The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), the third diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), was mainly a response to the vehement, insistent, and often persuasive antipsychiatry movement that had developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Coming from a number of directions, sociologists, lawyers, judges, social critics, and even some psychiatrists themselves, the movement challenged the medical model of psychiatry, the involuntary commitment of patients to mental hospitals, the “warehousing” of patients in hospitals without receiving effective treatment, and even whether patients with mental disorders had any illness at all. Additionally, psychiatrists were accused by some authors of “controlling” people to accrue power over them. Psychiatry as a profession was thrown on the defensive. The publication of an article in the prestigious journal Science in 1973 charging—through seemingly inspired experiments—that psychiatrists could not even diagnosis a mentally ill patient, created a sensation. This was the last straw for the beleaguered APA. Though only five years had passed since the last revision of the DSM, and little had changed, the Board of Trustees of the APA commissioned a revision that would show that psychiatry was a legitimate medical and scientific endeavor and thus counter the attacks of the antipsychiatry movement. The irony here is that in 2019, the Science article was shown to be in large part fraudulent.
DSM-III turned out to be not a revision but a large, brand-new manual based solely on observable signs and symptoms, the “diagnostic criteria.” It upended the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders in North America and in many other places as well. The Task Force that produced the manual was led by Robert Spitzer, a talented and energetic man, with an empirical bent, who never shied away from a fight. The Task Force he led shared his empiricism, and many of its members were determinedly antipsychoanalytic. There is no doubt that DSM-III helped to dethrone psychoanalysis as a leading method of thought and treatment in North America. Analysts had relied heavily on the diagnosis of neurosis, which Spitzer removed from the manual. Spitzer and the Task Force were strongly supported in their decisions by Melvin Sabshin, the APA’s new medical director, who himself wanted to rid psychiatry of “ideology,” and promote the profession more clearly as scientific and medical.
The manual itself featured many new diagnoses because Spitzer wanted to include diagnoses that were important to clinicians. Thus, he prized reliability (psychiatrists agreeing on the same diagnosis) over validity (the accuracy of the diagnosis). A positive feature of DSM-III was its five-pronged diagnostic system, which, if used properly and completely, helped psychiatrists arrive at a deeper knowledge of their patients, as well as a more accurate prognosis. On the other hand, relying solely on diagnostic criteria encouraged some clinicians to practice a relatively quick “checklist” psychiatry instead of taking time to understand patients as human beings in all their complexity. Another shortcoming was the strict categorical approach of the diagnostic system which often led to comorbidity or “not elsewhere specified” diagnoses. Nevertheless, since the appearance of DSM-III, the DSMs have achieved an outsized influence over many key areas of life.
Article
Trevor A. Harley
Research in the psychology of language has been dogged by some enduring controversies, many of which continue to divide researchers. Furthermore, language research has been riven by too many dichotomies and too many people taking too extreme a position, and progress is only likely to be made when researchers recognize that language is a complex system where simple dichotomies may not be relevant. The enduring controversies cover the width of psycholinguistics, including the work of Chomsky and the nature of language, to what extent language is innately determined and the origin of language and how it evolved. Chomsky’s work has also influenced our conceptions of the modularity of the structure of the mind and the nature of psychological processing. Advances in the sophistication of brain imaging techniques have led to debate about exactly what these techniques can tell us about the psychological processing of language. There has also been much debate about whether psychological processing occurs through explicit rules or statistical mapping, a debate driven by connectionist modeling, deep learning, and techniques for the analysis of “big data.” Another debate concerns the role of prediction in language and cognition and the related issues of the relationship between language comprehension and language production. To what extent is language processing embodied, and how does it relate to controversies about “embedded cognition”? Finally, there has been debate about the purpose and use of language.
Article
Alan C. Tjeltveit
How has ethics been connected with the science and profession of psychology? Has ethics been essential to psychology? Or have psychologists increasingly developed objective psychological understandings free of ethical biases? Is ethics in psychology limited to research ethics and professional ethics?
