1942: Psychology

Historians have noted that great wars have often brought about marked advances in engineering, an applied physical science. More recently wars have also produced comparable advances in medicine, a biological science. In World War I, a bio-social science, psychology, also made significant progress with the development of mental testing on a large scale. In the present war all of these sciences are making still more significant advances, and other social sciences such as economics, sociology and political science are finding similar opportunities.

One of the most significant commentaries on the role of the sciences in wartime is that of the present restrictions which are necessarily placed upon the reporting or printing of confidential researches undertaken for the government. Altogether these projects now occupy a large part of the time of leading scientists through projects in the various branches of civil government, in the armed forces, and through contracts for projects conducted by scientists in universities. Coordinating committees work through the National Research Council and similar research agencies. At present we can only report the fact of widespread research in these applied fields. Details of findings must in most cases remain unpublished until after the war.

Military Psychological Activities.

Certain broader aspects of military psychological activities are already known and may be mentioned freely. For example, the selection of scientific personnel and other specialists for both the armed forces and civil government offices is being cleared through the agency of the National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel. This agency covers all of the sciences but the methodology is that of applied psychology and the agency is directed by a leading psychologist. In close cooperation with it is the liaison office of the American Psychological Association which assists in locating specially qualified personnel for special types of governmental positions and vice versa. As one evidence of the role of psychology in the war, it is announced that practically all of the psychologists known to be in the armed services have been assigned to psychological or closely related work, at least within a relatively short time following their basic military training period of a few months. This holds true of men inducted through the selective service act and includes advanced students as well as professional psychologists.

Whereas psychologists in the last war were restricted largely to problems of intelligence testing in relation to classification of military personnel, they are at present called upon to develop and evaluate tests in many other areas such as perception in the various sense fields, manual and bodily coordinations as in the operation of mechanized equipment, and in affective balance or emotional stability. Problems in perception tend to be intimately related to those of action, as in controlling a machine. Studies of manual skills include tests for mechanical aptitudes in war industries and in the manual skills of operating trucks, tanks, and airplanes.

Measurement of Temperamental Factors.

Measurement of temperamental or personality factors is still the most difficult of all of the fields, although several relatively new approaches are being tried. In one of these approaches the individual is put under conditions of mental stress in a controlled condition designed to produce frustration. Evidences of emotional instability and quickness of recovery are studied to determine whether these samples of emotional behavior will be predictive of behavior under stress situations in civilian or military life. Another approach is that of attempting to relate factors of temperament to constitutional differences in body builds. Here the old fallacy of attempting to distinguish sharp body types has been overcome by recognizing the need for a quantitative method of describing the test profile resulting from measurements on a number of body dimensions. In this way gradations in body build are recognized.

Verbal Questionnaires.

The use of verbal questionnaires for measuring emotional factors still suffers from the lack of empirical validation of such questions on selected groups in which the emotional status has been determined by more intensive case histories. The psychological mechanisms of compensation and rationalization would alone be sufficient to upset any 'arm chair' evaluation of the significance of a given set of answers by the psychologist constructing a test. It definitely cannot be assumed that the person being measured can or will give a thoroughly straightforward reply to such questions, even though the person is not consciously evading the issue. On the other hand, it may be possible to establish the existence of certain characteristics though not necessarily logical answers brought about by the habitual use of various mental mechanisms (compensation, etc.) in the solution of personal problems by persons of various temperaments. Some such studies have been made, but larger numbers of individuals in each criterion group must be studied in order to show stability of findings. Lacking such well-established devices for measuring individual difference in temperamental factors, clinical psychologists have been greatly restricted in their ability to meet the needs of the armed forces in selecting personnel.

Projective Techniques.

A wide variety of devices for diagnosing personality have been developed under the name of 'projective techniques,' in which some relatively neutral or impersonal situation is presented to a person with the request for his reactions to it. For example in the well known Rorschach test, a standardized shape of ink blot is presented with a question as to what the person perceives it to be. Similarly, individuals may be asked to interpret, or complete a cartoon or story about some other person. In all such cases the individual's interpretations are influenced by his background of previous experiences, and the various techniques endeavor to determine the significance of various types of replies to the background of the person's own problems. Such techniques are at present largely qualitative, but some progress is being made toward quantification of the method. A related idea is that of the 'psychodrama' and 'role therapy' in which the psychologist attempts to discover how the person thinks of himself or his role in life. Frequently it is possible to suggest a variation of this role which enables the person to see himself in a new light, one more satisfying to himself and thus a means of relieving a frustration if that is present. This should also result in better adjustment between the individual and his social groups, since the new role is usually chosen so as to adjust the individual's goals in the direction of better conformity to social needs.

