William R Woodward

University of New Hampshire | UNH · Department of Psychology

Members of New Hampshire's Palestine Education Network met on Palestine Remembrance Day with State Representative Maria Perez. She explained that she has befriended some local Palestinians and had put together a powerpoint about Palestine activism. A friend of Israel obtained this powerpoint and wrote a critical article about her based on this one...

Bruner’s lectures in 1965 reveal a sustained effort to meld evidence from physical and cultural anthropology with experimental psychology. He used Vygotsky to correct and extend Piaget. He used Brown & Lenneberg to provide mechanisms for the Whorfian hypothesis. He used Jean Berko’s pivot word experiments to understand how children construct syntax...

The format of this chapter is very unusual. Here are the outcomes of an attempt to realize an idea that appeared while finishing editorial work on this book. As the first editor I have invited authors to share their thoughts on the future and on cultural psychology in the future. Unfortunately it had to be at short notice, so many were unable to co...

I have presented a broader review of Fechner “in and for psychology” than that with which psychologists are generally familiar. Fechner wrote in a time before the emergence of psychology as a discipline and a profession. (1) He offered a quantitative theory of pleasure as a computational principle in action, directed toward the goal of stability or...

Dear Students and Teachers, This is a how-to course: how to read and write history of psychology as scientific biography, and with this knowledge, how to write your own autobiography. A fancy name for this goal is "historiography," meaning "the writing of history." You will be practicing skills useful in the writing of history of biography. Since e...

Most citizens of the U.S. believe in the goodness of their country. The idea that 9/11 could have been done by government operatives creates dissonance. It is easier to deny this truth than to live with a dissonant thought. We need to speak the truth to power. This brings comfort at a deeper spiritual level. The author also tells the story of his v...

I served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Turkey during the Vietnamese War. Volunteers were expected to support our war of aggression. This silencing of the truth as I saw it increased my strong feelings of dissonance in 1969. Recognizing the falseness of the alleged threat of Communism then made it easier to recognize the falseness of other national hyp...

We did a qualitative content analysis of news reports disseminated by international media about events occurring in Rwanda. We grouped these reports into seven themes: human rights, security, foreign relations, Hutu menace in the Great Lakes, memorializing the victims, economic situation, and democracy, of which we report only the first three here....

In our previous paper, we did a qualitative content analysis of news reports disseminated by international media about events occurring in Rwanda. We grouped these reports into three themes: human rights, security, and foreign relations. Here we add our analysis of four more themes: Hutu menace in the Great Lakes, memorializing the victims, economi...

Why wouldn't Iranians fear the nuclear states surrounding them and want to protect themselves? And why cannot Israel be expected and encouraged by the U.S. to participate in a nuclear non-proliferation treaty? By the way, I am not happy with the Portsmouth Herald inviting nationally- syndicated writers George Will and Charles Krauthammer into our l...

Child guidance teams functioned far better than juvenile courts as a treatment facility. Treatment teams looked at medical, educational, economic, social, and psychiatric causes of the child's problematic behavior. whereas parents and courts tended to invoke the personality of the child. Bronner and Healy replaced hereditary explanations with accou...

This is the first full-length historical study of the origins and receptions of the work of Hermann Lotze (1817-1881), a German philosopher pillaged by the founders of pragmatism, neoidealism, analytic philosophy, and phenomenology. Lotze argued in a problem-centered way about disciplinary issues. For example, he combined directive ideas with lawfu...

Since 1967, Palestine is a land under occupation by a foreign power. Israel has not fulfilled the obligations of an occupying power in that Israel's own Mental Health Act has not been applied to Palestine. A legislative framework for mental health has been lacking, with consequences for unemployment, refugee status, and traumatic effects of occupat...

Reviews the book, William Stern (1871–1938): A Brief Introduction to His Life and Works by James T. Lamiell (2010). We have two decades of William and Clara Stern revival in the history of psychology, thanks, in large part, to the persistent efforts of James Lamiell. This book will primarily interest psychologists for its more robust account of dif...

Augusta Bronner recasted juvenile delinquency as a social problem rooted in the home and community, replacing the previous emphasis on heredity and personality. She used mental tests as tools to determine the unique abilities and disabilities of the child. Then she provided guidance to the child for the benefit of parents and of the juvenile courts...

