Psychology (Functional Area: History and Theory)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10315/27610

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 28

Open Access
A History of Psychological Boredom: The Utility of Boredom in the Practice of Psychological Science
(2022-03-03) Berman, David Elliott; Pettit, Michael
The 100-year plus history of psychologists attempting to establish boredom as a quantifiable construct provides insight into the problems associated with how psychology adopts its subject matter. By borrowing terms from the public and assuming they represent universal aspects of human nature, the discipline has spurred critical inquiry regarding the practices hidden assumptions and theory. In particular, boredom, with its associations with both existential and trivial concerns, exposes the limitations of the practice of scientific psychology and reflects the disciplines own conflicted identity. In order to facilitate an examination of these theoretical issues, this historical examination focuses on the failed attempts by 1970s personality psychology and 1990s positive psychology to domesticate the concept. With the inclusion of the publics boredom discourse during these decades, the cultural influence on these disciplines theorizing is excavated. These influences complicate attempts by psychologists to practice as a science and provide a reason to take pause amid repeated calls to unify the discipline.
Open Access
Building a "Cross-Roads Discipline" at McGill University: A History of Early Experimental Psychology in Postwar Canada
(2020-11-13) Oosenbrug, Eric; Pettit, Michael
This dissertation presents an account of the development of psychology at McGill University from the late nineteenth century through to the early 1960s. The department of psychology at McGill represents an alternative to the traditional American-centered narrative of the cognitive revolution and later emergence of the neurosciences. In the years following World War II, a series of psychological experiments established McGill as among the foremost departments of psychology in North America. This thesis is an institutional history that reconstructs the origins, evolution, and dramatic rise of McGill as a major center for psychological research. The experiments conducted in the early 1950s, in the areas of sensory restriction, motivation, and pain psychology, were transformative in their scope and reach. Central to this story is Donald O. Hebb, author of The Organization of Behavior (1949), who arrived at McGill in 1947 to find the charred remains of a department. I argue that the kind of psychology Hebb established at McGill was different from most departments in North America; this is developed through a number of interwoven storylines focused on the understanding of a particular character of McGill psychology - a distinctive psychological style - and its broader historical importance for Canadian psychology, for North American psychology, and for psychology across the globe. This psychological style was an amalgam, embracing both the experimentalism associated with behaviorists and attention to subjective and emotional states associated with psychoanalytic and Gestalt theory. It contributed to the development of cognitive (neuro)psychology, but through avenues that lay somewhat outside the main scientific developments commonly noted in existing historical studies, which tend to neglect the role of emotion and embodied experience. This dissertation provides an account of the complex interplay of factors that affected the trajectory of psychology at McGill with attention to key individuals, department structures, and priorities; it examines how research institutions in Canada were built after the war; how various tensions and relationships shaped these early projects; and investigates the development of key concepts, theoretical views, research practices, and commitment to interdisciplinarity.
Open Access
Constructive History: From the Standard Theory of Stages to Piaget's New Theory
(2016-11-25) Burman, Jeremy Trevelyan; Green, Christopher
This project demonstrates how Historians of Psychology can contribute to the future of Psychology from within the Department of Psychology (rather than from departments of History, the History and Philosophy of Science, or Science and Technology Studies). To do this, I focus on the claim that Jean Piagets last works constitute a new theory, while also showing how this labelling was appropriate. This is discussed briefly in the introduction. The first chapter is also quite simple: it follows the turn toward locality, and uses autobiography to show why a psychologist might want to pursue advanced training in history. This approach is then reflected in the second chapter, where Piagets autobiography is used to situate what followed in his own studies. The third chapter reflects this at an again-higher level, comparing an American history of Piagets biography with a Genevan history (but augmented with new archival research). In addition to revealing new details about his life, this also highlights a difference in historiographical sensibilities at work in shaping the discipline. The fourth chapter then shows that this generalizes. It reviews the most famous case of an instance where a series of texts were indigenized during their importation into American Psychology (viz. Titcheners importation of Wundt). To confirm that the same thing occurred with Piaget, I introduce a new technique inspired by the Digital Humanities. In short: I show in quantitative terms acceptable to Psychologists what Historians would be more inclined accept from a study of primary sources. Two examples of this more-traditional kind of history are then presented. In chapter five, I consider a change in Piagets appeals to a formalism associated with Kurt Gdel. In chapter six, I look at how this change informed Piagets return to biology (and his subsequent updating of the Baldwin Effect). And the conclusion re-examines the original claim in light of everything else discussed. The ultimate result, though, is not only a new way to consider Piagets standard theory of stages. I also present a new way to understand his broader view of the development of knowledge. This also in turn informs a new way of doing history, presented in the Appendix.
