1941: Psychology

Various schools of thought and viewpoints which originally appeared to be divergent are still being consolidated into the field of psychology as a whole. Differences in viewpoint appear to represent primarily differences in subject matter interest and methods of approach rather than logically opposed interpretations of the same problems. Although there has been a slight increase of interest in theoretical problems in recent years this type of research which attempts to integrate the findings of specialized investigations is still greatly neglected in psychology.

Associative Theories.

Older theories of associative learning are being revised in terms of later findings on conditioned responses and after a considerable period of disfavor for all associative theories, the revised statements have led to a wider acceptance among psychologists. At the same time it is felt by a number of writers that insight theories of learning are not at all incompatible with associative theories and the two are being integrated. A small but fairly steady stream of work on the psychology of reasoning continues to appear under the names of concept formation and studies in inductive thinking.

Physiological Psychology.

The dominant activity in physiological psychology continues to be the use of electrical recording of the skin galvanic reflex as a measure of muscular and glandular internal activity. Laboratories for the detection of guilt are now in operation in many police headquarters throughout the country. At present their major usefulness in courts is still indirect through the obtaining of confessions from suspects rather than through the use of their original records of blood pressure and similar data as direct evidence of guilty knowledge, since these latter evidences are not yet established as legally acceptable. Records of blood pressure and breathing are the commonest measures for the detection of guilt in these laboratories but newer instruments incorporate also the skin galvanic record. Private consulting laboratories for guilt detection have also appeared in recent years and function as part of the methods for checking honesty among employees of financial concerns such as banks.

An outgrowth of the research on emotional responses as measured by the skin galvanic reflex is the theory that individuals who are well adjusted emotionally tend to relieve their emotional excitement or tensions by immediate overt activities such as verbalizing or bodily movements, whereas individuals who are less well adjusted emotionally tend to inhibit overt verbalization or other overt bodily activities and thereby divert their energies to internal muscular and glandular activities such as digestive actions which are recorded indirectly through the skin galvanic measurements.

The study of electro-encephalograms or 'brain waves' also continues and is now being extended to include the study of infants and young children. There are preliminary evidences that some children who exhibit marked behavior problems have characteristically different patterns of brain waves than have normal children. The underlying bases of brain waves are still relatively unknown. Studies of the brain waves of deaf and dumb subjects show some evidence for the localization of sensory functions in specific areas of the brain.

Genetic Psychology.

Genetic psychology is once more on a fairly even keel after the recent intense controversies over the effects of environment upon the development of individual differences in intelligence. Although there are still sharp differences of opinion in the field, further evidence on the intellectual development of children in relation to that of their parents seems to indicate even more clearly that when children from parents of low intelligence are placed in superior foster homes from early infancy and kept there over a period of years, e.g. 5-10 years, their measured intelligence is found to be on the average superior, as would be expected from their environment, rather than very inferior, as would be expected from the very low intellectual status of their true parents. The psychology of later maturity and declining years of life is represented by a few studies which indicate that the greatest accomplishments of leaders in various artistic and learned fields tend to be clustered within certain decades of their lives, but with considerable variations as to the particular decades involved in each of the various fields. Philosophers, for example, have apparently experienced their deepest insights during the later part of their fourth decade, although recognition may be delayed for some time after this. The periods of greatest production of writers ranged from the twenties for short poetic works, to the thirties for the longer novels and dramas, and the forties for scientific prose, political prose, epic poetry and best sellers, and on up to the fifties for history and criticism, while only biography — largely autobiography — is at its best from men past sixty. Among musicians more serious work such as symphonies, opera and sacred music appears primarily in the fourth decade, while lighter compositions appear both earlier and later than the fourth decade.

Educational Psychology.

Educational psychology in general reflects the eclectic progress of theories of learning. As the reports of educational experiments on methods of teaching such as those of progressive education continue to be published the strong and weak points of the newer and the traditional approaches become more apparent, as is true also of their overlapping. A great deal of the emphasis in modern educational psychology is coming to be placed upon the development of adequate adjustive habits on the part of the individual student. The present trends seem to be toward a more balanced emphasis upon both intellectual and social aspects of the student as compared to previous emphases upon purely intellectual skills and some of the more recent emphases on social adjustment alone.

Differential Psychology.

