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Over the course of psychology’s first several decades, the language used to convey the subject matter gradually shifted from being free and literary to being strictly constrained and disciplined by increasingly focused theoretical demands. The project described here, “Disciplining Psychology,” aimed to depict this transformation by generating images of the faces of three highly influential psychologists—William James, Sigmund Freud, and B. F. Skinner. Each image is composed of the words used in one of each individual’s most important books. The tightening of the disciplinary vocabulary is revealed in the differences among the three arrays of words themselves, but I have also striven to reflect it in the aesthetic aspects of each image. The method used here could easily be extended to a wider array of authors, texts, and psychological topics.

The American Psychological Association (APA) began 125 years ago as a small club of a few dozen members in the parlor of its founder, G. Stanley Hall. In the decades since, it has faced many difficulties and even a few existential crises. Originally a scientific society, it spent the decades between the world wars figuring out how to accommodate the growing community of applied psychologists while still retaining and enhancing its scientific reputation. After World War II, with an expanded mandate, it developed formal training models for clinical psychologists and became an important player in legal cases pertaining to civil rights and other social justice issues. With practitioners taking an ever-greater role in the governance of the organization in the late 1970s, and the financial viability of the association in doubt in the 1980s, many psychological scientists felt the need to create a separate organization for themselves. The 1990s and early 2000s brought more challenges: declining divisional memberships; a legal dispute over fees with practitioners; and a serious upheaval over the APA Board of Directors' cooperation with governmental defense and intelligence agencies during the "war on terror." These clashes appear to have precipitated a decline in the association's membership for the first time in its history. The APA has faced many storms over its century-and-a-quarter, but has, thus far, always ultimately found a way forward for itself, for its members, and for the wider discipline of psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record

Look at any introductory psychology book that covers psychoanalysis, and you are likely to find an image of an iceberg floating in the sea. The image serves as an illustrative metaphor for Freud's theory of the mind: Only a fragment of our ideas and feelings are conscious or "visible" to us, while the vast bulk of our mental content is unconscious or "invisible" to everyday introspection. A simple Internet search of the terms "Freud iceberg" will bring forth hundreds of examples. The problem is that Freud never mentioned the iceberg in his published writings. It is a metaphor that has become ubiquitous in (English-language) writings about Freudian theory, but that does not find its source in his work. So the question is, where did it come from? Much attention has been directed to a passage in Ernest Jones's biography of Freud. Many have taken this to mean that the Freudian iceberg metaphor derives directly from Fechner. Jones encouraged this interpretation, quoting Freud on being "open to the ideas of G. T. Fechner and following that thinker upon many important points." The iceberg metaphor of mind has another source with a solid connection to Freud: Granville Stanley Hall. Hall was one of the founders of American psychology. The mystery of the Freudian iceberg is not completely resolved, but we have made considerable progress. The mystery that remains is why Hall believed the metaphor's origin to lay somewhere in Fechner's writings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Traditionally, American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century has been framed as a competition among a number of "schools": structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, etc. But this is only one way in which the "structure" of the discipline can be conceived. Most psychologists did not belong to a particular school, but they still worked within loose intellectual communities, and so their work was part of an implicit psychological "genre," if not a formalized "school." In this study, we began the process of discovering the underlying genres of American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century by taking the complete corpus of articles from the journal Psychological Review during the first decade of its publication and conducting a statistical analysis of the vocabularies they employed to see what clusters of articles naturally emerged. Although the traditional functionalist school was among the clusters we found, we also found distinct research traditions around the topics of color vision, spatial vision, philosophy/metatheory, and emotion. In addition, momentary clusters corresponding to important debates (e.g., the variability hypothesis) appeared during certain years, but not others.

Self-regulation is of interest both to psychologists and to teachers. But what the word means is unclear. To define it precisely, two studies examined the American Psychological Association's system of controlled vocabulary—specifically, the 447 associated terms it presents—and used techniques from the Digital Humanities to identify 88 closely related concepts and six broad conceptual clusters. The resulting analyses show how similar ideas are interrelated: self-control, self-management, self-observation, learning, social behavior, and the personality constructs related to self-monitoring. A full-color network map locates these concepts and clusters relative to each other. It also highlights some of the interests of different audiences, which can be described heuristically using two axes that have been labeled abstract versus practical and self-oriented versus other-oriented.

