Animal Tales: Observations of the Emotions in American Experimental Psychology, 1890–1940

Rose, Anne C.

doi:10.1002/jhbs.21562

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 66 publications

(50 reference statements)

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“…Laboratory practice in both nations disregarded motives, as being unobservable, easily displaced, or both (Danziger, ; Nicholson, , pp. 40–43; Rose, , pp. 304–306).…”

Section: Transatlantic Crossingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…All had a Harvard link. Münsterberg formally directed the Emerson Hall psychology laboratory that Yerkes managed, and Hamilton was Yerkes's doctoral student (Hamilton, , p. 13; Rose, , p. 304). Cannon and Wheeler commuted daily from Cambridge to Boston, where each had a laboratory located, respectively, in Harvard's medical school and the Bussey Institute of biological research.…”

Section: Transatlantic Crossingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Earlier, many American psychologists’ practical tests emphasized mastery of learned skills in animals: a raccoon tinkered with a latch to escape from a box, or a pig identified the door leading to food among multiple entrances arranged in a predictable order. Taking for granted the pragmatist's core assumption about natural will, prewar psychologists focused experimentally on mental development (Rose, , pp. 301, 306–308).…”

Section: Academic Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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William McDougall, American Psychologist: A Reconsideration of Nature‐nurture Debates in the Interwar United States

Rose¹

2016

J History Behavioral Science

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The British-born psychologist William McDougall (1871-1938) spent more than half of his academic career in the United States, holding successive positions after 1920 at Harvard and Duke universities. Scholarly studies uniformly characterize McDougall's relationship with his New World colleagues as contentious: in the standard view, McDougall's theory of innate drives clashed with the Americans' experimentation into learned habits. This essay argues instead that rising American curiosity about inborn appetites-an interest rooted in earlier pragmatic philosophy and empirically investigated by interwar scientists-explains McDougall's migration to the United States and his growing success there. A review of McDougall's intellectual and professional ties, evolving outside public controversy, highlights persistent American attention to natural agency and complicates arguments voiced by contemporaries in favor of nurture.

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“…Laboratory practice in both nations disregarded motives, as being unobservable, easily displaced, or both (Danziger, ; Nicholson, , pp. 40–43; Rose, , pp. 304–306).…”

Section: Transatlantic Crossingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Transatlantic Crossingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Academic Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

William McDougall, American Psychologist: A Reconsideration of Nature‐nurture Debates in the Interwar United States

Rose¹

2016

J History Behavioral Science

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“…The topic of emotion often was minimized in early experimental psychology (Rose, 2012). In 1914 Watson believed that mental states such as emotions were essentially internal states and not subject to behavioral (i.e., scientific) analysis.…”

Section: Comparative Psychology Before 1913mentioning

confidence: 99%

John B. Watson’s Early Work and Comparative Psychology

Dewsbury¹

2013

RMAC

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John B. Watson's 1913 "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It," the so-called behaviorist manifesto, is examined in the context of its time and of its influence on the history of comparative psychology. The key ideas in the article were, a.) reliance on the experimental method, b.) prediction and control as goals of psychology, c.) elimination of the construct of consciousness d.) the importance of continuity of species, e.) direction of knowledge not solely toward humans, and f.) a role for instinctive behavior. These ideas can be seen to have been present before Watson and in the literature of his day. The article itself did not have a great immediate impact on psychology. Comparative psychology around 1913 had been strong but was entering a period of partial dormancy from which it recovered during the 1920s and 1930s. It was then that Watson' early work, and other work of the time, had their greatest impact. Comparative psychology matured in subsequent decades. The impact of behaviorism varied through different phases of its development. Watson's primary role was to integrate assorted ideas so as to form a fairly coherent package that he, a master salesman, could label and promulgate first to other psychologists and then to a broader public. His specific influences on comparative psychology are sometimes difficult to evaluate.

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“…Indeed, as indexed by his appeal to the reader's commonplace experience of desire quoted above, consideration of ‘wants’ tended, as a rule, to overflow the floodgates of anti-mentalism. Neo-behaviorism thus appears as a rarely noticed tributary (see also Rose, 2012) into the postwar sciences of emotion (Biess and Gross, 2014; Dror et al ., 2016), and its heirs in the neurosciences. This leads to a broader historiographical point: despite the greater attention paid to his neo-behaviorist colleagues, it was Tolman's work that proved paradoxically instrumental to the shift to cognitive questions in midcentury psychology.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Maps of desire: Edward Tolman's drive theory of wants

Torracinta

2022

History of the Human Sciences

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Wants and desires are central to ordinary experience and to aesthetic, philosophical, and theological thought. Yet despite a burgeoning interest in the history of emotions research, their history as objects of scientific study has received little attention. This historiographical neglect mirrors a real one, with the retreat of introspection in the positivist human sciences of the early 20th century culminating in the relative marginalization of questions of psychic interiority. This article therefore seeks to explain an apparent paradox: the attempt to develop a comprehensive theory of ‘why … we want what we want’ in the 1940s by esteemed American ‘neo-behaviorist’ psychologist Edward Tolman – a proponent of a methodology famous for its prohibition on appeals to unobservable mental phenomena. Though chiefly known today for his theory of ‘cognitive maps’, Tolman also sought to map the contours of desire as such, integrating Freudian and behaviorist models of the ‘drives’ to develop a complex iconography of the universal structures of motivation. Close attention to Tolman's striking maps offers a compelling limit case for what could and could not be captured within an anti-mentalist framework, and illuminates an important precursor to theories of motivational ‘affect’ in the postwar cognitive and neurosciences. His work upsets a standard chronology that centers on the ‘cognitive revolution’ of the 1960s, and points to the significance of psychoanalysis to an earlier turn to cognitivism. Tolman concluded his theory pointed ‘in the direction of more socialism’ – a reminder of the politically labile anti-essentialism of behaviorism's commitment to mental plasticity.

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Animal Tales: Observations of the Emotions in American Experimental Psychology, 1890–1940

Cited by 4 publications

References 66 publications

William McDougall, American Psychologist: A Reconsideration of Nature‐nurture Debates in the Interwar United States

William McDougall, American Psychologist: A Reconsideration of Nature‐nurture Debates in the Interwar United States

John B. Watson’s Early Work and Comparative Psychology

Maps of desire: Edward Tolman's drive theory of wants

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