Other Wartime Trends.

Social psychologists have been called into governmental work on such problems as surveying aspects of morale in both civilian and military groups. They and the social scientists are also consulted in attempting to evaluate the effect of large population shifts such as those brought about by moving rural workers to new defense plant areas.

By what may seem a curious turn of affairs, a considerable number of specialists in comparative or animal psychology have now shifted their interests to applied human psychology, thus uniting workers from two areas which had previously been considered to have little in common. Some of these men have even gone into social psychology, a still longer jump. In the opinion of the writer these incidents are evidence of an acceleration in the two trends reported in previous articles, namely the growing recognition of the applicability of the same basic scientific methods to all subject matters, and the gradual merging of earlier viewpoints into an eclectic psychology. Another example of such convergent trends in psychology is to be found in a commission to consolidate or federate the various major psychological organizations which have been developed to promote their respective special fields of psychology in recent years. The willingness to undertake such a consolidation of efforts marks a healthy reversal from a not too distant tendency of the 'pure scientists' to hold aloof from the 'applied scientists.' The great amount of shifting about of men in the different areas of the war effort should also aid in breaking down the remaining barriers between the special fields of interest. As an evidence of the tremendous shifting about of psychologists during the war, the American Psychological Association this year reports change of address for about half of the associates and members. Such an extensive change is probably four or five times the normal expectation. A further evidence of convergent trends in psychology is the appearance of collaborative textbooks bringing together studies from all of the various fields of psychology with an increasing attention to the applied fields.

Psychology and Wartime Civil Life.

Many of the current changes in the wartime life of everyday citizens are of considerable psychological interest and may have a lasting effect on our culture. These in a way constitute a whole series of uncontrolled social experiments on a gigantic scale. The publication of the English Beveridge plan for social changes after the war and the Dutch plan for a colonial union both indicate changes of great social importance. The necessity for vastly increased man power is forcing both military and business organization to break down restrictions which have usually kept women and certain racial groups from an opportunity to work in certain areas primarily restricted to men or to majority groups. Likewise our democratic organizations are being 'tried by fire' as appropriate means of coordinating the interests of individuals and society in a tremendous war effort. This is perhaps more true of labor and labor regulating organizations than of any other groups.

Education.

Educational psychologists are faced with problems of determining the advisability of curricular changes at all levels of education. Strangely enough, neither psychologists nor educators have been consulted very extensively on problems of training military personnel, though all grades of schools have been given opportunities to train civilians for defense work. More recently, with the advent of selective service recruitment of 18-19 year old men, the government is setting up specialized military training units in colleges and universities with admission to be based upon ability rather than financial status of the individual. Psychological tests will undoubtedly be used in such admissions plans. Here too is another evidence of progress which should interest social psychologists in a democratic country.

The conscription of younger college men is also forcing a hasty and long delayed revaluation of regular educational objectives and methods. The necessity of choosing the most essential types of training for men going into specialized services within a few months, and the coordinate demands for training young women to take over jobs previously held by men are straining the resources of colleges to make necessary changes in time to survive the prospective shifts in demands for public service during the war. On the other hand, university staff members are being called upon as never before to furnish expert personnel for government emergency offices, and the very serious attention now given to systematic postwar planning would have been considered largely 'academic' in the last war.

Public Opinion.

The major problem of a 'representative government,' that of correctly interpreting the opinions and needs of its citizens as a basis for formulating governmental policies is particularly acute in wartime, when a lag of several months may represent a costly delay in aligning the efforts of citizens behind a war program. The phrase 'too little and too late' as applied to England and America applies not only to the technical plans of military leaders, but to the problems of civil leadership as well. In spite of the availability of public opinion polls, administration leaders seem often to have waited too long for public opinion to develop before undertaking a policy, only to find after a few months of controversy or indecision that the general public had been far ahead of the leaders' sentiments in such developments of opinion. In other instances, as with the 'farm bloc' or the 'silver bloc,' small groups have been able to force or delay legislative action on matters when public opinion was almost certainly strongly opposed to such actions. The use of representative sample public opinion polls seems to offer one of the principal methods for the public to inform its representatives of their wishes and needs in between more formal and expensive general elections. While national administrative leaders are using the technique extensively, the legislative groups appear to resist its use, probably viewing it as a rival agency for representing views of the people.

