Psychological Concepts

An International Historical Perspective

Kurt Pawlik, Gery d'Ydewalle

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000144444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Among the scientific advances over the last one hundred years, those in psychological science rank among the most prolific and revealing. The analyses of human intelligence and cognition, of human consciousness and self-awareness, of human memory and learning, and of human personality structure have opened up new avenues towards a deeper understanding of the human nature, the human mind, and its evolution. These new insights, whilst meeting high standards of research methodology, have also given rise to a conceptual grid which connects hitherto divergent lines of research in the human and behavioral sciences, leading up to present-day neuroscience.

The Editors, both past presidents of the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS), bring together a distinguished panel of international experts in the attempt to unravel, in a comparative cross-cultural and historical approach, changing contents and functions of psychological key concepts (such as intelligence, cognition, mind and the self). Their findings help to guide psychological theorizing, psychological experimentation and field research, and in so doing they apply behavioral science insights to the improvement of human affairs. Prepared under the aegis of the International Union of Psychological Science, the book exemplifies a concept-driven international history of psychological science.

With its team of distinguished researchers from four continents, Psychological Concepts: An International Historical Perspective outlines the history of psychology in a truly innovative way.

1 A historical and comparative study of concepts and constructs in psychology

Kurt Pawlik and Géry d’Ydewalle

The approach to the history of psychology taken by this volume differs from familiar history texts. In this chapter the rationale of this approach is explained and followed up into the design and aim of the book. As a point of start, we will first look at alternative modes of collating facts of history in psychology, their merits and their shortcomings—all the while keeping in mind Hermann Ebbinghaus’s (1885) often-quoted dictum of psychology’s “long past albeit short history still”. The latter has been borne out ever so often in the recent “boom” of history texts in psychology, several of them spurred by the celebration of centennial anniversaries of research laboratories (Hearst, 1979), of national societies of psychology (like that of the American Psychological Association in 1992, of the British Psychological Society in 2001, or of the German Society of Psychology in 2004) or simply by the ubiquitous attention to the recent “turn of the millennium” (Fuller, Walsh, & McGinley, 1997). Already, the accumulated literature on the history of psychology is far too numerous to be referenced here in detail. Instead, we will take a comparative look at alternative approaches, with reference to illustrative literature.

Styles of uncovering the history of psychology

It seems that there is more agreement among scientists on the goals in studying the history of science than among historians on those of the science of history itself:

• Is history an objective rational science, yielding results that can claim to stand, irrespective of a historian’s frame of reference? Or is history to be understood as a portrayal (a reconstruction) of selected moments in, and documents on, the past, chosen according to a historian’s strategy of search or way of interpretation?

• If so, by what criteria will such search be guided, and how is what will be worth the exercise of historical reconstruction or fact collection to be decided?

• Can we yet give a new sense, if not answer, to the Hegelian question of whether one can learn anything from history, and derive from its study transferable insights (in the sense of explanations or predictions)?

• Or can history at best furnish case studies of essentially unique circumstances, actors and events, “stories” told by the past with no lesson to be learned from them for the future?

• Is the notion of (some) empirical lawfulness in the course of history tenable at all? Is the apparent covariation (and interaction) between antecedent, concomitant, or just “collateral” events in the evolution of psychology and their consequences a distracting illusion or heuristically fruitful to guide the professional historian of psychology?

• And still more general: can psychology itself, as a science and as a profession, learn lessons from its own past and history (Pawlik, 2004)?

However tempting, for the purpose of this volume we cannot dwell on these and other fundamental questions of historical reflections in psychology; yet we should keep them in mind as proper caveat against drawing all too quick generalizations from the comparative historical essays that make up this volume. Instead, we would like to join with Edwin G. Boring, who expressed this so well in the Preface to the first edition of his classic text A history of experimental psychology:

The experimental psychologist … needs historical sophistication within his own sphere of expertness. Without such knowledge he sees the present in distorted perspective, he mistakes old facts and old views for new, and he remains unable to evaluate the significance of new movements and methods. ... A psychological sophistication that contains no component of historical orientation seems to me to be no sophistication at all.

(Boring, 1929, p. ix)

As any student of the history of psychology will soon detect, there is more than one way or one style of uncovering the discipline’s past. In fact, one can distinguish at least five approaches to the study of history of psychology, depending on whether it takes off from leading personalities (authors/researchers) and institutions, proceeds by temporal (periods in time) or regional (countries, language zones) traditions of study, or goes by schools of thought or paradigms of methodology. And, of course, there can by any number of combined approaches, Boring’s aforementioned book serving as a first and fine example (see also Boring, 1942, or the recent Illustrated history of psychology by Lück & Miller, 1999). More often, though, texts on the history of psychology seem to concentrate on one preferred mode of study as a road map guiding the search for facts and their presentation.

Organizing a history of psychology around leading personalities unfolds a scenario of authors considered influential, like Wundt, Thorndike, or Skinner in psychology proper or Sherrington and Wiener from physiology and cybernetics, respectively. The three volumes by Kimble, Wertheimer, and White (1991), Kimble, Bonneau, and Wertheimer (1996), and Kimble and Wertheimer (1998) can serve as an excellent recent example. A companion approach looks at the history of psychology through the eyes of the actors themselves, that is, through autobiographies of eminent authors. The series on the history of psychology by invited autobiographies as initiated by Murchison (1961) is the classic example, which has been taken as a model also in other language communities (e.g. Pongratz, Traxel, & Wehner, 1972). And there is a rich resource of literature of self-initiated autobiographies by leading names in psychology, beginning with Wundt’s late Erlebtes und Erkanntes (Wundt, 1920) or, more recently, with Skinner’s highly readable three-volume autobiography (Skinner, 1976, 1979, 1984). Still another variant of this type of history of psychology takes off from representative personal documents or statements reflecting the development of the discipline, like the annual addresses of successive presidents of the American Psychological Association (Hilgard, 1978) or their equivalent, for example, in the German Society of Psychology (Schneider, 2005).