We have two decades of William and Clara Stern revival in the history of psychology, thanks, in large part, to the persistent efforts of James Lamiell. He has republished their Recollection, Testimony, and Lying in Early Childhood (1909) and William Stern’s (1917) brochure “Psychology and Personalism” (Stern, 2010). He has also published a book on...

In der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik traf ich eine widersprüchliche Situation an. Von einigen Psychologen wurde die sowjetische Psychologie als Zwangsjacke, von anderen als Richtschnur und Quelle der Inspiration betrachtet. Ähnlich war es in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Für die meisten Psychologen während des Kalten Krieges war ein Marxismus...

I encountered the ironic and counter-intuitive situation in the German Democratic Republic that Soviet psychology may have been regarded in part by some psychologists as a strait jacket, and by others as a guiding source of inspiration. Similarly in the Federal Republic of Germany.Marxism was anathema in psychology for most psychologists during the...

Gestalt psychologists emphasized the study of consciousness, like structuralist psychologists who used controlled introspection in sensory experiments. However, they emphasized that both perceived forms (Gestalten) and the experienced world are already structured wholes. They rejected the view of Structuralists and Associationists that consciousnes...

Cherry, Unger, and Winston suggest that a more nuanced way of treating ethnic differences is called for, suggesting that professional groupings are more salient than ethnic backgrounds in understanding the careers of three e´migre´ women. I affirmed a broader thesis, and I explicitly referred to “Russian women e´migre´s,” because in fact the ethnic...

In einer seiner letzten Arbeiten beschreibt Manfred Buhr (2007/2010) den europäischen Weg kritisch als einen „schmerzhaften Prozess“ (Buhr 2010, 9). Wir verstehen Buhr so, dass die europäischen Nationen, die über Jahrhunderte als Akteure kolonialer Herrschaft und Unterdrückung aufgetreten sind, sich nun auf ein tieferes Verständnis des Projekts der...

This chapter will situate Charlotte Bühler (1893-1974) as a professional woman in developmental psychology and humanistic psychology. I will give special attention to The First Year of Life (1927, English1930), “The Human Life Course as Psychological Problem” [Der menschliche Lebenslauf als psychologisches Problem] (1933), From Birth to Maturity (1...

This paper uses archival sources and autobiographies to give a fuller account of the lives of three Russian women psychologists, each of whom voluntarily emigrated several years before the Third Reich. As such, their stories contribute to gender history, emigration history, and ethnic history. The characteristics of second-generation women in psych...

Situating Lotze in the School of Speculative Theology, I use debates about Schelling's critique of Hegel-then and now-to understand Lotze's critique of Hegel. Lotze's early metaphysics seems to employ a version of Hegel's dialectical analysis of being, phenomena, and mind emphasizing "the interconnection of things." One can equally argue that he pr...

Stuatingn Lotze in the School of Speculative Theology, I use debates about Schelling's critique of Hegel -- then and now -- to understand Lotze's critique of Hegel. Yet Lotze's early metaphysics seems to employ a dialectic version of Hegel's analysis of being, phenomena, and mind emphasizing "the interconnection of things." One can equally argue th...

Healing, as clinical psychologists know, comes through exposing the conflicts in our unconscious, experiencing the painful memories again, and catharsis of the emotions. This cleansing through facing the truth, bit by bit, is cathartic. We as citizens bear a responsibility to face the truth about whatever happened on 9/11. Our wars have done so muc...

Psychophysics became a central feature of the New Experimental Psychology in Western Europe and the United States, and G. T. Fechner was celebrated as its founder in 1860. However, Fechner's booklet on a pleasure principle for ethics in 1846 has received almost no attention by historians. I will try to show here that Fechner's proposals for an empi...

Manfred Buhr (2007) suggested a powerful and subtle critique of European nations. He observed that their histories reveal “a painful process”. His antidote is a universalism that takes a deeper understanding of the Enlightenment project of reason. Buhr endorsed emancipation and human dignity through the Enlightenment rationalism of Kant. He allowed...

Fear animates those on all sides of this issue. According to a Zogby poll in 2006, 46 percent of the public does not believe the official story. The mainstream and many of the alternative media have censored themselves from raising this topic. As a historian of psychology, a Quaker, and a returned Peace Corps volunteer, I tremble at the possibilit...