Open Access
Contested Spaces: Neoliberalism and Psychology in the Feminist Anti-Violence Movement in Ontario from the 1970s to Today
(2023-12-08) Salis, Desiree; Rutherford, Alexandra
This thesis examines how the co-evolving projects of Psychology and neoliberalism have influenced the feminist anti-violence movement since the early 1970s and attends specifically to the extent to which this movement has been depoliticized over time through the use of trauma as a concept applied to the area of domestic violence research and intervention. A critical feminist and historical lens is used to analyze Toronto Interval House and the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Homes as institutionalized sites of the feminist movement from 1973 to today. I conclude the institutionalized movement, represented through shelters and state policies, has contorted itself to meet the demands of neoliberalism in Ontario, resulting in functional rather than truly emancipatory forms of feminism enduring across the province and within the women’s shelter system. This project contributes a historical, theoretical, and critical perspective on moving forward feminist theorizing and organizing by reconceptualizing violence and trauma.
Open Access
Defying the Laws of Nature?: Menstruation and Female Intellect in Historical Perspective
(2015-01-26) Jenkins, Amanda Lauren; Rutherford, Alexandra
In 19th and early 20th century America menstruation began to be constructed as a barrier to women wishing to access higher education. Male physicians warned of the supposed dangers studying would impose upon female reproductive systems. A closer look at these perspectives are explored in greater depth through my research question “What discourses has science constructed around the relationship between menstruation and female cognitive ability from the late 1800s to today in America?” This paper explores two key figures in the battle against educating women: Edward H. Clarke (1820-1877) and G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924). Despite substantial support for Clarke and Hall’s arguments, many feminists sought to disprove their theories. Psychologist Leta Hollingworth, and physicians Clelia Mosher and Mary Putnam Jacobi were forerunners in these arguments. A look at how and why menstrual invalidism has persevered from 19th century to today will be explored through Nancy Tuana’s epistemology of ignorance framework.
Open Access
Developing a Theory of Subjectivity for Video Gaming
(2020-11-13) Miller, Tony; Teo, Thomas
Video game studies in mainstream psychology are often limited to investigating the positive and negative effects of playing on mental health. These studies adhere to a reductionist perspective trying to make a direct link between violence, depression, or anxiety and playing video games. I argue that to fully understand the subjective experience of video gaming, there is a need to develop a theory of subjectivity that can explain why and how immersion happens in the experience of playing video games. To develop this theory, I compare the experience of playing video games to the experience of watching a movie and then, based on preexisting subjectivity theories in cinema, I try to develop a similar theory for gaming experience. Based on the empirical data collected from interviewing gamers and my theoretical insights, I provide a theory of subjectivity which explains the subjective experience of playing video games.
Open Access
From Psychologism to Psychologization: Beyond the Boundaries of the Discipline and Practice of Psychology
(2017-07-27) Mulvale, Susannah Ellen; Rutherford, Alexandra; Teo, Thomas
This thesis provides a descriptive account of three waves of critiques of psychologism and psychologization that appeared throughout the 20th century from philosophers and sociologists. I examine these arguments chronologically to show that psychology has repeatedly been criticized for going beyond its disciplinary boundaries and permeating other academic and cultural realms. Although the critiques focus on different forms of psychologism and psychologization, they all demonstrate how psychological approaches to subjectivity have precluded important knowledge about human mental life that can be gained from philosophy and sociology. By incorporating philosophical and sociological findings into psychological thinking, a more holistic understanding of human mental life can be achieved. Philosophers and sociologists illuminate the systemic roots of individual problems by focusing on the relation between individuals and social structures, and they encourage the development of critical thinking and political engagement as a means to achieving the psychological aim of mental well-being.