Abnormal Psychology.

In abnormal psychology the striking results of 'shock therapy,' e.g., treatment of major mental disorders by inducing convulsions through the use of drugs, or electrical shocks or by operations on the frontal lobes of the brain, have now been extended in another direction. Cooling the body of the human being is found to produce a partial suspension of living activities. Strange to say, when victims of severe mental disorders have their body temperatures thus lowered for some time, they may show a temporary return to normal mental condition when they are returning to the normal body temperature, only to relapse when the return to normal is complete. Such unusual findings in types of disorders which have long been among the most resistant to treatment raises many questions as to the reasons for the observed effects. Further research along this line should help to evaluate all of the shock theories for the origin and treatment of such disorders.

One curious fact about the effect of the war on mental hygiene is the English report on decreased numbers of serious mental disorders among civilians, a finding which is just the opposite of what many would have expected. Apparently wartime morale has somewhat more than compensated for the other stresses of war.

Effect of War on Psychological Studies.

As might be expected, the research areas less directly connected with the war effort, such as experimental esthetics and other pure science investigations, have been temporarily overshadowed by emergency research. One must not lose sight of the fact that pure science and many theoretical problems which have not yet reached a stage of development where application is possible or wise, are still worthy of attention. These should properly continue to stimulate thinking and research even in wartime. On the other hand, the present general trends in psychological work give increasing support to the principle that studies in applied psychology may well contribute as much to the advancement of pure science as has previously been expected in the opposite direction. Such empirical studies are likely to give much needed corrections to the frequently misleading implications from 'well controlled' but artificial laboratory studies such as those on the learning of nonsense syllables and maze pathways.

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.

1940: Psychology

A review of progress in psychology during the past year reveals a series of gradual advances in a large number of lines rather than any single outstanding discovery. Many of these advances are merely extensions of knowledge or additional recognition accorded to research developments of the past few years.

General Psychology.

In the field of general psychology significant progress continues in the adaptation of experimental to statistical methods for analyzing the relative importance and interrelations of factors in human behavior. The methods of factorial analysis are now being extended from the original field of measuring intellectual abilities to include analyses of the factors that underlie individual differences in perception, motor skills, and mechanical abilities. A method comparatively new to psychology, the analysis of variance, is attracting a great deal of attention because of its possibilities in controlling and studying many variables at once instead of single pairs of variables at a time, as has previously been considered necessary in most experiments.

Physiological Psychology.

In physiological psychology recent studies have shown measurable electrical action potentials which indicate that minute contractions in arm muscles are a factor in what has usually been considered to be a 'mental set' in the old experiment of judging lifted weights. This type of work represents a technological advance in Fechner's historical problem of 'inner psychophysics,' or the interrelations between stimuli, intermediate processes, and overt responses. Fechner originally was unable to study intermediate processes except as they could be inferred from the end overt response, or by introspective descriptions.

The startling series of electrophysiological evidences reported three years ago in support of the venerable Helmholtz or 'resonance' theory of hearing are now being revaluated in the light of further evidence which suggests a combination of the resonance and frequency theories.

Another biological approach to psychology is the theory of constitutional bodily types as one of the factors underlying various psychological characteristics such as temperamental qualities. The most recent work suggests three primary kinds of body build, whose names, endosome (round, fat), mesosome (well muscled), and ectosome (thin) are derived from three main layers of tissue in embryological development. The present theory recognizes the previously neglected fact of continuous gradation between these types by stating an individual's degree of each type in five body areas, the head, shoulders and arms, upper trunk, abdomen, and legs. Minor factors of hirsutism and masculine vs. feminine secondary sex characteristics are also recognized. As yet only minor correspondences of structural to functional characteristics such as temperaments have been reported, but the classification provides a useful method for testing such relationships.

Comparative Psychology.

Relatively few changes have appeared in animal or comparative psychology during the year. The production of experimental neuroses in animals continues to be a promising approach to the understanding of the origins of certain types of abnormal behavior in human beings. The advantage is, of course, the greater possibility of controlling the various factors in animal environments and of being able to try experiments which might be too strenuous for human subjects.