In differential psychology many studies are being reported on the interrelations of human abilities. These indicate the extent to which certain abilities are so broad as to be important in many different skills, as in many verbal skills. In other cases an ability may be important in only a very restricted group of skills and always there are many factors which appear to be specific to single skills.

Vocational Psychology.

Probably the most striking developments in vocational psychology are the activities of psychologists who have recently been called upon to assist military, naval and civil service government organizations in the selection and classification of the vast numbers of new soldiers, sailors, and other government employees. Intelligence tests are used almost universally in such selection programs and are supplemented by tests for the measurement of specialized trade or professional knowledge. Measures of sensory acuities and those for motor skills or muscular coordinations are used but rarely, though some new investigations are getting under way along these lines. Strangely enough, very little psychological research is being done upon methods of training, the logical supplement to methods of selection. A striking exception to the general neglect of training studies is the development of specialized psychological and engineering extension services of universities for the training of supervisors in industries which are being forced to expand their operations very rapidly during the national emergency. This movement, paralleling the much earlier extension services for the application of scientific findings to agriculture may represent the opening wedge by which psychology may eventually come to play a considerable part in industry in general. The measurement of personality or temperament is widely recognized as of great importance for selection and classification of skilled workers in both civil and military occupations, but as yet very few of the personality inventories or other diagnostic measuring devices have been clearly demonstrated to be effective.

Recent attempts to measure mechanical abilities by current tests seem to indicate that such mechanical abilities are quite highly specific or at most grouped into relatively narrow clusters of skill, contrary to earlier beliefs in the existence of a single general mechanical ability. Various extensive attempts to predict skill in complex mechanical operations from either paper and pencil tests of mechanical knowledge and aptitudes or from samples of manual assembly performances have failed almost completely The importance of work methods, long exploited by experts in motion study engineering, curiously has remained almost unrecognized by psychologists and educators.

Social Psychology.

The rising tide of interest in social psychology, which has been marked by the appearance of numerous new texts within the past several years, is an exception to the general eclectic trend which predominates in most of the other fields of psychology. In social psychology there is still very little agreement on even such elementary aspects as the enumeration of the major problems of the field. A topic which is rapidly coming to the fore but on which relatively little has been done as yet is that of morale. The importance of this problem is expected to develop very markedly now that our nation has become involved in the current war. Various groups are working on the problems of morale of both military and civil population but so far the approaches are largely theoretical. If social psychologists are able to adapt and devise techniques for investigation quickly, they may be able to describe and analyze some of the tremendous social changes which now are taking place under war conditions.

The swiftly changing national and international situations which fluctuate with the tides of war have provided an unusual opportunity for the demonstration of the modern technique of public opinion polls which employ the technique of interviewing representative samples of the population in order to estimate what percentages of the whole public concerned favor each viewpoint on current issues. As these techniques are applied to problems of great importance some of the limitations of the methods are appearing and the techniques are being gradually corrected to improve the accuracy of our interpretations.

Abnormal Psychology.

No striking new developments have appeared in abnormal or clinical psychology though the techniques of shock therapy continue to be extended and refined for the treatment of major mental disorders. Recent improvements in the techniques of administering shock include the supplementary use of partial anaesthesia to reduce the severity of muscular contractions produced by insulin or metrazol and the recognition of the possible importance of certain vitamins of the B complex which may be important in determining why certain individuals respond to shock therapy and others do not. Electrical shock, which is more easily controlled than chemical stimuli, is also being used in shock therapy. Theories as to the changes by which recovery occurs are still numerous and of uncertain accuracy.

A further field of clinical research is the use of 'projective techniques' such as the well known Rorschach test which attempts to diagnose and measure individual differences in personality by means of the interpretation placed upon certain ambiguous stimuli such as ink blots. More recent techniques include the use of dramatizations which a child would like to have his favorite comic-strip characters portray and other imaginative situations which on their surface appear to refer to other people, but which usually involve the unrecognized projection of the individual's own wishes, fears, habits, and other psychological characteristics. A survey of the after effects of psychoanalytic treatments of mentally disturbed individuals in America suggests that because of widely divergent viewpoints on sex and other social problems the psychoanalytic assumptions and techniques are less applicable in typical American cultural situations than in European cultures in which the technique originated.