Psychology (Functional Area: History and Theory)

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Open Access
History Of Psychology Courses? Influence On Students? Personal Epistemologies
(2025-04-10) Motola, Samantha Tia; Teo, Thomas
This paper explored how the history of psychology course influences students’ personal epistemologies and if, and how, this alters students’ perceptions of psychological knowledge. Students’ ways of knowing, their experience in the history of psychology course, and their attitudes towards psychology were collected by open-ended interviews with students and qualitatively analyzed. The findings were largely reflected the empirical and theoretical bodies of work on personal epistemology and the history of psychology. The results suggested that a development in students’ ways of knowing and a broadening in students’ conceptualizations about psychological knowledge and institutional psychology took place following their completion of the course. The results contribute to existing personal epistemology literature which is always engaged with the role and outcome of education on students’ beliefs about knowledge. Furthermore, this research also contributed to discourse regarding the history of psychology course’s position within academic psychology, and the importance of teaching history critically.
Open Access
The Rise Of Null Hypothesis Significance Testing As The Gold Standard In Psychology, 1940-55
(2025-04-10) Arshinoff, Spencer Henry; Green, Christopher D.
In the midst of the ongoing replication crisis, it is more important than ever for psychologists to look critically at methodology. Nearly every psychologist uses null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) to analyze and draw conclusions from quantitative data, despite its imperfections and the heavy criticisms it has received, particularly in recent years. Though NHST is usually taught as a strictly formalized, “objective” procedure inherent to the field, it was only introduced to psychology in the 1930s. The method reached its current status of ubiquity during the so-called “inference revolution” of 1940-55 (Gigerenzer & Murray, 1987). However, the means through which this revolution occurred remain unclear. By reviewing course catalogues from six major Canadian universities from 1940-55 and situating my findings in the broader historical context, I aim to disentangle how, and why, NHST became the gold standard of psychological statistics during this time.
Open Access
"Progressive? Mothers: Feminist Eugenics and Leta S. Hollingworth
(2025-04-10) Stead, Michael John Hewgill; Rutherford, Alexandra
Leta S. Hollingworth was an early 20th century U.S. Psychologist, active during what is commonly referred to as the Progressive Era. While initial scholarship on Leta Hollingworth during the 1960s and ‘70s had celebratory aims geared towards her role as a feminist Psychologist, more recent scholarship has attempted to unpack her engagement with the eugenics movement. Using archival materials and drawing inspiration from scholars that challenge the limits of the archive, the present thesis explores Hollingworth’s scholarship and activism, fleshing out her own feminist and eugenic ideologies. I then forward the argument that Hollingworth did not hold feminist and eugenic ideologies together with tension, but reconciled them through the logic of another movement, feminist eugenics. This thesis ends with a discussion of how studying the life and scholarship of an early 20th-century feminist eugenicist serves as a cautionary tale for contemporary bioethical debate.
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
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
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
Towards a psychopolitical theorization of nostalgia in psychology
(2023-12-08) Christie, Danielle Alexandra; Rutherford, Alexandra
Whether through divisive injunctions to “Make America Great Again,” or countless anesthetizing spinoffs and remakes, our current epoch appears to be one of uniquely nostalgic sensibility. Across disciplines, there is consensus that nostalgia is heightened in times of stress and change, functioning as a reprieve from an inhospitable present. It follows that our rapidly shifting social, economic, environmental, and geopolitical terrain fosters the ideal conditions for nostalgia to flourish. While its interpretation has vacillated significantly, contemporary psychological research frames nostalgia as a largely positive resource that shores up optimism, purpose, and social connectedness. Yet, if nostalgia can be exploited by politicians to foster resentment and violence, how does this figure with the construal of nostalgia as predominantly positive? Untethering nostalgia from its psychologized status, then, is critical to grasping its key functions. As such, this thesis advances a psychopolitical retheorization that resituates nostalgia in its social, political, and historical context.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Wilhelm Dilthey's Conceptualization of Mental Life: The Unity of Consciousness
(2019-07-02) Majumdar, Stefan; Teo, Thomas
Abstract This study is an examination of Wilhelm Diltheys conceptualization of mental life. An introduction recounting Diltheys intellectual background is provided, including a detailed literature review of texts that elaborate his ideas. A description of Diltheys analysis of the elemental constituents of consciousness is presented. Diltheys assessment of self-consciousness is examined, and his psychological epistemology is explained. A discussion of Diltheys analysis of logic and psychological processes is given. The study explicates Diltheys position on the relation between aspects and dynamics within the psyche. A justification of Diltheys distinction between mental and physical objects of psychological investigation is provided. Consciousness is shown to constitute a phenomenal unity. Examples of the relevance of Diltheys ideas for contemporary psychological theory and practice are presented. Findings are recounted providing a detailed picture of main conclusions drawn from the study.