Child Psychology.

In child psychology the continued interest in the education of the emotions is illustrative of the increasing emphasis upon the socialization of children as compared to the older emphasis upon skills such as the 'three R's.'

Differential psychology exhibits a relative quiescence on the nature-nurture controversy on intelligence, with evidence as to the importance of long continued and large differences in environment now being more widely accepted.

Educational Psychology.

Educational psychology is undergoing a rather thorough self-examination by national committees of leaders in the field. A major outcome appears to be a shift of interest from older technical problems of learning to an examination of the social setting to which the child must learn to adjust. Anthropologists are contributing surveys of social factors such as the influence of foreign and low economic sections of a community on the child's problems, while the psychoanalyst's study of basic needs and adjustments represent another approach. One older topic, the transfer of training, is being reinvestigated to emphasize that the type as well as the amount of training or practice is a major factor in determining the degree of transfer from one activity to another.

Vocational Psychology.

Vocational psychology, though still relatively undeveloped, shows a number of significant lines of progress. A survey of the special abilities of all scientists in America is under way for possible use in the current emergencies, and the first newly drafted soldiers are undergoing classification by revised army intelligence and special ability tests. A number of psychologists are cooperating on the problems of selecting, training and rating the efficiency of aviation students who are enrolled in widespread college training courses.

Employee or 'in service' training programs in private and public organizations are receiving increasing recognition as a logical procedure to follow up a program of personnel selection. The method of informal conferences between employees in the same type of work is proving especially helpful in such problems as developing better public relations, and in introducing plans for new developments in business procedures. In older and better known technical skills such as repairing electrical machines the training programs are often more formal, providing intensive training and checks through regular inspection of skillful and defective work during an extended training period. From the standpoint of ultimate benefits, perhaps the most significant aspect of personnel work is not in greater emphasis upon selection and training of workers so much as in improvement of industrial and social relationships among members of business organizations. Unfortunately the significant advances along this line are relatively rare, though the large scale experiments of one of the largest electrical manufacturers has resulted in making this the major emphasis in their personnel program.

Avocational Psychology.

With the increasing growth of leisure time from shorter working hours, avocational psychology shows great opportunities for the study of all fields of arts and other recreations. Further studies of individual differences in artistic abilities are showing significant relationships to the intellectual and temperamental backgrounds and work methods of students, as well as many other minor factors.

Social Psychology.

As in the past year or two social psychology continues to hold a major share of professional interest, because of present political and military trends and also because of its latent possibilities for both scientific and social progress. Writers in the field still show little agreement as to the major problems which are believed to constitute the field at present. One group conceives social psychology as primarily a pure science emphasizing the analysis of social phenomena, while another group believes that it should go further in actively advocating specific viewpoints in the furtherance of social progress, for example, in labor conflicts. The applied social science of polling public opinion showed increasing accuracy and significance in forecasting and analyzing trends leading up to the recent national election. An unusual type of study analyzed panic behavior aroused by a recent nation-wide radio broadcast dramatization of an invasion from Mars. The listeners' backgrounds in educational and religious matters was shown to be important in determining their adequacy in evaluating the startling situation brought about by hearing only fragments of the broadcast. A more practical type of social research by psychologists and other educators is the study of effective methods of group discussion as a democratic method of solving community problems. Such studies show a convergence of developments with studies on all other forms of problem solving, from personal defense or adjustment mechanisms to inductive reasoning such as experimental methods in science.

Abnormal Psychology.

Shock therapy or the artificial production of coma and convulsions continues to be a major interest in abnormal psychology. Various treatments, such as heavy doses of insulin and metrazol, are being extended to other psychoses in addition to dementia praecox, their first application. One interesting aspect of such treatments seems to be the fact that certain of the physiological deficiencies such as oxygen and blood sugar supplies to the brain may be remedied by producing even greater temporary deficiencies by the shock, so that the added severity of the shock may start a readjustment to these deficiencies. The use of electrical shocks on the forehead is another method now being investigated as a safer and more controllable method of producing the coma and convulsions in shock therapy. Another interesting development is a series of studies which show that in cases of mental deterioration, vocabulary skills remain nearer the original levels of mental abilities than other skills and thus afford some basis for estimating the level from which intellectual deterioration began.

