the emerging scientific psychology projected the values of the new man. Several examples of this androcentric psychology are reviewed, including the views of such prominent psychologists as G. Stanley Hall, James McKeen Cattell, and William James. There were also a few women psychologists who challenged the androcentric bias by attempting to incorporate the values of the new woman, most notably Mary Whiton Calkins, Helen Thompson Woolley, and Leta Stetter Hollingworth.

Cultivating the field of psychology. Psychological journals at the turn of the century and beyond.

Prominent psychologists, including G. Stanley Hall, James Mark Baldwin, and James McKeen Cattell, cultivated the field of psychological publishing with privately owned and managed journals. Hall's journals, including the American Journal of Psychology and Pedagogical Seminary, reflected his view of psychology as the empirical study of human nature and his support for applied psychology. Baldwin and Cattell's periodicals, including Psychological Review and Psychological Monographs, reflected a narrower scientific and academic view of psychology. Baldwin and Cattell were more successful editors than Hall and strategically linked their journals to the American Psychological Association (APA). The Psychological Review journals were purchased by APA in 1925. The narrower vision represented in these journals may have contributed to applied psychologists' dissatisfaction with APA during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Behavioral science: a progress report

A prominent neuroscientist A. Damasio has observed that "More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s... than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience" (1999). This progress, which should continue at an exponentially increasing pace as we move into the 21/sup st/ century, sets the stage for another revolution-in the scientific formulation of intentional behavior. Just as applied sciences such as fluid mechanics and solid-state electronics benefited from breakthroughs in physics, so it may be expected that social psychology and economics, for example, will similarly benefit from our expanding knowledge of psychosomatic and psychological function. Economics, however, with its basic concepts dating from the nineteenth century, must endure an extensive renewal. Toward this end, a new mathematical theory of behavior was formulated in the early 1990s based on the contributions of prominent psychologists and economists over the past two centuries. Presentation of the new approach at international conferences continued in 2000 with attention moving beyond the fundamentals into macroeconomic concerns including business cycles, productivity, and unemployment.

The Message and the Medium: The Roots/Routes of Jerome Bruner's Postmodernism

Jerome Bruner has been one of the most prominent American psychologists and educators since World War II with particular interest in and influence on social education. He has repeatedly invented new fields of study and reinvented himself in the process. A pioneer in public opinion research during the 1940s, Bruner founded the New Look school of perception in the early 1950s, the Cognitive Revolution during the late 1950s, and a post-Piagetian school of child development in the 1970s. Bruner was a positivist during the 1940s, then a structuralist through the 1960s, and a post-structuralist during the 1970s. A Cold War liberal in politics through the 1950s, he has since moved steadily to the Left. During the 1980s, Bruner emerged as a postmodernist and founded the field of cultural psychology. This article is an intellectual biography of Bruner, focusing on the influence of his early years in public opinion research and the significance of his conversion to postmodernism.

Chen Li: China's elder psychologist.

Chen Li is one of a small group of psychologists in China who trained abroad early in their careers, returned to teach and do research, and continued doing so into later life beyond normal retirement age. His contacts with a number of prominent psychologists in England and Germany in the 1930s, and his inadvertent position at the center of a political row in China in the 1960s, leading to the shutting down of psychology for 10 years, made him historically important. Known for his work in organizational psychology and education, he is a distinguished psychologist and educational leader. Although trained as an experimentalist, he now embraces a broader view of psychology but remains emphatic it should be applied to real-life problems.

The role of judgment in macroeconomic forecasting accuracy

This paper presents evidence on the role that judgmental adjustments play in macroeconomic forecast accuracy. It starts by contrasting the predictive records of four prominent forecasters who adjust their models with those of three models that are used mechanically. The adjusted forecasts tend to be more accurate overall, although important exceptions can be found. Next the article compares adjusted forecasts with those generated mechanically by the same model. Again, with some significant exceptions, judgmental adjustments improve accuracy more often than not. The article closes by considering whether macroeconomic forecasters should place more or less emphasis on their adjustments relative to their models. It finds a clear tendency for modelers to overadjust their models, illustrating what prominent psychologists have termed “the major error of intuitive prediction”. In short, model builders should not hesitate to adjust their models to offset their limitations but should also guard against the tendency to overestimate the value of their personal insights.

Current developments in community psychology in Canada

Extant historical sources on the evolution of community psychology in Canada provide different perspectives on the subdiscipline's origins but tend to neglect developments in Quebec. The present account is based on oral history data and pertains chiefly to current issues in academic community psychology. Recent interviews of seven prominent Canadian-based community psychologists indicated that there has been a relative lack of cooperation and of knowledge sharing between francophone and anglophone community psychologists. Another theme was the dominating effect of U.S. community psychology on the Canadian subdiscipline. Interviews of 13 central figures in the U.S. subdiscipline confirmed this impression of unidirectional influence. The issues of cultural division and U.S. domination bear significantly on the identity of Canadian community psychology. However, trends in graduate training, community practice, and political support appear to bode well for the future.

An alternative to Chomsky's radical nativism

Abstract In recent years, a number of prominent psychologists such as Jerome Bruner and Jean Piaget have expressed opposition to Chomskyan nativism as an explanation of how human beings learn languages. On close examination, it is found that Chomsky's argumentation that led him to formulate his peculiar version of the nativistic hypothesis is deficient at a number of points: (1) his argumentation from the syntax of natural languages is incorrect, (2) his argument from the ‘degenerate’ data available to the child learning a language is based on insufficient data, and (3) his argument requires belief in the largely unsupportable hypothesis of Lamarckian evolution. As a result, an alternative is suggested based on the works of Piagetian and neo-Piagetian scholars and the two-stage hypothesis of Gallagher.