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.
Open Access
The Mind of the New Socialist Student in the Chinese Revolutionary Imagination, 1949-1958
(2018-11-21) Gao, Zhipeng; Teo, Thomas
Between 1949 and 1958, the nascent Peoples Republic of China witnessed a radical shift of knowledge about the human mind that transformed pedagogy. Against the Cold War and the changing Sino-Soviet relation, Chinese psychologists progressively repudiated American and Soviet schools for their shared deterministic philosophy and disinterest in human agency and class struggle. In light of this critique, educators abandoned psychological science as the basis of pedagogy and endeavored to create a supreme new socialist student to meet Chinas economic and political agendas. This dissertation explores this exteriorization epistemic transition by juxtaposing psychology and education. Taking advantage of so far untapped archival and published sources, this dissertation explores how psychologists, educators, and students navigated between a utopian communist dream and Chinas harsh socioeconomic reality in the creation of the new socialist student ideal. Chapter One Wrestling with Human Nature argues that the critique of psychology instantiated Chinas progressive ethos that, in the endeavor of transforming human mentality, rejected scientific discovery of mental laws. Chapter Two Laborizing Education argues that students faced excessive academic and labor tasks due to Chinas pursuit of post-war recovery, of success in Cold War competition, and of forestalling future labor-based class stratification. Chapter Three Engendering Citizenship scrutinizes how educators tapped into students subjectivity to produce a new citizenship identity capable of dismantling existing social relations.
Open Access
The Past Lives of Betty Eisner: Examining the Spiritual Psyche of Early Psychedelic Therapy through the Story of a Outsider, a Pioneer, and a Villain
(2018-05-28) Davidson, Tal; Rutherford, Alexandra
In this thesis, I argue that early LSD research was imbued with a sense of mysticism that was constructed to be commensurable with concurrent scientific epistemology. I demonstrate how mysticism entered psychedelic research and therapy through the history of a pioneer LSD psychotherapist named Betty Eisner. Since the late 1940s, Eisner was a key member of a bible study group that emphasized the psychological foundation of mystical experiences. When she entered psychology in the 1950s, she imported this influence into her research and therapy. As an active member of the small international LSD research community of the 50s and 60s, she participated in ongoing discussions about the place of mysticism in LSD psychotherapy. However, following malpractice accusations in the 1970s, Eisner lost her clinical license. Using records from her license revocation hearings, I will contextualize her work within the larger psychology professions attitudes toward mystically inspired therapy.
Open Access
Psychoanalysis as an Interdisciplinary Science: From 19th Century Neuropsychology to Modern Neuropsychoanalysis
(2017-07-27) Harper, Katherine Anne; Rutherford, Alexandra
This dissertation explores interdisciplinarity from three perspectives. It emphasizes the intellectual foundations of Sigmund Freuds Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and Alexander Bains Mind and Body (1872). It argues that these neural networks were similar and created via borrowed and integrated knowledge. This thesis contributes to the scholarship on Bain and Freud by presenting an analysis of their models, thus, providing a qualitative comparative analysis to make explicit the continuities and discontinuities in their ideas. In comparing their works, this study finds that there is no evidence that Freud borrowed directly from Bain when he created the Project; the similarities in their models are likely due the common academic milieus they emerged from. The discontinuities, however, were due to the neuron doctrine and the new scientific methods that emerged between 1872 and 1895. Part two of this thesis posits that psychoanalysis began as an interdisciplinary field founded on the Project, and that this interdisciplinarity continues today in the field of neuropsychoanalysis. This study finds that psychoanalysis has had a long history of interaction with the various psy-disciplines, particularly experimental psychology, and that the connection between the creation of the Project and the emergence of the field of neuropsychoanalysis was not a linear one. A conceptual bibliometric citation analysis demonstrates that, while experimental academic psychologists were testing the validity of Freudian concepts via empirical methods, they were actually borrowing knowledge from psychoanalysis. This analysis expands on the work of Hornstein (1992) and presents the first quantitative analysis of the intense relationship between psychology and psychoanalysis as psychologists were testing Freudian concepts. This thesis ends with an exploration of the recently created field of neuropsychoanalysis and provides the scholarship with the first bibliometric citation analysis of the field. In so doing, this portrait of the discipline presents an analysis of the psychological concepts this field is interested in studying, the methods used, and an examination of the extent of collaboration between psychoanalysts and neuroscientists. This is followed with a brief discussion on the clinical and theoretical relevance of neuroscience to psychoanalysis and the increasing concern regarding the validity of imaging techniques.