This study continues a previous investigation of the intellectual structure of early American psychology by presenting and analyzing 3 networks that collectively include every substantive article published in Psychological Review during the 15-year period from 1909 to 1923. The networks were laid out such that articles (represented by the network's nodes) that possessed strongly correlated vocabularies were positioned closer to each other spatially than articles with weakly correlated vocabularies. We identified distinct research communities within the networks by locating and interpreting the clusters of lexically similar articles. We found that the Psychological Review was in some turmoil during this period compared with its first 15 years attributable, first, to Baldwin's unexpected departure in 1910; second, to the pressures placed on the discipline by United States entry into World War I; and, third, to the emergence of specialty psychology journals catering to research communities that had once published in the Review. The journal emerged from these challenges, however, with a better-defined mission: to serve as the chief repository of theoretical psychology in the United States.

In the 1830s, Charles Babbage worked on a mechanical computer he dubbed the Analytical Engine. Although some people around Babbage described his invention as though it had authentic mental powers, Babbage refrained from making such claims. He does not, however, seem to have discouraged those he worked with from mooting the idea publicly. This article investigates whether (1) the Analytical Engine was the focus of a covert research program into the mechanism of mentality; (2) Babbage opposed the idea that the Analytical Engine had mental powers but allowed his colleagues to speculate as they saw fit; or (3) Babbage believed such claims to be fanciful, but cleverly used the publicity they engendered to draw public and political attention to his project.

In 1889, George Paxton Young, the University of Toronto's philosophy professor, passed away suddenly while in the midst of a public debate over the merits of hiring Canadians in preference to American and British applicants for faculty positions. As a result, the process of replacing Young turned into a continuation of that argument, becoming quite vociferous and involving the popular press and the Ontario government. This article examines the intellectual, political, and personal dynamics at work in the battle over Young's replacement and its eventual resolution. The outcome would have an impact on both the Canadian intellectual scene and the development of experimental psychology in North America.

This study investigated the intellectual structure of early American psychology by generating 3 networks that collectively included every substantive article published in Psychological Review during the 15-year period from the journal's start in 1894 until 1908. The networks were laid out so that articles with strongly correlated vocabularies were positioned close to each other spatially. Then, we identified distinct research communities by locating and interpreting article clusters within the networks. We found that, from the first 5-year time block to the second, psychological specialties rapidly differentiated themselves from each other. Between the second and third 5-year time blocks, however, the number of specialties shrunk. We discuss the degree to which this shift may have been attributable either to a change in the journal's editorship in 1904, or to a broader crisis of confidence, beginning that same year, in the use of "consciousness" as the discipline's defining concept.

Straight-line depreciation (SL) appears to be a crude procedure that is unsupported by economic logic. Nevertheless, internationally, it is the most widely used method of allocating the costs of fixed assets to accounting periods by way of depreciation charges. Many authors attribute its use to its simplicity. That justification may be deemed to be insufficient, since ideally SL should provide accounting figures with economic meaning under known assumptions. Such meaning might be defined by reference to the net present value (NPV) calculus, which is recommended in the literature of financial management for the evaluation of economic flows associated with the acquisition of fixed assets. After briefly considering economic depreciation alternatives discussed in the literature, this article selects the Ladelle/Brief/Grinyer Earned Economic Income (EEI) calculus as a theoretical model for the examination of SL depreciation. EEI provides signals which are consistent with those given by NPV and can satisfy the accounting constraint that one should recognize realised profits only. The article employs mathematics and deterministic computer simulation to explore some circumstances in which SL provides figures which approximate to the net investment charges using the EEI calculus. It shows that there are many patterns of declining annual benefits from ownership for which SL provides an approximation to EEI net charges that could be considered to be adequate. Consequently SL often provides more economically interpretable information, and consequently is more defensible, than is typically assumed in the literature relating to accounting.

George Lakoff's (1987) work has been a major force in the recent effort to redefine the study of concept formation, semantics, metaphor, and ultimately all of scientific psychology. In place of the traditional objectivist account of these domains, Lakoff offered experientialism, a position that has become increasingly popular in a wide array of psychological subspecialties over the last several years. We believe that Lakoff's account of the relation between experientialism and objectivism is fundamentally flawed. The primary sources of the problem are an equivocation in his account of objectivism and a misunderstanding of the relation between classification schemes and truth. Moreover, we argue that a suitably sophisticated form of objectivism can subsume experience under its aegis (and that psychology might be impossible otherwise). In any case, we try to show that the alternative account of semantics he provided fails because it falls prey to precisely the same criticism he considered crucial to the ref...