Understanding the various connections among ethics and psychology requires conceptual clarity about the many meanings of ethics and related terms (such as moral, ideal, and flourishing). Ethics has included, but goes beyond, research and professional ethics, since ideas about what is good or bad, right or wrong, obligatory or virtuous have shaped psychological inquiry. In moral psychology, psychologists have sought to understand the psychology of ethical dimensions of persons, such as prejudice or altruism. Some psychologists have worked to minimize ethical issues in psychology in general, but others embraced psychologies tied to ethical visions, like advancing social justice. Many ethical issues (beyond professional ethics) have also been entangled in professional practice, including understanding the problems (“not good” states of affairs) for which clients seek help and the (“good”) goals toward which psychologists helped people move. Cutting across the various ways ethics and psychology have been interconnected is an enduring tension: Although psychologists have claimed expertise in the science of psychology and in the provision of psychological services, they have had no disciplinary expertise that equips them to determine what is good, right, obligatory, and virtuous despite the fact that ethical issues have often been deeply intertwined with psychology.
Article
W. Andrew Achenbaum
Edmund V. Cowdry’s Problems of Ageing (1939), the first U.S. handbook in gerontology, spurred efforts to systematize and communicate data and hypotheses in a “discouragingly difficult field,” as one of the volume’s contributors put it. Researchers, educators, and practitioners subsequently published handbooks of aging to share basic concepts, norms, and metaphors—and eventually to construct theories.
Compared to theoretical constructs that animate African American studies, paradigms that inform inquiries into sex and gender, and queer theory-building, research on aging is sustained by few evidence-based, methodologically robust, heuristic theories. No single construct yet seizes the gerontological imagination. Analyzing notable handbooks reveals that the modern history of ever-emerging gerontological theory building went through three phases.
First, attempts to formulate Big Theories of Aging resulted in more disappointments than scientific advances. In the second phase, researchers on aging set more modest aims, often giving priority to methodological innovation, but failed to promote consilience in a data-rich, theory-poor arena. Psychological theories, pertaining to lifespan development, merit special attention in the third phase, because they proved useful to biomedical and social scientists doing research on aging.
Article
Vindhya Undurti
There is no explicitly defined field as feminist psychology(ies) in India. It is therefore necessary to look beyond the discipline of psychology and examine the scholarship available in other disciplines as well as in activist efforts to illumine questions that are of concern to feminist psychology(ies)—questions of how inequitable access to resources, disproportionate burden of care giving and gender stereotypical identities impact on gender relations and on women’s well-being and identity. From the interface of psychology with feminisms, three thematic areas emerge against the backdrop of past and contemporary socio-political developments in the country that have directly or indirectly influenced and informed the content and direction of research in these thematic areas. The three key themes are (a) mental health and well-being and the influence of the interlinked perspectives of gender, public health, human rights and social justice on this field, (b) gender-based violence and the evolution of psychosocial interventions for reduction and prevention of violence, and (c) the socio-historical construction of identities and the construction of masculinities in particular and that of the “modern Indian woman” in the conundrum of tradition and modernity.
First, the literature on gender and mental health emphasizes the need to connect mental health with social determinants, demonstrates the existence of gender bias in access to mental health services, shows that women are represented more in common mental disorders whose aetiology is associated with the social position of women, and highlights the relationship of gender-specific risk factors such as domestic violence to the occurrence of depression in women.
Second, the body of work on interventions for reducing and preventing gender-based violence shows services such as one-stop centers hinged on a psychosocial intervention model; and women’s collectives for alternate dispute resolution based loosely on feminist principles, serving as a platform for voicing and recognition of violence and connecting survivors to institutional services.
Third, the socio-historical context of identity construction reveals masculinity as a product of interplay of the colonizing and colonized cultures in the nationalist period of pre-independence India, the subsequent turn to “aggressive Hindu communalism” as a model for masculinity and the construction of femininity in the conundrum of tradition and modernity.
Thus, despite e some influence and infusion of perspectives on each other, feminisms and psychology in India continue to run parallel to each other, and feminist psychology(ies) in India remains an indistinct field as yet.