Open Access
Growing Psychology at Home: Reflections on Indigenous Psychology
(2023-03-28) Afsin, Bilal; Teo, Thomas
This dissertation reflects on the indigenous Psychology movement, which emerged in reaction to the international spread of American Psychology after the Second World War, but whose literature began to expand from 1990 notably and has continued to do so to the present. These reflections adopt an analytical framework following the stages of critique, reconstruction, and creation. In the first, different definitions and meanings of indigenous Psychology and distinctions among its cognate terms (indigenized, indigenizing, and indigenization) are critiqued and reconstructed. Starting from the generic definition of indigenous Psychology as Psychology specific to a particular culture, the relationship between the notions of psychology and culture are discussed. Because the most fundamental critique levelled by indigenous psychologists at the current discipline of Psychology is at the individualistic framework it employs and depends on, individualism is conceptually analyzed by dividing it into its various components. Following from each critique exposing confusions in basic concepts such as indigeneity, culture and individualism, the dissertation proceeds in the second stage to reconstruct these to a certain extent by proposing some clarifying analytical distinctions. Finally, in the last stage, the dissertation aims to put the notion of indigenous Psychology on a more concrete case-specific basis by pointing to the lack of indigenization of Psychology in Türkiye and concludes by proposing an undergraduate course syllabus on the historical development of Psychology in Türkiye.
Open Access
The Impact of Income Inequality of Psychosocial Well-Being
(2014-07-09) Sheivari, Raha; Teo, Thomas
In this thesis, I investigated the impact of income inequality on psychosocial well-being. I argued that income inequality is an important problem for psychology, because it is a powerful social determinant of wide range of psychosocial problems that impact well-being negatively. Income inequality is related to problems such as mental illness, obesity, teenage pregnancy, violence, and premature mortality. I analyzed the two major theoretical frameworks for explaining the relation between income inequality and psychosocial well-being: the psychosocial environment explanation and the neo-material explanation. I argued that both of these explanatory frameworks are important for psychology. Furthermore, I discussed the methodological criticisms of the relation between income inequality and psychosocial well-being. Finally, I explored the possibilities for interventions on behalf of psychologists regarding the issue of income inequality. I emphasized the importance of conceptualizing income inequality as a structural problem and argued that improving psychosocial well-being of populations requires a systemic intervention that is focused on reducing the income gaps.
Open Access
Internalization and Resistance of the Business Self in Activist Performing Artists: A Critical Arts-Informed Research Project
(2022-03-03) Ruderman, Michael David; Hynie, Michaela
Neoliberalism has been tied to the creation of the "business self" and other flattening subjectivities that inhibit critical thought. Art has the potential to challenge this cultural disimagination through radical imaginaries and societal critique. However, explorations of neoliberal subjectivity among artists raises doubts about its potential for resistance. There is little subjectivity research, though, with those from whom artistic resistance is most likely to emerge: activist artists. The present study uses a critical, arts-informed approach to explore how the neoliberal self is internalized and/or resisted by activist performing artists in Ontario. Interviews, a focus group, and collaborative workshops were employed with four activist artists. A thematic analysis identified nine themes. Findings indicate little internalization of the business self. Rather, the results gesture towards a model of activist artist as care worker. Such a model reframes our understanding of activist artmaking and sheds light on strategies of subjective resistance to neoliberalism.