Psychological Research.

Attempts to systematize the findings of psychological research into a single viewpoint continue, with an increasing freedom from the relatively narrow viewpoints which have often characterized recent years in psychology. One significant trend is the attempt to formulate the basic assumptions and theories necessary to predict certain types of learning behavior. The method attempts to discover or devise a set of principles which are so rigorous that they can be formulated in symbolic logic, and deductions from them can be evaluated experimentally. The first developments will probably be most significant as a test of the usefulness of these exact methods.

As a supplement to this slower procedure of building a system of psychology by highly exact analyses beginning on only one narrow area is the less striking but more familiar eclectic approach of attempting to classify all of the major contributions from all viewpoints in psychology. These contributions must then be translated into a common terminology, and searching for a minimal list of concepts, assumptions, and principles which would organize the findings into a relatively simple and consistent classification of observed facts, together with the most promising hypotheses where facts are not available, and the methods for testing the hypotheses.

1939: Psychology

Development of a Comprehensive System.

Perhaps the most significant progress in psychology is the gradual development of a broad eclectic viewpoint through the convergence of major schools of thought and special fields of interest. Newer movements such as topological psychology, the analysis of forces acting in a specific behavior situation, are now recognized as developments of new or neglected sets of problems rather than complete systems of the whole field of psychology. With the gradual emergence of a large body of accepted facts and principles spirited controversies have now shifted from more general to more specific problems such as the effect of certain environmental factors upon measured intelligence, with the arguments narrowed down to the interpretation of particular groups of experiments.

Instead of defining psychology in terms of the particular interests of each school of thought it is now generally recognized that all of the interests are essential and supplementary to one another in a complete system of psychology. An outline of the contributions of each of the various schools of psychology shows that each has represented a special interest in a few related problems, and frequently only a few aspects of these problems. In cases where various schools were interested in the same aspect of a problem their differences were frequently those of terminology rather than of logical opposition. Earlier tendencies to accept or reject viewpoints as a whole are now being modified in the direction of judging each point of their work on its own merits, rejecting some, accepting some and recognizing the balance as still in need of further research.

The Eclectic Concept.

The present eclectic trend differs from earlier eclectic movements in that it not only accepts the specific factual contributions of each school but is also interested in the theoretical correlation of those facts. This development of an eclectic theoretical basis for psychology has been greatly facilitated by several broader developments in the philosophy of science. For example, it is now being recognized that we do not ordinarily 'discover' facts about the world, but rather 'construct' concepts which enable us to organize our knowledge for better understanding of a given problem. It follows that various 'constructs' may be devised to describe the same situation, and the relative usefulness of such concepts may be judged by the extent to which they enable us to understand and predict such phenomena. The movement called operationism clarifies the methods of defining any scientific phenomenon by stating the operations necessary to produce or identify it, thus grounding a science in concrete observations. While some scientists would restrict their concepts to this type alone, it seems justified to admit also the more abstract concepts providing that they can be directly related to such concrete operations as those of the more strictly operational concepts.

A group of psychologists at Yale is now attempting to provide a logical framework of psychological assumptions, hypotheses and deductions for the prediction of various types of behavior. They are attempting to extend the system from studies in animal learning to psychology in general, and as a check on their reasoning have translated their principles into symbolic logic. Such a system is not only based upon experimental results but each new deduction is also capable of being tested by further experiments. Another very significant attempt to correlate the facts of psychology is the work of Tolman in diagramming the various factors which help to determine the behavior of an animal in a particular situation, e.g., at a choice point in a maze.

As further evidence of eclecticism, most general textbooks of psychology have now so far assimilated the contributions of the various schools of thought that they no longer bother to distinguish their sources as behaviorism, structuralism, etc., except in rare instances. Similarly we find that leading representatives of two supposedly divergent schools of thought, psychoanalysis and topological psychology, have recently found it entirely possible to report their findings to other psychologists with almost no reference to the specialized terminologies which were long supposed to be necessary in each field. These and similar facts strongly suggest the possibility and usefulness of standardizing a single terminology for the major concepts of all of the special fields of psychology, as in the older sciences.

Experiments in Measurement.