Heidelberger’s book is a philosophical-historical blockbuster, one of a kind, spanning psychology, philosophy, and the history of science with an original and persuasive rethinking of the main lines of intellectual history from the nineteenth through the twentieth century. After an exhaustive biographical chapter, he launches an exciting original i...

Miki Takasuna describes knowledge transfer between elite communities of scientists, a process by which ideas become structurally transformed in the host culture. By contrast, a process that we have termed knowledge transfer by deelitization occurs when (a) participatory action researchers work with a community to identify a problem involving oppres...

What was the significance for psychology of the disintegration of the ego in nineteenth century philosophy? First, I will introduce Lotze's concept of mind, or pure self..., secondly, I will introduce Lotze's concept of the empirical self..., and thirdly, I will examine the definitions of psychology and self put forward in the 1880s and 1890s...My...

The paper opens with a confession of Jaynes' influence on my own evolution of religious consciousness. He never shared his war resistance to the World War II with me, even though I was in the midst of resisting the Vietnamese War. Then I go on to discuss his unpublished fragments of chapters, presumably composed after 1976 when his book on The Orig...

Finally, for those teachers of history of psychology willing to assign a challenging text and supplement it with primary and secondary sources, a multi-authored textbook has arrived that they can be proud of. Intellectual substance replaces hagiography and “first laboratory” myths. Instead of “schools” (experimental psychology, psychoanalysis, beha...

Review of a huge co-authored study of science in the German Democratic Republic. The book is organized by discipline by scholars from the former East and West Germany. Authoritative study.

Josef Brožek is dear to all of us in history of psychology, as I am sure he is to those in biology. He knits together even members who have never attended Cheiron North America or Europe. He never forgot the lesson of his youth in Siberia, that the privilege of the few did not extend to all, and he sought to join us through a common history. Perhap...

Presents a series of obituaries and remembrances of the psychologist, Josef Bro?ek.

Presents reflections and observations about the life and contributions of Josef Maria Brožek. The author comments that Josef Brožek as a mentor was vitally concerned that the history of psychology take root institutionally. This obituary describes some of Brožek's efforts toward that end. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

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Despite the widespread respect among psychologists for Skinner himself, scientific psychology has paradoxically not yet granted the same kind of status and recognition to the tradition of laboratory work he initiated. The operant laboratory of the 1950s led to applications in education, mental health, and organizational behavior. However, the publi...

In this paper, we take as an example a group of female doctoral students,, which was formed at the Department of Psychology at the University of Berlin, between 1923 and 1933. ' In Berlin of the twenties around Kurt Lewin, a group was formed by the students and colleagues who did 'dissertations under him and published them. Among Lewin's sixteen do...

During the Romantic period from about 1790 to 1840, Naturphilosophie exercised an ambivalent influence on the medical disciplines. In the early Romantic period, it provided a goal of unity of knowledge, an increase in organic images of the world, and numerous theories of science.1 Yet these same ideas came under heavy criticism in the late Romantic...

My goal is to follow and elucidate the evolution of William James's theory of knowledge (i.e., the various kinds of knowledge and how they are acquired) / weighs the influence of the philosophers Chauncey Wright, Charles S. Pierce, and Hermann Lotze on James's maturing theory / points out the similar interests of philosophers and psychologists in c...

In the 1960’s positivist accounts of scientific explanation relied on axiomatization, justification, and deductive reconstructions. Since the 1970’s, postpositivist philosophy of science has rejected axiomatization, replaced justification with discoveiy, posited incommensurable paradigms instead of deductive explanations, and made history the sourc...

Commemorates G. M. Haslerud, who died suddenly on April 10, 1990. In his doctoral dissertation (1934) he addressed free and prescribed maze patterns in rats, pointing to a lifetime interest in creative transfer. In 1972 he completed his magnum opus, Transfer, Memory, and Creativity: After-Learning as Perceptual Process, which reflects continuing co...

Commemorates G. M. Haslerud, who died suddenly on April 10, 1990. In his doctoral dissertation (1934) he addressed free and prescribed maze patterns in rats, pointing to a lifetime interest in creative transfer. In 1972 he completed his magnum opus, Transfer, Memory, and Creativity: After-Learning as Perceptual Process, which reflects continuing co...