Article
Kate Sheese
Feminist psychology as an institutionalized field in North America has a relatively recent history. Its formalization remains geographically uneven and its institutionalization remains a contested endeavor. Women’s liberation movements, anticolonial struggles, and the civil rights movement acted as galvanizing forces in bringing feminism formally into psychology, transforming not only its sexist institutional practices but also its theories, and radically challenging its epistemological and methodological commitments and constraints. Since the late 1960s, feminists in psychology have produced radically new understandings of sex and gender, have recovered women’s history in psychology, have developed new historiographical methods, have engaged with and developed innovative approaches to theory and research, and have rendered previously invisibilized issues and experiences central to women’s lives intelligible and worthy of scholarly inquiry. Heated debates about the potential of feminist psychology to bring about radical social and political change are ongoing as feminists in the discipline negotiate threats and dilemmas related to collusion, colonialism, and co-optation in the face of ongoing commitments to positivism and individualism in psychology and as the theory and practice of psychology remains embedded within broader structures of neoliberalism and global capitalism.
Article
Heather Wolffram
Forensic psychology in the 21st century entails the application of psychology to all aspects of the criminal justice process. Forensic psychologists, therefore, are engaged in the theorization of offending, offender profiling, the psychology of testimony, investigative interviewing, the psychology of juries and judges, and psychological approaches to the punishment and treatment of offenders. Historically, however, forensic psychology, has been narrower in scope.
Founded principally in Europe during the late 19th century as a response to the reform of criminal procedure and research on suggestion, which undermined confidence in witness credibility, forensic psychology was initially pursued by jurists and psychiatrists eager to understand the behavior of all those involved in the criminal justice process. While this ambition was pursued piecemeal by jurists throughout the early 20th century in their studies of guilty knowledge, judges, jurors, and investigators, the exigencies of the courtroom, soon saw the field become focused on the psychology of the witness, particularly the juvenile witness. Important, in this regard were the efforts of both European and American experimental psychologists, whose precarious position within universities at the fin de siècle saw them look for real-world applications for psychology and led them to campaign voraciously for the inclusion of psychological knowledge and psychological expertise in legal proceedings.
Competition between several disciplines, including law, psychology, psychiatry, and pedagogy, over the role of psychological expert made the professionalization of this field difficult up until the Second World War. During the late 1940s and 1950s, however, not only did forensic psychology increasingly become the exclusive purview of psychologists, but the discipline’s scope began to expand. Notable in this regard was offender profiling, which emerged from the psychological analysis of war criminals and the application of the insights gained here to several high-profile criminal cases in the United States.
Article
Lawrence A. Shapiro
Philosophical functionalism, as distinct from the psychological school of functionalism that enjoyed popularity around the turn of the 20th century, is a theory about the nature of mental states. That is, functionalism offers an account of which conditions must be satisfied for something to count as a belief, or a desire, or a pain, or an itch, or a fear, or a memory. Functionalism is thus a metaphysical doctrine about mental states, that is, a doctrine concerning what makes something a mental state. “Metaphysical,” in this context, should not be taken to suggest anything mysterious. Chemistry is a metaphysical doctrine in just the same sense as functionalism: it is a theory that offers an account of which conditions must be satisfied for something to count as, say, a pure chemical substance rather than a mixture. As philosophical theories go, functionalism has been fantastically successful. Its contemporary form traces to seminal work that H. Putnam initiated in the 1960s, and it remains in early 21st century the most widely accepted theory of the nature of mental states among philosophers in the Anglo tradition.
According to functionalism, the conditions necessary and sufficient for something to be a mental state are specified in terms of functional role. Functionalists have disagreed about the correct basis on which functional descriptions of mental states should rest, with the result that functionalism is better conceived as a family of closely related theories about the nature of mental states rather than a single uniform view. Briefly, the idea of functional role can be usefully illustrated by consideration of an artifact, such as a corkscrew, the nature of which is defined in terms of the function of removing corks. What it is to be a corkscrew is to perform this functional role. Likewise, the functionalist claims, what it is to be a mental state is to perform the functional role characteristic of a belief, or a desire, or a pain, and so on.
Article
Augustine Nwoye
The purpose of the article is to trace the intellectual history of the new postcolonial discipline of African psychology. African psychology as currently conceptualized in universities in the South and other regions of Africa is a proud heir to a vast heritage of sound and extensive intellectual traditions and psychological scholarship on Africa and its peoples found scattered in the multiple disciplines of the humanities (anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, religion, etc.). Even before and after the critical evolution that led to the emergence of African psychology as a new discipline situated in the departments of psychology in some forward-thinking African universities, the different fields of the humanities offered legitimate research and writings on the nature of the life of the mind and culture in pre- and postcolonial Africa. The article reviews the variety and changing psychological themes that occupied the attention of the African and Western humanists and intellectuals within and outside Africa.