Another general trend is the extension of experimental methods to nearly every field of inquiry, thus verifying Thorndike's early prediction that whatever exists must exist in some quantity and eventually will be measurable. In many cases however we have rather slighted the qualitative analyses which should underlie or accompany any quantitative study. The measurement of trends in public opinion by social psychologists and of prospective needs and preferences of consumers by industrial psychologists are examples of rapidly developing techniques. The recent highly publicized investigations on telepathy have scarcely demonstrated the existence or non-existence of such phenomena but they have brought to light a multitude of sources of error, logical, experimental and statistical, which can tell us what type of methods would be necessary to produce really crucial evidence on this problem.

Electrical recording to nerve impulses affords additional evidence that the inner ear operates on the resonance principle of Helmholtz. Several improvements have been made in the measurement of eye movements in reading, e.g., in the one technique of recording electrical potentials from the steady polarity of the eye ball by means of electrodes placed on the skin around the eye. In another device an ordinary motion picture camera photographs a mirror image of the eye positions together with a portion of the reading material as a reference point. This permits a study of the reader at home as he examines advertisements in a magazine. Such pre-testing of the effectiveness of advertising copy would obviously be of great commercial importance if it is found to be predictive of sales responses.

Studies of the affective processes, feelings, emotions, etc., have trended away from the original development of omnibus 'personality' scales and are now becoming more specialized in their emphases. Measurements of vocational interests have shown small differences between closely related professions and larger differences between other groups of professions. Evidence is accumulating that such interests and attitudes are of the same order of importance as aptitudes or abilities in determining an individual's social and vocational achievements.

Experimental Neurosis.

Experimentalists are now devoting a great deal of attention to the various types of behavior mechanisms exhibited by persons and animals placed in a difficult and frustrating situation. Such terms as compensation, rationalization, aggression, regression and phantasy, once thought of as vagaries of the Freudian psychology, are now finding verification by experimental psychologists. Such mechanisms when carried to extreme constitute the symptoms of neuroses and psychoses. The development of experimental neuroses in animals is affording insight into the prevention and treatment of human disorders.

Similar treatments are used for both animals and humans, e.g., rest, including removal from the irritating situation, the use of sedatives, and the building up of many simple habits (similar to the treatment of dementia praecox by occupational therapy of human patients). The use of insulin, metrazol and other drugs to produce convulsions in psychotic patients is being verified and analyzed to determine the degree of permanence found in the early successful treatments. These 'shock therapies' show no single set of physiological changes in common but do overlap in the common psychological factor of a strong shock as a preparation for readjustment. In dementia praecox the patients have to be forced to make some attempted adjustment with the outside world, and the shocks keep them trying until they hit upon some adjustment which is effective.

The objective psychological studies on sex and marital relations are beginning to offer a sound basis for instruction in school and for re-education of persons having strong emotion conflicts from this source, and may eventually have great importance in prevention of mental disorders.

Experiments in Intelligence.

In the field of higher processes, three types of studies predominate. Mathematical 'factor analyses' of the interrelations of human abilities are being extended from the intellectual processes to all other fields. The Iowa studies on superior or very inferior environments tend to confirm the general principle that such environmental factors may markedly affect a person's score on general intelligence tests. In studies of children under three years of age it is not yet certain that the tests employed measure the same type of function as at older ages, but in some of the studies the individuals were traced to maturity thus overcoming this objection. Experiments on the effectiveness of group discussions in influencing social attitudes are bringing to light the various factors which facilitate or inhibit the success of this type of reasoning, a contribution to the psychology of reasoning and to the social psychology of democratic action.

Experimental analyses of individual differences in manual skills and mechanical abilities indicate that these abilities are so highly specific that it would be extremely difficult to construct useful tests for the selection of manual workers. The same is true for selection of automobile drivers, and in both cases careful methods of training in effective work methods seem to be far more important than the use of simple aptitude tests.

Learning.

Although the topic of learning is perhaps the largest in the entire field of psychology, no striking developments have appeared during the year. The previously divergent types of learning theories, conditioned responses, trial and error, and insight are being further integrated into a single general set of principles. Whether or not such a single basis of learning can be derived from the traditional laboratory experiments on animal and human conditioned responses, maze learning, and rote learning of nonsense syllables is yet to be determined. Human learning of complex verbal problems outside the laboratory may be found to involve principles which are not adequately represented in the simpler experiments.

Industrial Psychology.

