The Carlylian style of history, more commonly known as the "Great Man" approach, presented the "genius" as an individual worthy of celebration: history as hero worship. This style, which characterized the first wave of the history of psychology, has gone out of historiographic fashion. In its place is the "new history," which is marked by its external focus and privileging of social factors and cultural context in its explanations. This shift in historiographic sensibilities has also led to a revision in the appropriate subject matter for psychologist-historians. This article argues, in contrast, that it is possible to study eminent individuals without resorting to hagiography, and it presents various methods that could be used for this purpose. The aim of such an endeavor is to create a space for critically and historically informed perspectives on greatness and to suggest a reconsideration of the value of an "historical psychology".
Recovery is understood as living a life with hope, purpose, autonomy, productivity, and community engagement despite a mental illness. The aim of this study was to provide further information on the psychometric properties of the Person-in-Recovery and Provider versions of the Revised Recovery Self-Assessment (RSA-R), a widely used measure of recovery orientation. Data from 654 individuals were analyzed, 519 of whom were treatment providers (63.6% female), while 135 were inpatients (10.4% female) of a Canadian tertiary-level psychiatric hospital. Confirmatory and exploratory techniques were used to investigate the factor structure of both versions of the instrument. Results of the confirmatory factor analyses showed that none of the four theoretically plausible models fit the data well. Principal component analyses could not replicate the structure obtained by the scale developers either and instead resulted in a five-component solution for the Provider and a four-component solution for the Person-in-Recovery version. When considering the results of a parallel analysis, the number of components to retain dropped to two for the Provider version and one for the Person-in-Recovery version. We can conclude that the RSA-R requires further revision to become a psychometrically sound instrument for assessing recovery-oriented practices in an inpatient mental health-care setting.
Many argue that current categorical personality disorder (PD) classification systems should be more dimensional and consider personality traits. The present study examined whether a brief PD screening tool, the Standardized Assessment of Personality: Abbreviated Scale (SAPAS) primarily screened for traits of low emotional stability, low extraversion, and low agreeableness, rather than PD per se. A general community sample (n = 237) completed the SAPAS, a personality trait measure, and the International Personality Disorder Examination (IPDE) screening questionnaire. Regressions showed that the SAPAS provided substantial incremental validity over personality trait scores in predicting total IPDE scores, indicating that the SAPAS captures variance unique to PD, rather than just extremes of general disposition. The SAPAS is an empirically valid rapid PD screen for nonclinical populations, correctly identifying 78% of individuals who screen positively for PD on the IPDE. However, the SAPAS was not effective for screening antisocial PD, limiting its utility in forensic settings.
Just a few short decades ago, an area explicitly called feminist psychology did not exist (Stewart & Dottolo, 2006). Psychology of women courses and the materials needed to teach them did not appear until the early 1970s, and as Unger (2010) has shown, some of these earliest materials were not particularly feminist. Although today's students may not realize it, even the increased presence of women in the discipline is a fairly recent phenomenon. In 1960, only 17.5% of all doctoral degrees in psychology in the United States were awarded to women. By the year 2004, the proportion of women receiving doctorates in the field had risen to 67.4% (Women's Programs Office, American Psychological Association, 2006). Female students are now the majority in most psychology classrooms in North America. However, despite this shift, in the increasingly antifeminist, neoliberal environment that surrounds us, the future of courses and programs on women and gender, especially feminist ones, is at risk.Given this context, it seems especially important to educate students about the short history, but long past, of women and feminism in psychology. Even though feminist psychology did not coalesce until the 1970s, women (many of whom identified as feminists) have long been active and important contributors to psychology. Their voices and stories went largely undocumented until the 1970s when feminist activism brought their contributions to light. Psychology's Feminist Voices (www.fe ministvoices.com) is a unique multimedia digital archive that we have developed to highlight both the history and the current status of women and feminism in psychology. It is an advocacy tool for feminist psychology as well as an educational resource for instructors who want to include contextualized material about gender and feminism in their courses. Here, we give a brief history of the project and then present the teaching resources we have developed to help bring Psychology's Feminist Voices into the classroom. Psychology's Feminist Voices: A Short HistoryIn 2004, concerned about both the future and the past of feminism in psychology, I (A.R.) began an oral history project to collect and preserve the narratives of the women and men who strove to bring feminism to psychology in the 1970s. The project started modestly, but its greater potential soon became apparent: Instead of a preservation project with only a handful of early participants, why not expand it to explore the dynamic relationship between feminism and psychology as experienced by the very people who live it in their personal and professional lives? In addition to life narratives, I became interested in further questions: What was it like to be a feminist in psychology, then and now? How did our interview participants develop their feminist identities? How does their feminism enter their work? What do they see as the persistent challenges and future directions for the field? These questions became part of the interview protocol as the oral histories continued. The research team grew and the...
Feminist psychology began as an avowedly political project with an explicit social change agenda. However, over the last two decades, a number of critics have argued that feminist psychology has become mired in an epistemological impasse where positivist commitments effectively mute its political project, rendering the field acceptable to mainstream psychology yet shorn of its transformative vision. In this article, we explore the complexity of allying positivism with a transformative project using two illustrative examples from feminist psychology's history. Both Naomi Weisstein, whose work was catalytic in the creation of feminist psychology in the 1970s, and Ethel Tobach, who has consistently fought against sexism, racism, and other forms of injustice as both scientist and citizen, have remained committed to the scientific ideal without losing sight of their political projects. An examination of their efforts reveals the vital necessity, but ultimate insufficiency, of this position for creating large scale social change as well as a need for constant vigilance to the politics of knowledge in which science—and feminism—are embedded.
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