However, the great limitation of all psychological research and writings which constitute psychological humanities is that they could not and, indeed, are not meant to replace the legitimate role being played by African psychology as a fledgling postcolonial discipline and center of thought and scholarship. This fledgling discipline came into being to argue against and partner with Western psychology and the black psychology popularized in North America, with a view toward the enrichment of both Western and black psychological knowledge with new perspectives for understanding the psychology of Africans in continental Africa. The purpose of the article is to elaborate on these issues.
Article
Jeremy Trevelyan Burman
Jean Piaget (1896–1980) is known for his contributions to developmental psychology and educational theory. His name is associated especially with Stage Theory. That we believe him to have focused solely on cognitive development, however, is not because he did. This is instead the result of the popularization of his writings in the United States during the Cold War. (A period of crisis and subsequent education reform.) The overpowering influence of those interests blinded us to his larger framework, which he called “genetic epistemology,” and of which his stages were just a part. To address the resulting and continuing misunderstandings, this essay presents original historical scholarship—distilling over a thousand pages of archival documents (correspondence, diary entries, budgets, and reports)—to provide an insider’s look at Piaget’s research program from the perspective of the Rockefeller Foundation: genetic epistemology’s primary funding agency in the United States from the mid-1950s through the early-1960s. The result is an examination of how a group of interested Americans came to understand Piaget’s writings in French in the period just prior to their wider popularization in English, as well as of how Piaget presented himself and his ideas during the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. My goal, however, is not to summarize the whole of this misunderstood program. Instead, I aim to provide a source of archivally-grounded perspective that will allow for new insights about the Genevan School that are unrelated to American Cold War interests. In the process, we also derive new means to see how Piaget’s experimental examinations of the development of individual knowledge served to inform his team’s investigations of the evolution of science (and vice versa).
Article
Horst Gundlach
Gestalt psychology is an holistic approach to psychology launched in 1910 by three psychologists: Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka. It was conceived to oppose elementary or atomistic psychology, the conception that psychical processes consist of elements whose associations produce the contents experienced in the mind or soul. Instead, Gestalt psychology holds that configurations or, in German, Gestalten, not these hypothetical elements, are the primary material underlying experience. Beginning with research in perception, the Gestalt approach was soon applied to other fields of psychology. Gestalt theory, inspired by field theories in physics, tried to lay a common groundwork for psychology, physiology, and physics. The Gestalt movement originated in Germany, but the three protagonists for personal and political reasons resettled in the United States where the movement became an important force combatting the dominance of behaviorism. The Gestalt approach was especially fruitful in empirical psychology, but it did not fulfill the promise of turning psychology into a unified science based on a common theoretical ground.
Article
Raymond E. Fancher
Gordon W. Allport was a prominent Harvard University psychologist during the mid-20th century, notable both for his early and effective promotion of “personality” as an important psychological subdiscipline, and in his later career as a social psychologist for works on several issues of major social importance. In 1921 he and his older brother Floyd Allport jointly proposed the study and measurement of traits as the foundation of a new subdiscipline of personality psychology, with Gordon’s Harvard doctoral research a pilot study demonstrating the feasibility of the approach. On a subsequent postdoctoral fellowship in Germany Allport became impressed by William Stern’s “personalistic” psychology, which held that a person’s “individuality” could be defined in two ways: relational individuality, comprised of the particular combination of numerous measurable traits manifested by a subject in studies such as Allport’s thesis; and real individuality, a Gestalt-like conception of a personality that is more than just the sum of its parts, and discoverable only through a qualitative analysis of the traits’ role in an overall life history. These ideas inspired in Allport a conception of personality as a broad and independent psychological field that would incorporate both the “nomothetic,” experimental methods of the natural sciences in measuring and studying personality traits, and the non-experimental “idiographic” methods utilized in the historical and humanistic fields for providing conceptions of wholly integrated, unique personalities. Noting that Anglo-American psychology was heavily dominated by the former approach, he became an outspoken advocate of the latter as a necessary complement to it.