Industrial psychology is developing so rapidly that there is a distinct shortage of trained men and women. Personnel selection programs employing objective tests are now recognizing the necessity of considering qualitative factors as well, e.g., referring several tested applicants to a supervisor, who is allowed to select the one with whom he can work the best. In many cases adequate training programs have not yet been designed to follow up the selection measures. Customer research surveys of prospective consumer wants, preferences in design, and habits of responding to advertising and selling programs are at present both the largest and the fastest growing activities of industrial psychology.

Social Psychology.

After a long preoccupation with pure science and laboratory research psychologists have recently recognized their neglect of the vital problems of social psychology which now confront us in economic cycles, industrial strife, and international complications. Recent attempts to extend and adapt scientific methods to the study of social problems include the following types of studies: analyses of propaganda, the effects of stereotype terms such as 'communist' to produce an unreasoned emotional attitude toward another movement; the examination of various forms of government as to their assumptions regarding the nature of individual differences among its citizens and their motivation for cooperating and in respect for law; and the qualitative and statistical factors underlying conformity to social regulations. Recent developments in surveying public opinion have attracted so much interest from the general public and from governmental officers that the techniques are now being extended to various specialized areas of the United States and to England.

The inadequacy of present legislative, diplomatic and military methods of dealing with the present grave national and international problems affords a great opportunity for social psychology and related social sciences to demonstrate the feasibility of scientific approaches to some of these problems.

1938: Psychology

Progress and Trends.

Progress in psychology during the past year has been steady in nearly every line, but represents the extension and consolidation of earlier lines of work rather than any startlingly new ideas. Experimentation remains the dominant interest, but the long neglected theoretical integration of research findings is beginning to recover its rightful emphasis.

The present trends in psychological theory are strongly toward eclecticism. The various viewpoints, such as behaviorism, which seemed so divergent a decade ago have now converged so much as to seem largely a matter of emphasis on special fields of interest, with all of the viewpoints necessary to provide a complete coverage of psychology. Although psychologists are now finding themselves more and more in agreement on major principles, the vast number of new developments and the difficulties of keeping up with the ever broadening literature are forcing a higher degree of specialization of interests. The question has now been raised as to whether or not psychology may not eventually split up into two or more fields, perhaps clustering around the biological and social interests respectively.

Qualitative Interests.

One general trend which is coming to the fore is the interest in the qualitative study of intermediate processes between the stimulus and the final overt response. In this trend the psychological emphasis is upon patterns of action, including sets, attitudes, work methods and adjustment mechanisms, the question of how a person responds to a situation. The physiological counterpart of this interest is the study of the electrical brain waves and muscular action currents which are now accessible to study by newly devised radio amplifying systems.

Still another qualitative interest is a continued development of gestalt psychology which is called topological psychology, or the non-metric analysis of the forces operating on an individual so as to predict the type of behavior which he will exhibit in this specific instance. While a great deal of interest has arisen concerning the new trend from group statistics to the study of individual cases, it is not at all certain that the particular theories and terminology may not be equally well described in older and better known terms.

A very curious trend of the purposive gestalt psychology is its increasing resemblance to the ultra-mechanistic theories of tropisms advanced by the physiologist Loeb many years ago, and which has long been considered to be an opposing point of view. The emphasis upon the dynamic nature of behavior is now widely accepted by practically all points of view, though its details of theory remain vague, and experimental evidence is therefore difficult to evaluate. In a further development of gestalt psychology the original emphasis upon the unitary nature (gestalt quality) of mental and overt acts has been carried even further by another school. The late William Stern, in his personalistic psychology, has criticized the application of gestalt concepts to separate acts as being atomistic, and maintains that the whole person is the fundamental gestalt figure.

Studies of Sensory and Affective Processes.

Investigations in the sensory processes continue to emphasize the importance of audition, with several notable researches and symposia by both psychologists and physiologists, together with two major books on hearing and the psychology of music. Studies on vision have recently emphasized the gestalt phenomena of size constancy in the perception of figures at varying distances.

Affective or feeling processes have been clarified by the recent publication of several major books in the field, emphasizing both the physiological bases of emotions and the qualitative nature of emotional adjustment mechanisms.

Effects of Environment.