Our commentators (especially Bechtel & Abrahamsen) reinforce what we ourselves suspect, that - though theories of change are available, none will be found that are sufficiently general and flexible to incorporate all the nuances in the history of psychology. Undoubtedly we are working at multiple levels when confronting the data of the history of p...

Commentaries on Woodward & Devonis, Toward a new understanding of scientific change: Applying Interfield science to the history of psychology.

We would first like to say that we are extremely gratified as much by the vigor and vitality of our commentators’ responses as by their material contributions to the theoretical basis of two disciplines, the history of psychology and psychology as a whole. Before replying to individuals, we feel that some clarification of our position in this dialo...

in 1842, in a revolutionary book reviewing the literature on pathology and therapy, Hermann Lotze offered detailed criticisms of hypotheses and theories about the circulatory and the autonomic nervous systems recently published by Johannes Mueller and Jakob Henle.

The return to James thus has new meaning for philosophers... Richard Rorty, James Edie, Sandra Rosenthal.

The history of scientific discipline formation in Germany played a special role in the fall of the wall, intellectually and institutionally. It emanated from philosophy departments in social science faculties in the German Democratic Republic, a relatively small "niche" as they say there, where one could do work around the edges of those fields of...

The history of scientific discipline formation in Germany played a special role in the fall of the wall, intellectually and institutionally. It emanated from philosophy departments in social science faculties in the German Democratic Republic, a relatively small “niche” as they say there, where one could do work around the edges of those fields of...

Behavioral biology and operant psychology have developed in parallel but separate paths since their origins in the 1930s. In the first three decades, both fields dealt with microscopic (or molecular) controlling variables and qualitative data. Since about 1960, both have primarily focused on macroscopic (or molar) controlling variables. Their share...

Factors in the interdisciplinary as well as international transfer included 1) the acceptance of foreign models, e.g., irritability from John Brown and Broussais; 2) instruments, like microscope and blood pressure manometer, and 3) methods, e.g., Fechner learned to measure mental events through functional relations from the French, Morgagni found d...

The essays in this volume are by specialists in intellectual history, history of science, and psychology, who focus on the social and cultural history of the discipline with an emphasis on ideas and institutions.The topics addressed include: the structure of psychological research before and during the ascendancy of behaviorism, the role of women i...

The question of the social commitment of the sociologist, and the scientist in general, has become a burning issue facing the sociology of East and West alike, — though it may take different forms. (P. C. Ludz, “Sociology”, in C. D Kernig (ed.), Marxism, communism, and Western society (New York, 1973), vol. viii, p. 46.)

It has become increasingly clear that Lotze's concept of function is not merely that of self-regulation of living systems. Nor is it the adaptation of thte organism to the environment in the sense of evolution by natural selection. The elaboration of Lotze's suggestions by Pierce (semiotic community), a mental development of natural science (James)...

Diplomacy in East German Psychology Review By: William R. Woodward Review of: Psychologie in der DDR By: Friedhart Klix, Adolf Kossakowski, and Walter Mäder ( Eds.) , Berlin, West Germany: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1980. 207 pp. $6.00 paper (DM 14,80) The German Democratic Republic, like its sister the Federal Republic of Germany,...

Prioritätsbehauptungen und Kontroversen sind bestechende Beweise dafür, dass die engagierten Parteien über die Bedeutsamkeit einer wissenschaftlichen “Entdeckung” übereinstimmen. Ihre wesentliche Bedeutung für die Geschichte der Wissenschaften besteht darin, die Gebiete der Meinungsübereinstimmung und Meinungsverschiedenheit innerhalb eines Forschu...

The use of history in the social science curriculum leads to a deepened understanding of the respective disciplines of anthropology, education, sociology, political science, psychology, and history of science. The use of history in the social sciences also leads to extradisciplinary interests in history, philosophy, and literature. Some highlights...

Divergent viewpoints regarding social behaviorism raise the more fundamental issue of just what social behaviorism is. One area of convergence is a functional feedback approach expressed in terms of "self-reinforcement." The core theme is the gradual process of operationally defining the laws of contiguity, effect, and observational learning. Three...