Open Access
The Journal of Comparative Psychology (JCP): A Network Analysis of the Status of Comparative Psychology
(2014-07-09) Lahham, Daniel Elias; Green, Christopher Darren
Abstract Comparative psychology‟s relationship to various other sub-disciplines and scientific “movements” has been discussed by many scholars throughout its history. The majority of these analyses took the form of frequency counts of the different subject species used within scientific periodicals (Schneirla, 1946; Beach, 1950; Dukes, 1960; Lockard, 1971) and presented similar conclusions: rats were the most commonly researched organism and the study of learning was the key to understanding behavior. The most popular of these critiques was Frank Ambrose Beach‟s “The Snark was a Boojum” (1950). Beach argued that comparative psychology, with the advent of behaviorism, slowly became a discipline focused only on rat learning in mazes. Donald Dewsbury (1984) responded to these discussions claiming that frequency counts alone could not depict the success and failures of the comparative discipline. Instead, he argued that comparative psychology maintained a historically continuous tradition of excellence off the efforts of a small group of prominent comparative psychologists. In this study, I attempted to “bridge” the gap between these two competing views of the comparative discipline in order to view the legitimacy of both claims. Using network analysis, a tool common to digital history, I investigated metadata (organism studied, scientist, institution) from the Journal of Comparative Psychology during the period of 1911 to 1950. I found that both arguments were partially correct in their assertions. Comparative research was being conducted by a small group of prominent scientists throughout the entire four-decade period on many more species other than the rat; however, the broader comparative discipline was heavily impacted by the influx of research on learning in rats. In both cases, the authors inadvertently focused solely on their own claims, and failed to recognize the validity of the other.
Open Access
Listening for a leak: Students story their experiences in undergraduate psychology
(2023-12-08) Martin, Katia Zoe; Rutherford, Alexandra
There are cracks in academic Psychology’s pipeline: What starts out as a diverse stream of incoming students ends in a homogeneous trickle. We know racism and androcentrism contribute to the leakage, but we need to listen to students’ personal experiences to get a fuller picture. I conducted open-ended narrative interviews with nine undergraduate Psychology students at York University, and found consistent ambivalence and alienation. These seemed difficult to reconcile; participants seemed constrained by the ways of thinking trained into them by academic Psychology. A collaborative zine-making workshop made space for other modes of thinking: students hand-made an art book (zine) together, critically exploring their experiences. The zine reflects the complex conversations and tinkering that helped create it, contributing to a picture of how we might confront the cracks in Psychology education if we want the field to welcome in those it has tended to push out.
Open Access
Magda Arnold and the Human Person: A Mid-Century Case Study on the Relationship Between Psychology and Religion
(2015-12-16) Rodkey, Elissa Nicole; Rutherford, Alexandra
The life of Magda Arnold (1903-2002)—best known for her pioneering appraisal theory of emotion—spanned the 20th century, and she witnessed the rise and fall of many of the major “schools” of psychology. Arnold had an unusual perspective on these theories of psychology, due in large part to an event that occurred in 1948: her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Throughout her life, but especially following her conversion, Arnold rejected reductionistic theories of the human person, instead articulating theories which emphasized human agency and telos, and which held up the human experience as the primary source of psychological knowledge. Arnold’s conversion significantly affected her career, as she made professional sacrifices to teach in Catholic institutions and was open about her religious identity in her academic work at a time when Catholic scholars were suspect. Arnold’s conversion also shaped her psychological thinking—she later credited her conversion and resulting exposure to scholastic philosophy with inspiring her appraisal theory. Arnold’s involvement in psychology (1935-1975) roughly corresponds with a period in academic psychology in which there was very minimal investigation of religious topics (1930-1976)—they were generally considered taboo or unscientific. Yet the majority of American consumers of psychology remained religious in this period, and applied and popular psychology addressed their interests. Arnold’s life contributes an important perspective on this period, highlighting how one psychologist of faith responded to the pressures of an increasingly secular psychology by rejecting the apparent conflict to affirm the fundamental compatibility of faith and science. As such Arnold’s life is a useful contribution to the growing literature on the “complexity” perspective on the relationship between science and religion (as opposed to the traditional “conflict” perspective). Arnold was also aware of her own perspective as a religious psychologist and emphasized experimenter subjectivity in her work—offering a critical perspective on psychology that anticipated modern critiques of scientific objectivity. As a result Arnold contributes to discussions of reflexivity and objectivity in psychology, by drawing on her writings about the role of basic assumptions in science, and by considering her life to see just how her personal beliefs shaped her science.