Probably the most striking announcements of the year have concerned the very marked effects of environment upon the intelligence quotient or other intelligence test scores. Cumulative evidence from the study of numerous individuals from pre-school age through to college has indicated a far greater modifiability of intelligence test scores than has previously been suspected. Investigations by Iowa psychologists have shown marked increases in test scores and ranks as a result of long-continued contact with superior environment, facts which no control experiments so far devised have been able to explain away. Children of inferior parents adopted into superior foster homes at an early age show similar large improvements in measured intelligence, while orphan children living in a state institution with deficient educational stimulation declined markedly after several years until adequate education facilities were provided.

Factorial Analyses.

Recently-developed statistical methods of factor analysis indicate that the abilities measured by general intelligence tests are really over-lapping groups of abilities rather than one general ability. Qualitative studies are now under way to analyze the psychological nature of problem solving and reasoning which, although among the oldest of psychological topics, have been somewhat dormant during recent behavioristic developments.

Factor analysis is also being applied to the newer field of individual differences in manual and bodily skills. Preliminary findings indicate that differences in gross athletic skills rest partly upon differences in specialized anatomical development; but in other cases, and especially in finer manual skills, the relationship between skills rests more upon similarities in types of action, a functional rather than an anatomical basis.

Personality.

The field of personality finds several new books which help to integrate and reinterpret the scattered research upon this topic, but the field needs still further integration with the discussion of the various separate activities of the individual, which now receive most of the space in psychological texts. One evidence of the increased recognition accorded to personality is the appearance of the new type of 'student centered' as opposed to 'science centered' older texts. The newer student-centering emphasis includes a much more extensive treatment of personality and individual differences than was formerly found in general texts.

In keeping with the findings upon the modifiability of intelligence test scores, workers in vocational guidance are coming to regard individual aptitudes in the special fields as also modifiable, a trend away from the extreme hereditarian emphasis. Vocational guidance is receiving a rapidly increasing amount of attention in schools, but still awaits a very extensive reexamination and further research before it can begin to fulfill its promise.

The use of various paper and pencil 'personality inventories,' 'attitude scales' and other trait measures has disclosed the necessity for a much more careful type of validation of such measurements, by comparison with the results of carefully worked out clinical case histories. Objective test scores themselves are sometimes found to represent only 'what the person says about it' rather than 'what they do about it,' a distinct though not fatal limitation upon their usefulness.

Methodologies.

Methodologies as such are receiving more intensive study as it becomes necessary to check and refine details in nearly every field. In addition to the qualitative methods, electrical techniques, and factorial analyses already mentioned, the methods of sample surveys stand out as a contribution of applied psychology and commerce. Great improvements have been made in the accuracy of 'straw votes' or public opinion and in market research on prospective consumer needs and wants.

Social Experimentation.

The social experiments initiated by the Federal Government are of the greatest interest, though often lacking in definite significance because of the lack of controls and the neglect of refinements which could only be made possible by preliminary experimentation on a smaller scale. Miniature experiments on small groups, concerning social relationships of the democratic and autocratic types have been introduced with promising results in topological psychology. These may point the way to similar developments of great social importance in planning or evaluating new social developments.

Abnormal Psychology.

In abnormal psychology the progress in the treatment of the severe mental disorder, dementia praecox, continues along medical lines of 'shock therapy,' involving the repeated use of strong doses of drugs to produce coma or convulsions and thereby force the patient back into more normal contact with his environment. The fundamental nature of the recovery process is still uncertain, as is also the permanence of the recoveries, but the percentage of successful cases is so striking in contrast with previous lack of success as to be very encouraging. Further important developments should be forthcoming on this tropic in the next few years, particularly in finding modifications of the treatment which can attain the same results with less severe means.

Educational Psychology.

In educational psychology the various theories of learning, both purposive and mechanistic, seem to be fitting into a larger eclectic theory which combines the principal features of both approaches in a single description. With the current developments in the progressive education movement, educational psychology merges into social psychology with strong emphasis on the study of socialized living and current social issues.

Applied Psychology.

Applied psychology in general has progressed significantly in the formation of a new professional association which is setting up standards of practice similar to those of the older professions. Such an association may also speed up progress in many other ways so as to make the services of applied psychologists much more widely available to the public. Cooperation with workers in related sciences and business is now very common and effective. Likewise, applied scientists have in many cases developed their work to the point where they may contribute significant findings and evaluations to pure science as well as to the arts and industry.