A taste of facility. A Sartrean look at psychiatry.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1979) was a French intellectual, philosopher and literateur who stood on a common platform of philosophy and psychology. His importance to us lies not only in his great impact on twentieth century thought, but also because he outlined a fairly elaborate system of descriptive psychology as a prelude to his ontological description of the world. His treatises on 'Imagination' and 'Emotions' are classics in the existential tradition. His novels and plays are based on the same themes as concern a psychiatrist in his daily clinic. His principal text of philosophy, 'Being and Nothingness', contains a whole chapter on 'Existential Psychoanalysis'. Not surprisingly, therefore, he has had a significant impact on our approach to mental patients. With the increasing emphasis on the scientific method, the philosophical moorings of medical science became more and more blurred. The result was an impersonal view of the diseased. Thus during this period it had become common practice to view human beings as objects worthy of study from the disease view point. As a result the disease and its causation became more important than the diseased person himself. It must be granted that progress in medicine often results from this passion with causation. However, a causal view of phenomena presupposes that clarity about the phenomena exists among us. Prior to the problem of establishing the etiological basis of a disease entity, there is the problem of uncovering the phenomenal character of the disease in question. This task may not be formidable in most branches of medicine, but in the case of psychiatry the disease entities are human realities themselves expressed in the life activities of fellow-men. This is where empirical psychology breaks down and why some psychiatrists tend to resort to the existential-ontological departure. The point is to liberate man from the speculative subject-object relationship and to stress his uniqueness and individuality. This movement started with Binswanger (1881-1966) who was the first psychoanalyst to use Heidegger's principles to criticize Freud (4,5). He was in the quest of a genuine psychology (7). There have been other psychiatrists of repute who emulated his example. Some prominent psychologists who have been influenced to varying degrees by existentialism are Allport, Angyal, Fromm, Goldstein, Maslow and Rogers (10). At the same time, existential philosophers have themselves been keenly interested in psychology and psychiatry. Karl Jaspers began life as a psychiatrist and his first major work was his General Psychopathology' (12). Jean-Paul Sartre has been keenly interested in psychology and has written a lot on the subject (17). Admittedly, Sartre's impact on psychiatry and psychotherapy has not been as significant as on literature and politics (7). But he has, along with Heidegger, provided a unification which has helped in the understanding of the normal human mind as well as the abnormal one. The series of steps Sartre took towards his totalization of human experience are of great interest to a psychologist because of his investigation of psychic phenomena in the process. This detailed evaluation of individual phenomena is, he says, the only way we can make psychology progress. His insistence on the unambiguous description of such phenomena is in the great Husserlian tradition (28). Here, we shall take a look at the series of steps Sartre took towards his composite view of human psychology.

Psychological approach to the activity of man

The term "activity" is often used to characterize various psychic processes and still needs closer definition. This problem may be formulated as the problem of determinism of psychic development of man. A psychoanalytical theory of S. Freud and behaviourism represent two opposite approaches to its solution in bourgeois psychology. Soviet psychology deals with this problem on the basis of materialistic-dialectical methodology. A structural-functional approach to the development of human psyche developed in works of some prominent Soviet psychologists throws a new light upon the problem of human activity. L. I. Bozhovich, French psychologist A. Wallon and some Soviet and foreign Marxist philosophers consider that man inherits a psychological mechanism which enables him to join any existing social structure.

Twenty Years of Deception in Social Psychology

During the decade 1959 to 1969 the percentage of studies using deception in the leading social psychological journal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, rose from 41% to 66%1 Perhaps as a result of this dramatic increase, in the late 1960s a number of prominent social psychologists began to criticize the field's reliance on deception technology. To determine the effect of these critiques 1188 articles published in four leading social psychology journals between 1959 and 1979 were categorized according to use and type of deception. Use of deception did not decrease from 1969 to 1979.

Two Social Psychologies: Is Segregation Inevitable or Acceptable?

Many social psychologists have delineated two distinguish- able branches of social psychology, usually called "psychological" and "sociological." These two types differ in focus; they tend to differ in methods, theories, and areas of interest as well. This segregation of the two has its basis in many aspects of disciplinary identification, but it greatly limits the potential of both social psychologies, as the example of social psychology of aging illus- trates. However, bridges can be built and integration fostered; indeed, prominent social psychologists of both types often do cross the boundaries. More conscious bridge-building can enhance the social psychological enterprise.

Personality, Stress and Tuberculosis.

This volume contains a series of lectures presented at the Memphis Veterans' Administration Hospital in 1955 and 1956 by a number of prominent physicians and clinical psychologists. The lecture series, in the words of the editor, "constituted a coordinated teaching venture on the interrelationships of the medical and psychological sciences pertaining to tuberculosis." Following the editor's introduction and three separate and thoughtful forwards, the thirty-three chapters are presented in four parts. The first, entitled "Basic Considerations," deals with endocrine and psychosomatic aspects of disease, in particular of tuberculosis. Parts two and three deal with clinical applications of psychological research and psychotherapy as applied to tuberculosis patients in general and to some of the special problems met with in their management, especially the one of irregular discharge. Fortunately, the patient's physician, and all hospital staff members, come in for considerable attention in several of the chapters. While hesitant to single out

War Is Not Human Instinct Prominent Psychologists Hold

War Is Not Human Instinct Prominent Psychologists Hold

Human Nature in Business

A NOTHER book on psychology calls for a prefatory statement if not for a plea of confession and avoidance. Business men are oversold on psychology, said one of the most prominent psychologists in the country. And there was no beguiling him into filling any of the space between the covers of this volume. word psychology in a title will sell any book. This fairly represents the opinion of a publisher who prints books for profit. Members of the Editorial Council of The Annals, almost to a man, seemed unusually interested in the outline of this number. They had ideas-too many ideas to be developed and reconciled in one volume.