Open Access
Methodological Differences Between Psychological Fields and its Impact on Questionable Research Practices
(2020-05-11) DiGiovanni, Julian Michael; Green, Christopher Darren
A recent development in research fields, including psychology, is that several studies have called into question the replicability of findings that were thought to be well-established. This phenomenon, termed the replication crisis in psychology, is gaining acceptance as a legitimate concern. This paper explores the quality of research from three prominent psychology journals: The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, across the years 1995, 2005 and 2015. The quality of research was determined through creating individual p-distributions, similar to the methods of Masicampo & Lalande (2012). This paper uncovered that there was evidence regarding the use of questionable research practices (QRPs) since 1995. Overall, the quality of each journal's research appeared to be increasing as the years progressed.
Open Access
Mobilizing Empathy: From Einfuhlung to Homo Empathicus
(2021-07-06) Barnes, Marissa E.; Teo, Thomas
This dissertation traces the movements of empathy across and within diverse contexts. Empathy is shown to be conceptually amorphous with significant degrees of variation in its applications. With an analytic lens focused on use (conceived of as the mobilization of empathy) heterogeneous conceptions of empathy are examined, illuminating the different psychological and social realities that are created when empathy functions in different ways. This systematic reconstruction is facilitated through an analysis of empathys moral, relational, epistemic, natural, and aesthetic conceptual foundations, and its quantitative, gendered, pathological, political, educational, commodified, and professional uses. It is argued that at the core of empathy is a moral valence; specifically, that empathy is irreducibly connected to ethical questions and, thus, there is always a moral dimension inherent in its applications. Based on the reconstruction an ontology of empathy is derived that includes the individual, the other, and its moral valence. The dissertation concludes with considerations of the consequences of this ontology. Challenging empathy exclusively construed as a matter of individual intentionality, it is argued that socio-political, economic, and societal structures create, shape, and maintain much of what individuals have access to and experience empathically. For this critical understanding, the notion of empathy avoidance, arm-chair empathy, and regulated empathy, are introduced.
Open Access
Moving Instructions: A History of Sex Therapy, 1954-2001
(2023-12-08) Smolyanitsky, Hanna Lea Rebecca; Pettit, Michael
This thesis examines the sudden emergence and surprising disappearance of “sex therapy” as a distinctive intervention in the United States during the second half of twentieth century. Sex therapy is a psychologized and behavioural therapeutic intervention aimed at solving clients’ dissatisfactions with their sexual experiences. I argue that sex therapy appeared in the 1950s and 1960s out of marital therapy and the American medicalization of sex. The field experienced a quick spurt in popularity in the 1970s, and an equally rapid decline during the Reagan administration and AIDS crisis in the 1980s. By the late 1990s, its practices had largely migrated into and were usurped by couples therapy and bio-medicine. Despite this short existence as a public-facing intervention, I argue that sex therapists’ conceptions of what sex was, and what it meant to be a sexual being, were reproduced in lay Americans’ self-knowledges in the creation of a sexual subject.
Open Access
Networking Western Psychology's Elite: A Digital Analysis of "A History of Psychology in Autobiography"
(2015-08-28) Lee, Shayan Hope Anne Fox; Pettit, Michael
This thesis analyzes digital social networks for the institutional affiliations of the one hundred and twenty authors in the A History of Psychology in Autobiography (AHPA) book series. The introductory section contextualizes the analyses for the nine volumes in terms of the series’ historiographic foundations, socio-historical influences, and a history of the production of the first volume. It asserts that the series editors’ privileged disciplinary positions and the series’ unusual historiographic features render it an unusually precise internalist historical record of elite perspectives. The analytical chapter forwards the position that the AHPA networks illustrate the accuracy of Kurt Danziger’s (2006) historical premise of intellectual ‘centers’ and ‘peripheries’ in Western psychology’s disciplinary geography. The conclusion includes an assessment of the digital methods used, consideration of future directions, and a critical discussion of the AHPA series and how this thesis fits into a larger framework of ethical historiography.