A routine approach to inferring functions for a gene set is by using function enrichment analysis based on GO, KEGG or other curated terms and pathways. However, such analysis requires the existence of overlapping genes between the query gene set and those annotated by GO/KEGG. Furthermore, GO/KEGG databases only maintain a very restricted vocabulary. Here, we have developed a tool called “CoCiter” based on literature co-citations to address the limitations in conventional function enrichment analysis. Co-citation analysis is widely used in ranking articles and predicting protein-protein interactions (PPIs). Our algorithm can further assess the co-citation significance of a gene set with any other user-defined gene sets, or with free terms. We show that compared with the traditional approaches, CoCiter is a more accurate and flexible function enrichment analysis method. CoCiter is freely available at www.picb.ac.cn/hanlab/cociter/.

The “Baldwin Effect,” named after the turn-of-the-twentieth-century American psychologist James Mark Baldwin, has experienced a revival over the last few decades, driven primarily by some cognitive scientists who think it might be able to solve problems related to the evolution of consciousness. Baldwin’s own interests when he developed the theory, which he called “organic selection,” were somewhat different from those of modern cognitivists, and his social context was enormously different. This chapter aims to recover the social challenges of Baldwin’s time and explore how they might have been related to his proposal. Chief among these challenges was the widespread perception in the United States that the massive immigrant slums in New York and other cities posed a kind of existential threat to the American way of life. This perception, in turn, led to a number of radical and disturbing eugenic proposals for meeting the “immigrant problem.” It is suggested here that, although Baldwin did not address the immigrant issue directly, it was in his mind as he developed his theory of “organic selection,” and also that it offered a way out of the crisis that many Americans thought they then faced.

It is tempting to assume that a gradual accumulation of damage ‘causes’ an organism to age, but other biological processes present during the lifespan, whether ‘programmed’ or ‘hijacked’, could control the type and speed of aging. Theories of aging have classically focused on changes at the genomic level; however, individuals with similar genetic backgrounds can age very differently. Epigenetic modifications include DNA methylation, histone modifications and ncRNA. Environmental cues may be ‘remembered’ during lifespan through changes to the epigenome that affect the rate of aging. Changes to the epigenomic landscape are now known to associate with aging, but so far causal links to longevity are only beginning to be revealed. Nevertheless, it is becoming apparent that there is significant reciprocal regulation occurring between the epigenomic levels. Future work utilizing new technologies and techniques should build a clearer picture of the link between epigenomic changes and aging.

It is widely held that the methods of AI are the appropriate methods for cognitive science. Fodor, however, has argued that AI bears the same relation to psychology as Disneyland does to physics. This claim is examined in light of the widespread but paradoxical acceptance of the Turing Test—a behavioural criterion of intelligence—among advocates of cognitivism. It is argued that, given the recalcitrance of certain deep conceptual problems in psychology, and disagreements concerning psychology's basic vocabulary, it is unlikely that AI will prove to be very psychologically enlightening until some consensus on ontological issues in psychology is achieved.

Identifying drug-drug interactions (DDIs) is a major challenge in drug development. Previous attempts have established formal approaches for pharmacokinetic (PK) DDIs, but there is not a feasible solution for pharmacodynamic (PD) DDIs because the endpoint is often a serious adverse event rather than a measurable change in drug concentration. Here, we developed a metric “S-score” that measures the strength of network connection between drug targets to predict PD DDIs. Utilizing known PD DDIs as golden standard positives (GSPs), we observed a significant correlation between S-score and the likelihood a PD DDI occurs. Our prediction was robust and surpassed existing methods as validated by two independent GSPs. Analysis of clinical side effect data suggested that the drugs having predicted DDIs have similar side effects. We further incorporated this clinical side effects evidence with S-score to increase the prediction specificity and sensitivity through a Bayesian probabilistic model. We have predicted 9,626 potential PD DDIs at the accuracy of 82% and the recall of 62%. Importantly, our algorithm provided opportunities for better understanding the potential molecular mechanisms or physiological effects underlying DDIs, as illustrated by the case studies., Author Summary Drug-drug interaction (DDI) is an important problem in clinical practice. In this study, we developed a novel algorithm for systematically predicting pharmacodynamic (PD) DDIs through protein-protein-interaction (PPI) networks. We calculated a score to predict potential PD DDIs by integrating the information from drug-target associations, PPI network topology and cross-tissue gene expression correlations. The scoring system was validated by known PD DDIs and agreed with similarities in drug clinical side effects, which we further integrated to increase the prediction performance. Our approach not only outperformed previously published methods in predicting DDIs, but also provided opportunities for better understanding the potential molecular mechanisms or physiological consequences underlying DDIs.