Allport taught undergraduate seminars promoting this conception at Harvard and Dartmouth between 1924 and 1930, before returning permanently to Harvard in 1930. There, both independently and in collaborations with others, he conducted and promoted seminal personality research employing both nomothetic and idiographic methods. His comprehensive and authoritative 1937 textbook, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, was a landmark in establishing personality as a major psychological discipline. With enhanced reputation, Allport became a leading institutional figure in American psychology. For the rest of his career he continued to advocate an inclusive, “eclectic” approach to personality psychology, while also turning attention to important social issues such as wartime morale and propaganda, the influence of radio as a mass medium, the role of religion in personality and society, and with particular impact the nature of prejudice.
Article
David K. Robinson
Gustav Theodor Fechner (b. 1801–d. 1887) is well known to psychologists as the founder of psychophysics, a set of methods for empirically relating measured sensory stimulus to reported sensation. Rich as this field of research has proven to be, especially as detection instruments and recording devices have improved in modern times, Fechner himself would be disappointed to discover that he is remembered merely for psychophysics as psychologists understand it today. To Fechner, those particular methods and approaches were only one part of the domain of psychophysics—outer psychophysics—whereas he envisioned psychophysics (both outer and inner) to be the key to the broadest kind of scientific worldview: the study of the relationship between the material world and the mental world (indeed the spiritual universe; in German, die geistige Welt).
The preface of Fechner’s 1860 masterwork, Elements of Psychophysics, states, “[I]t is an exact theory of the relation of mind to body. . . . As an exact science psychophysics, like physics, must rest on experience and the mathematical connection of those empirical facts that demand a measure of what is experienced or, when such a measure is not available, a search for it.” In that definition, Fechner reveals his view of natural science, and how psychophysics was meant to expand the range of natural science and the scope of its achievements. Fechner’s influence emerged during the mid-19th century, as the physical and medical sciences were achieving great breakthroughs and establishing fundamental and unifying concepts; this was especially true in Germany, including the city where he came to study and remained for the rest of his life, Leipzig. Fechner was one of the most enthusiastic and optimistic believers in unifying concepts of science.
Fechner’s psychophysics gave important impetus to psychometrics and experimental psychology; he also proposed a statistical approach to aesthetics and a “theory of collectives” that pointed toward statistical interpretations of many (perhaps all) areas of experience. In his early career he was a central figure in German physics and an early supporter of the atomic theory of matter as well as Darwinian evolution. His profoundly spiritual ideas, however, were out of step with the science of his time. This aspect of Fechner’s thought is evident in his inner psychophysics, where he searched for the full measure of “what is experienced.”
Article
Karyna Pryiomka and Joshua W. Clegg
Like science in general, psychological research has never had a method. Rather, psychologists have deployed many methods under quite variable justifications. The history of these methods is thus a history of contestation. Psychology’s method debates are many and varied, but they mostly constellate around two interconnected concerns: psychology’s status as a science, and psychology’s proper subject matter. On the first question, the majority position has been an attempt to establish psychology as scientific, and thus committed to quantification and to objective, particularly experimental, methods. Challenging this position, many have argued that psychology cannot be a science, or at least not a natural one. Others have questioned the epistemic privilege of operationalization, quantification, experimentation, and even science itself. Connecting epistemic concerns with those of ethics and morality, some have pointed to the dehumanizing and oppressive consequences of objectification. In contrast to the debates over psychology’s status as a science, the question of its proper subject matter has produced no permanent majority position, but perennial methodological debates. Perhaps the oldest of these is the conflict over whether and how self, mind, or consciousness can be observed. This conflict produced famous disagreements like the imageless thought controversy and the behaviorist assault on “introspection.” Other recurrent debates include those over whether psychologists study wholes or aggregates, structures or functions, and states or dynamic systems.
