Would anyone be willing to give their opinions on prior large shifts in emphasis in psychology (revolutions or possibly renaissances)? Would anyone be willing to speculate on any theoretical, experimental, or applied shifts in psychology that might come during the 21th century? I think my class would be interested. Thanks, Paul

-- paul kleinginna (prklein@gsvms2.cc.gasou.edu), April 06, 2001

Answers

I am not prepared to defend, therefore, to give my projections, but you may find some interesting ones in:

Solso, R.L., & Massaro, D.W. (Eds.)(1995). The science of the mind: 2001 and beyond. New York: Oxford University Press.

-- Roger K. Thomas (rkthomas@uga.edu), April 06, 2001.

I currently working on an article dealing with revolutions and revivals in the history of psychology. I am not only interested in the bigger and clearer changes in thinking or practice, but also the smaller shifts in emphasis that may occur every 10 years or so. Small shifts might include renewed interest in evolutionary psychology, emotion, cross-cultural psychology, positive psychology, etc. I am also interested in predicting trends in the very near future of psychology like possibly future increases in physiological psychology (e.g., brain scan use, brain implants, behavior genetics) and even more interdisciplinary cooperation of various types (e.g., neuroscience and cognitive science). Paul

-- Paul R. Kleinginna (prklein@gsvms2.cc.gasou.edu), April 12, 2001.

My own perception, from the center of what is, perhaps, Europe's largest interdisciplinary center for cognitive science (Queen Square, London, with the Functional imaging labs, Institute of Neurology, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, etc), is that psychology is already changing dramatically with the coming of age of brain imaging techniques, as well as TMS. Psychologists are already learning to formulate their questions in ways that suit these methodologies, and this in turn creates shifts in the way that cognitive processes are modelled and understood. Of course, the process of integrating work based on different methodologies and perspectives is still at a very early stage.

However, I would like to push a different point. I believe the most radical and important revolution for the 'science of the mind' will come when we figure out how to incorporate introspective evidence - what we know from the inside - into scientific accounts. According to one view of the history of psychology, this is and has always been the central problem for psychology as a science. It may also be seen as the central issue in the philosophy of mind - directly relevant to the mind/body problem (often re-named the 'problem of consciousness')

If you would like to know more, you can look in my recent article published in Cognition, "Introspective Physicalism as an approach to the science of consciousness". Email me for an electronic reprint.

-- Anthony I Jack (a.jack@ucl.ac.uk), April 19, 2001.

One of the more important trends I notice is that the "middle ground" in psychology seems to be under significant strain. Under the influence of computational methods and brain imaging technology, perception and cognition are heading more strongly in the direction of the "hard" natural sciences. At the same time, there are significant numbers of psychologists heading the direction of critical, postmodern, hermeneutic and other humanities-inspired approaches to psychology. This may simply be a reflection of psychology's continually increasing size and diversity. But these two sides of the discipline seem not content to "live and let live" -- they seem increasingly critical of each other. The question is whether the middle will hold in the long run, or whether psychology will be torn into two or more relatively independent discplines. We have already seen this trend in professional psychology associations -- APA, Psychonomics, APS, SRCD, and a variety of psychotherapy-oriented organizations. There are also signs that psychology departments are coming apart with the rise of professional schools of psychology, and some research-oriented university departments having no clinical programs at all. I don't know that such a division would be a bad thing (although Division 1 of the APA seems now to be founded more or less on the premise that it would be), but it would certainly be a major shift in the organization of the discipline if it were to come to pass.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), April 22, 2001.

As far as what has been written about this by historians, I myself most frequently quote Franz Samelson's article on the "Struggle for Scientific Authority: The Reception of Watson's Behaviorism, 1913- 1920" from JHBS. Samelson argues that the first true paradigm shift lay in Watson's redefinition of the subject matter of psychology and how it can be known. Samelson writes: "In the earlier phase we find again and again the statement that the introspective method constitutes direct and immediate contact with the subject matter, while what we now mean by objective observation was then only an indirect or mediate one. After the revolution, the meanings are reversed: objective observation is the direct contact, while information obtained through introspection, if not altogether impossible or irrelevant, is at best indirect, a tenuous base for fragile inferences from questionable verbal reports. I think this is more than a manner of speaking; it reflects a real change in the way psychologists experienced, or had been trained to experience, their reality" (Quoting from Ludy Benjamin's A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY, 1988, p. 415).

I can only engage in wishful thinking regarding the future and wish that psychologists WOULD take the psyche more seriously, once again. I'd hope that psychologists in general would take alternate 'modes' of reality more seriously and not insist on the criteria of physics to validate experience! The pre-Watsonian view feels more like what psychology should be, to my clinician's soul!

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@fuller.edu), May 23, 2001.