Although exposure to inescapable shocks induced analgesia in rats, the analgesia was not manifest 24 hours later. A brief reexposure to shock, however, restored the analgesia. This reexposure to shock had an analgesic effect only if the rats had been shocked 24 hours previously. Further, long-term analgesic effects depended on the controllability of the original shocks and not on shock exposure per se. Implications of these results for learned helplessness and stress-induced analgesia are discussed.
American psychologists faced great difficulty at the turn of the century as they tried to erect and maintain boundaries between their science and its "pseudoscientific" counterparts-spiritualism and psychic research. The public solicited their opinions regarding spiritualism, and a few psychologists wanted to conduct serious investigations of spiritualistic and psychic phenomena. However, many psychologists believed that such investigation risked the scientific reputation of their infant discipline. Because they could not readily avoid the topic, some psychologists studied spiritualistic and psychic phenomena in order to prove them fraudulent or explain them via naturalistic causes, and others developed a new subdiscipline, the psychology of deception and belief. This article argues that psychologists used their battles with spiritualists to legitimize psychology as a science and create a new role for themselves as guardians of the scientific worldview.
Since its inception, experimental psychology has occupied a precaria ous place in the hierarchy of the sciences. It is well-known that whereas sociology sat at the peak of the Comtian hierarchy, psychology was not even on the pyramid, having been deemed incapable of becoming a science because its subject matter was unquantifiable and its methods mired in a metaphysical morass. Psychology has never quite lived this down and, as
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