Histories of psychology by institutions look into the role that a university department, a clinic or research institution has played in the history of psychology, like the precursors of present-day psychology at Harvard University, the impact (or missing or unsuccessful impact) originating from psychology in academies of science around the world or the history of international organizations in psychology (Rosenzweig, Holzman, Sabourin, & Bélanger, 2000). This approach provides valuable information on infrastructures that gave rise to the development of psychology as a discipline.

A third type of history studies the course of psychology during selected periods of time, as during political oppression in Germany by the Nazi regime (Geuter, 1985; Pawlik, 1994) or in the years of the Cultural Revolution in China (Jing, 1994), or in a certain region or language community (see for example Pawlik & Rosenzweig, 1994, or the survey by Clark, 1957, of the development of psychology in the first half of the twentieth century in the USA).

In a fourth approach, schools of thought, like associationism, behaviorism or psychoanalysis up to modern cognitivism or constructivism, are chosen as rationale for categorizing and integrating dates and dynamics in the history of psychology. The resourceful volume by Woodworth and Sheehan (1964) can serve as an early example for this approach, which has since become an organizing scheme for numerous excellent accounts of theoretical psychology and its historical roots (see, for example, Hall & Lindzey, 1970; Koch, 1959–1963; or Marx & Hillix, 1963).

In historical accounts of specific fields of psychology, like research on memory, on individual differences or psychological therapy, the preference seems to go for a fifth type of history writing in psychology: one by paradigms of theory or methodology. Thus in clinical psychology, for example, a history of psychotherapy will often be organized by reference to major therapeutic methodologies like psychoanalysis, behaviour therapy, cognitive behaviour therapy, and their later derivatives. Conversely, means and limitations of early research on head and brain injury, electro-encephalographic techniques of research, advances in the Chronometric analysis of cognitive performance, or functional magnetic resonance tomography may be paradigms of methodology highlighted in designing a history of neuropsychology.

It should go without saying, but should be stressed nonetheless, that each of these modes of studying the history of psychology is a valid one in itself, can yield salient insights into the evolution of the discipline and may provide the kind of orientation called for in the quote from Boring as to enhance “psychological sophistication”. Yet, unless special attention is paid, all five approaches can lack in one challenging aspect: theoretical and conceptual coherence. Clearly, there is significant connectivity in theory construction and concept formation across different research contexts, forming a “red thread” between laboratories and schools of thought apparently unconnected at the surface or even unnoticed by the actors in question.

Furthermore, one and the same concept term may be employed in different research traditions, thereby varying in meaning, operationalization, and theoretical context. The concept of “self” (see Chapter 15) can serve as an instructive example. And international psychology abounds with examples of supposedly equivalent concepts that differ significantly between languages and cultures in connotation and concept-building roots. Pawlik and d’Ydewalle (1996) gave the example of the Freudian German-language concept of Trieb (instinct vs. drive), and Chapter 6 unfolds the multitude of meanings of emotion. With concepts serving as building blocks in theory construction, such historical or cross-cultural divergence must be taken into account in the design and in assessing the validity of research on derivations from them.

Considerations like these gave rise to the idea of exploring the salience of an approach to the history of psychology by key concepts, taking concepts like intelligence, consciousness or mind as starting points for historical and cross-cultural comparison, thereby cutting across more familiar paths of history writing.

Concepts and constructs in psychology

According to one recent distinction in social science, the term concept would refer to “specific ideas covering crucial aspects of a narrow variety of behavior”, whereas construct would be used for “general ideas covering crucial aspects of a wide variety of behavior” (Zeller, 2005, p. 665, emphasis by the present authors). In this terminology (and without disputing for the moment its obvious vagueness), “intelligence” would constitute a construct, whereas a hypothesized ability like “perceptual speed” could qualify as a concept.

For the purpose of this volume, we used (and proposed to the contributing authors) a wider notion of concept in the sense of a core or source element of a psychological theory, like personality, motivation, or self. As salient nuclei in theory construction, such concepts will differ in meaning between rival theories and may also carry different connotations in different contexts of language and culture. Following from this delineation, conceptual units at the operational level, like behaviour or reaction or stimulus, should not fall under the purview of this project.

It is in this sense that the expression conceptual history is used for the approach followed in this volume. It entails diachronic (historical) and synchronic (cross-sectional, cross-cultural) explanation and comparison of core concepts. In this understanding, construct then refers to a conceptual variant or component of a psychological concept, typically conceived (“constructed”) out of research grounded in an articulated theory. For example, “secondary motivation” would constitute a construct in behavioral learning theory.

Clusters of ideas thereby identified as psychological concepts share a charm and risk: One makes reference to them by common-language words (see the examples given two paragraphs earlier), which can have a longstanding tradition in pre-empirical (philosophical or other) thinking about human nature. This may contribute to the appeal of psycho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables and figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 A historical and comparative study of concepts and constructs in psychology
• 2 Cognition
• 3 Consciousness: Psychological, neuroscientific, and cultural perspectives
• 4 Culture
• 5 (Individual) Development
• 6 Passion and qing: Intellectual histories of emotion, West and East
• 7 Mental imagery
• 8 Intelligence
• 9 Language
• 10 Learning and memory
• 11 Mind: Ghosts, machines, and concepts
• 12 Motivation: About the “why” and “what for” of human behavior
• 13 Perception: The pursuit of illusion
• 14 Individuality and personality
• 15 The self
• Author index
• Subject index