Article
Noemi Pizarroso Lopez
Historical psychology claims that the mind has a history, that is, that our ways of thinking, reasoning, perceiving, feeling, and acting are not necessarily universal or invariable, but are instead subject to modifications over time and space. The theoretical and methodological foundations of this movement were laid in France by psychologist Ignace Meyerson in his book Les fonctions psychologiques et les œuvres, published in 1948. His program stressed the active, experimental, constructive nature of human behavior, spanning behavioral registers as diverse as the linguistic, the religious, the juridical, the scientific/technical, and the artistic. All these behaviors involve aspects of different mental functions that we can infer through a proper analysis of “works,” considered as consolidated testimonies of human activity. As humanity’s successive achievements, constructed over the length of all the paths of the human experience, they are the materials with which psychology has to deal.
Meyerson refused to propose an inventory of functions to study. As unstable and imperfect products of a complex and uncertain undertaking, they can be analyzed only by avoiding the counterproductive prejudice of metaphysical fixism. Meyerson spoke in these terms of both deep transformations of feelings, of the person, or of the will, and of the so-called “basic functions,” such as perception and the imaginative function, including memory, time, space, and object.
Before Meyerson the term “historical psychology” had already been used by historians like Henri Berr and Lucien Febvre, a founding member of the Annales school, who firmly envisioned a sort of collective psychology of times past. Meyerson and his disciples eventually vied with their fellow historians of the Annales school for the label of “historical psychology” and criticized their notions of mentality and outillage mental. The Annales historians gradually abandoned the label, although they continued to cultivate the idea that mental operations and emotions have a history through the new labels of a “history of mentalities” and, more recently at the turn of the century, a “history of emotions.” While Meyerson and a few other psychologists kept using the “historical psychology” label, however, mainstream psychology remained quite oblivious to this historical focus. The greatest efforts made today among psychologists to think of our mental architecture in terms of transformation over time and space are probably to be found in the work of Kurt Danziger and Roger Smith.
Article
Thomas F. Pettigrew
The discipline of psychology has an extremely broad range—from the life sciences to the social sciences, from neuroscience to social psychology. These distinctly different components have varying histories of their own. Social psychology is psychology’s social science wing. The major social sciences—anthropology, economics, sociology, and political science—all had their origins in the 19th century or even earlier. But social psychology is much younger; it developed both in Europe and North America in the 20th century.
The field’s enormous growth over the past century began modestly with a few scant locations, several textbooks, and a single journal in the 1920s. Today’s social psychologists would barely recognize their discipline in the years prior to World War II. But trends forming in the 1920s and 1930s would become important years later.
With steady growth, especially starting in the 1960s, the discipline gained thousands of new doctorates and multiple journals scattered throughout the world. Social psychology has become a recognized, influential, and often-cited social science. It is the basis, for example, of behavioral economics as well as such key theories as authoritarianism in political science. Central to this extraordinary expansion were the principal events of mid-20th century. World War II, the growth of universities and the social sciences in general, rising prosperity, statistical advances, and other global changes set the stage for the discipline’s rapid development.
Together with this growth, social psychology has expanded its topics in both the affective and cognitive domains. Indeed, new theories are so numerous that theoretical integration has become a prime need for the discipline.
Article
Thomas Teo
Critical psychology comprises a broad range of international approaches centered around theories and practices of critique, power, resistance, and alternatives of practice. Although critical psychology had an axial age in and around the 1970s, many sources can be found decades and even centuries earlier. Critical psychology is not only about the critique of psychology, which is a broader historical and theoretical field, but about doing justice in and through theory, justice with and to groups of people, and justice to the reality of society, history, and culture as they powerfully constitute subjectivity, as well as the discipline and profession of psychology. Doing justice in and through psychological theory has a strong basis in Western critical approaches, representing a privileged position of reflection in Euro-American research institutions. Critical psychologists argue that traditional psychology is missing its subject matter and hence is not doing justice in methodology, and its practices of control and adjustment are not doing justice to the emancipatory possibilities of human agency or human science. Critical psychologists who are attempting to do justice with and to human beings are not neglecting the onto-epistemic-ethical domain, but are instead focusing on people, often marginalized or oppressed groups. Critical psychologists who want to do justice in history, culture, and society have argued that traditional psychological practice means adaption and adjustment. This means that not only subjectivity, but also the discipline and profession of psychology need to be connected with contexts. Psychologists have attempted to conceptualize the relationship between society and the individual, as well as the ability of humans not only to adapt to an environment but to change their living conditions and transform the status quo. This conceptualization also means providing concrete analyses of how current society, based in neoliberal capitalism, not only impacts individuals but also the discipline of psychology. Despite the complexities of critical psychology around the world, critical psychologists emphasize the importance of reflexivity and praxis when it comes to changing the conditions of social reality that create mental life. Given that subjectivity cannot be limited to intra-psychological processes, critical psychologists attend to relational and structural societal realities, requiring inter- and transdisciplinarity in the discipline and profession.