Since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, scholars have argued about whether the golden section—a number approximately equal to 0.618—holds the key to the secret of beauty. Empirical investigations of the aesthetic properties of the golden section date back to the very origins of scientific psychology itself, the first studies being conducted by Fechner in the 1860s. In this paper historical and contemporary issues are reviewed with regard to the alleged aesthetic properties of the golden section. In the introductory section the most important mathematical occurrences of the golden section are described. As well, brief reference is made to research on natural occurrences of the golden section, and to ancient and medieval knowledge and application of the golden section, primarily in art and architecture. Two major sections then discuss and critically examine empirical studies of the putative aesthetic properties of the golden section dating from the mid-19th century up to the 1950s, and the empirical work of the last three decades, respectively. It is concluded that there seems to be, in fact, real psychological effects associated with the golden section, but that they are relatively sensitive to careless methodological practices.

In that metaphor is made up of ideas and their expression, not just language, it may occur in pictures, not just in verbal representation. Pictorial metaphors for action in line drawings frequently involve events depicted in ways that violate a standard usage of outline and show the course of the action aptly. Metaphoric line pictures may include attempts to depict mental states, such as kinds of perception. Metaphoric pictures depicting perceptual states may be apt, rather than just conventional. That is, they may meet with wide acceptance and agreement on their significance from naive observers, including people who are blind and, therefore, unfamiliar with pictures but have been given the pictures in a raised form.

Geometrical illusions are displays that give false impressions that observers take to be accurate. They have traditionally been cited as evidence against the naive realist claim that people see the world as it "really" is. Such illusions, however, often depend on their being viewed from a single vantage point (Kennedy & Portal, 1990). In Gibsonian terms, they depend on the availability of impoverished information. In this study, spatial transformations were applied to line-length (Sander parallelogram) and area (Jastrow curves) illusions to provide information to observers about veridical size. In particular, the reversal of certain parts of the displays resulted in informative invariants that specified the veridical nature of the parts. Most observers were able to use the information. In this article we consider the status of geometrical illusions and possible informative perceptual transformations vis-a-vis problems of knowledge. We show how information for veridical size arises via the movement of parts of illusions, even though the illusory impressions are not dispelled. Geometrical illusions are usually flat displays of lines or black-and-white regions in which observers perceive length, shape, or area incorrectly. Popular examples such as the Miiller-Lyer, Ponzo, and Poggendorf illusions have figured prominently in t he philosophical discussion of the nature of knowledge for more than 100 years. These illusions are said to present problems for the naive realist, who argues that people perceive exactly and only what is there in the world. They are also said to provide support for the skeptic, who counters that there are many instances in which people know that their senses deceive them and that they therefore have no way of knowing when or if they can trust their senses. This critique has traditionally been called the argument from illusion.

It is practically an article of faith in psychology that in order to do empirical research one must first operationally define one's variables. However, the `operational attitude', first advocated by the physicist Percy Bridgman in the 1920s, has since been rejected by virtually every serious philosopher of science as unworkable. Furthermore, `operationism'-as developed by psychologists in the 1930s and 1940s-was based on a misunderstanding of Bridgman's intent from the outset. Nevertheless, contemporary textbooks continue to extol the virtues of operational definitions and today's psychology students are still required to learn the strategy. This paper discusses the historical background of operationism, its transmission from physics to psychology and the reasons for its continued tenacity in the face of repeated refutations and Bridgman's own repudiation in the 1950s.

Eugenics and Other Victorian "Secular Religions" - Raymond E. Fancher Practical Phrenology and Psychological Counseling in 19th-Century America - Michael M. Sokal Sealing Off the Discipline: Wilhelm Wundt and the Psychology of Memory - Kurt Danziger Psychology and Memory in the Midst of Change: The Social Concerns of Late-19th-Century North American Psychologists - Marlene Shore The Psychology of Mathematical Beauty in the 19th Century: The Golden Section - John S. Benjafield Cause Into Function: Ernst Mach and Reconstructuring Explanation in Psychology, 1872-1905 - Andrew S. Winston Charles Babbage, the Analytical Engine, and the Possibility of a 19th-Century Cognitive Science - Christopher D. Green Instincts and Instruments - Katharine Anderson Philosophic Doubts About Psychology as a Natural Science - Charles W. Tolman Karl Marx and Wilhelm Dllthey on the Sociohistorical Conceptualization of the Mind - Thomas Teo Early Developments and Psychology: Genetic and Embryological Influences, 1880-1992 - Fredric Weizmann

38 men and 74 women participated in a study of the relationships among neuroticism, extraversion, locus of control, and assertiveness and aggressiveness, respectively. Aggressiveness was related to extraversion and internal locus of control, while assertiveness was associated with stability as opposed to neuroticism. Sex of subject did not appear to be of importance.