Open Access
Personal Politics: The Rise of Personality Traits in the Century of Eugenics and Psychoanalysis
(2020-11-13) Davidson, Ian James; Pettit, Michael
This dissertation documents personality psychologys development alongside psychoanalysis and eugenics, offering a disciplinary and cultural history of personality across the twentieth century. Using the psychological concepts of neurosis and introversion as an organizational framework, personalitys history is portrayed as one of success: a succession of hereditarianism and its politics of normativity; a successful demarcation of the science of personality from competing forms of expertise; and a successful cleansing of personality psychologys interchanges with unethical researchers and research. Chapter 1 provides background for the dissertation, especially focusing on turn-of-the-century developments in the nascent fields of American psychology and the importation of psychoanalytic ideas. It ends with a look at Francis Galtons eugenicist and statistical contributions that carved a key path for psychological testers to discipline psychoanalytic concepts. Part I details the rise of personality testing in the USA during the interwar years, while also considering the many sexual and gender norms at play. Chapter 2 tracks the varied places in the 1920s that personality tests were developed: from wartime military camps to university laboratories to the offices of corporate advertisers. Chapter 3 takes stock of popular psychoanalytic notions of personality alongside the further psychometric development of personality testing. These developments occurred at a time when American eugenicistsincluding psychologistswere transitioning to a positive form that emphasized marriage and mothering. Part II partially strays from a strict chronicling of the Big Twos development into traitsneuroticism and extraversionto consider the broader histories of personality in the Cold War era and beyond. Chapter 4 considers the opposing legacies of Hans Eysenck and Paul Meehl to explore the development of psychometric tools that countered popular projective techniques. Additionally, it examines the multifarious connections between psychoanalysis and psychologists striving for a science of personality. Chapter 5 closes the dissertation with a look at the psychometric work that led to the Five-Factor Models ascent in the 1990s as perhaps the most widely accepted perspective on personality. Along the way, the conservative politics of heredity and eugenics would capitalize on cries for the academic freedom of racist science while justifying trait psychologys past.
Open Access
A Problem of Cosmic Proportions: Floyd Henry Allport and the Concept of Collectivity in American Social Psychology
(2014-07-09) Faye, Cathy Lee; Green, Christopher Darren
Floyd Henry Allport (1890-1978) is widely regarded as a significant figure in the establishment of experimental social psychology in the United States in the early twentieth century. His famous 1924 textbook and his early experimental work helped set the stage for a social psychology characterized by individualism, behaviorism, and experiment. Allport is particularly well-known for his banishment of the group concept from social psychology and his argument that the individual is the only viable, scientific object of study for the serious social psychologist. This early part of Allport’s career and the role it played in establishing American social psychology is relatively well documented. However, there is little scholarship regarding Allport’s work after the 1920s. An examination of this time period demonstrates that Allport’s earliest individualism was in fact rather short-lived, as he subjected it to serious revision in the early decades of the twentieth century. The increasing complexity of the bureaucratic structure of American society in the early 1900s, the economic collapse of the 1930s, and the onset of the Second World War were significant events in the development of Allport’s ideas regarding the individual. While his early work is marked by a concerted effort to create an ideal science for understanding the individual and the social, his later work was much more concerned with the social implications of individualism and collectivism. As the social world around him grew more complex, so too did his own social psychology, culminating in a significant change in Allport’s philosophy of science. These findings contribute to our understanding of social psychology and its history by: providing a novel view of one of social psychology’s central historical figures; demonstrating the difficult, persistent, and context-dependent nature of the individualism-collectivism divide in American social psychology; and providing a platform for thinking about the ways in which historians remember and write the stories of important figures in the field.
Open Access
Prolegomenon for a Body-Oriented Research Method in Psychology
(2019-03-05) Slyvka, Volodymyr; Teo, Thomas
Mainstream psychology adheres to a reductionist perspective on the body which is founded on a biomedical framework. In this view, the bodys functioning is investigated as merely physiological correlates of mental processes. To fully understand psychological phenomena, there is a need to address the issue of the body at all levels of the research process. The main objective of this thesis is to offer a prolegomenon for a research method in psychology which would systematically work with the bodily expression through gesture and movement for understanding psychological questions. First, I discuss historical and theoretical underpinnings of body image scholarship, nonverbal communication work, phenomenology, and feminist theory. Second, I examine the existing methods from applied fields of body psychotherapy and dance practices. Finally, I provide a possible format of the body-oriented method (BOM), including the stages of data collection, data description, data interpretation, and representation of results.