Article
Olwen Bedford and Kuang-Hui Yeh
Chinese indigenous psychology (Chinese IP) requires that the researchers’ theories, concepts, methods, tools, and results explicitly incorporate the structures and processes of the studied psychological and behavioral phenomena as embedded in their original context. Chinese IP is distinct from mainstream psychology in that it generates and promotes a different kind of psychological knowledge and because it is open with respect to research paradigm.
Chinese IP emerged in the mid-1970s in Taiwan. K. S. Yang is the key figure in its development. He recognized the disconnect between Western and Chinese ways of understanding human functioning and promoted Chinese IP as a way to address the particular problems encountered in Chinese societies. The broad variety of Chinese IP research can be roughly divided into three overlapping areas: general frameworks or approaches for conducting research on a variety of topics in Chinese societies, universal models of particular sociocultural concepts that may applied to any society, and investigation of concepts that have special meaning in Chinese societies, some of which adapt or bridge Western research with Chinese concepts. The ultimate goal of Chinese IP is to contribute to development of a human or global psychology, and Chinese IP researchers have proposed both bottom-up and top-down approaches to obtaining this goal. Chinese IP inherently questions the universality of mainstream psychology. This stance gives rise to numerous challenges for IP researchers including pressure from their own academic institutions to publish in high-impact journals that do not value indigenous research.
Article
Scott O. Lilienfeld and Candice Basterfield
Evidence-based therapies stemmed from the movement toward evidence-based medicine, and later, evidence-based practice (EBP) in psychology and allied fields. EBP reflects a progressive historical shift from naïve empiricism, which is based on raw and untutored observations of patient change, to systematic empiricism, which refines and hones such observations with the aid of systematic research techniques. EBP traces its roots in part to the development of methods of randomization in the early 20th century. In American psychology, EBP has traditionally been conceptualized as a three-legged stool comprising high-quality treatment outcome evidence, clinical expertise, and patient preferences and values. The research leg of the stool is typically operationalized in terms of a hierarchy of evidentiary certainty, with randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses of such trials toward the apex. The most influential operationalization of the EBP research leg is the effort to identify empirically supported treatments, which are psychotherapies that have been demonstrated to work for specific psychological conditions. Still, EBP remains scientifically controversial in many quarters, and some critics have maintained that the research base underpinning it is less compelling than claimed by its proponents.
Article
Vera Luckgei, Nora Ruck, and Thomas Slunecko
Feminist psychological knowledge production has flourished in the German-speaking countries since the late 1970s. But, in contrast to countries like the United States, Canada, or Great Britain, it only gained finite traction in the academy. During the late 1970s and 1980s, the so-called “project phase” of the second wave women’s movement saw the founding of counseling centers for women in Vienna and all over Austria. During the mid-1980s, students at the University of Vienna started recruiting feminist psychologists from the feminist counseling center Frauen beraten Frauen to teach courses on the psychology of women. From the mid-1980s until 2000, the Department of Psychology at the University of Vienna offered an unusually high number of courses in the psychology of women (up to ten seminars per semester and about 200 in total), turning the department into an unofficial and temporary teaching hub for feminist psychology. With 14 courses on the psychology of women, the academic year 1987/1988 marks the apogee of feminist psychological teaching by adjunct lecturers at the Department of Psychology. During the 1990s, it was again students who fought for and succeeded in having several guest professors in the psychology of women appointed at the Department of Psychology. This pinnacle period for the interrelation of feminist teaching and research saw not only the development of new didactic methods but also some continuity in the collaboration of a guest professor, adjunct lecturers, and students as well as a plethora of feminist psychological theses written by students.
