Re: [tips] History Systems
In educational settings, nothing signals improvement like a name change. You can be assured that the content changed significantly. Michael T. Scoles, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology Counseling University of Central Arkansas Conway, AR 72035 Phone: 501-450-5418 Fax: 501-450-5424 AVID: UCA dedicates itself to Academic Vitality, Integrity, and Diversity. Christopher Green chri...@yorku.ca 9/24/2014 2:39 PM ( mailto:chri...@yorku.ca) On Sep 24, 2014, at 10:28 AM, Lisa Gassin lgas...@olivet.edu wrote: Thanks to all who responded! Any other thoughts will be appreciated, too. One other thought: no one in the know uses history and systems anymore. That was a phrase popularized in the 1950s (though it may date back to the 1930s) that marks a course as one that hasn't been rethought in a very long time. Plain history of psychology (or sometimes history theory, which was a 1980s phenomenon) signals a more contemporary approach. Chris - Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M6C 1G4 Canada chri...@yorku.ca --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: micha...@uca.edu. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=357701.a768e95c4963686e69b47febf8aa657an=Tl=tipso=38505 (It may be necessary to cut and paste the above URL if the line is broken) or send a blank email to leave-38505-357701.a768e95c4963686e69b47febf8aa6...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@mail-archive.com. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5n=Tl=tipso=38514 or send a blank email to leave-38514-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
[tips] History System
The response from my department has been: a rose by any other name I argue that it's not the same and would like more input from the list for this topic that omitting systems is a significant departure. I have some ideas but they are probably not sufficiently strong to sway the rose by any other name folks. Finally another colleague asked me to ask the list about theories of personality. It is currently taught, pretty much, as the history of the theories of personality with an extremely strong emphasis on psychodynamic and humanistic approaches. Are there no 21st century theories? Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph. D. Professor, Psychological Sciences University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110-2492 tay...@sandiego.edu Subject: Re: History Systems From: Christopher Green chri...@yorku.ca Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 15:39:20 -0400 One other thought: no one in the know uses history and systems anymore. That was a phrase popularized in the 1950s (though it may date back to the 1930s) that marks a course as one that hasn't been rethought in a very long time. Plain history of psychology (or sometimes history theory, which was a 1980s phenomenon) signals a more contemporary approach. Chris - Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M6C 1G4 Canada chri...@yorku.ca --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@mail-archive.com. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5n=Tl=tipso=38515 or send a blank email to leave-38515-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
re: [tips] History Systems
On Thu, 25 Sep 2014 08:25:33 -0700, Annette Taylor wrote: The response from my department has been: a rose by any other name I argue that it's not the same and would like more input from the list for this topic that omitting systems is a significant departure. I have some ideas but they are probably not sufficiently strong to sway the rose by any other name folks. In these matters I generally defer to Chris Green's knowledge and expertise but one can evaluate for oneself whether a course title like History and Systems makes any sense. Consider: (1) What is the definition of a system? If one uses Edna Heidbeder's classic book Seven Psychologies, then one can claim that once upon a time in psychology there were several theoretical-metatheoretical-philosophical positions that guided the study and interpretation of psychological phenomena, such as: (a) Structuralism (first Wundt's, later Titchener's) (b) Functionalism (such as Dewey's) (c) Pragmatism (somewhat William James-ish, Peirce-ish) (d) Dynamic psychology (after Robert S. Woodworth) (e) Behaviorism (different flavors depending upon the the expert being used as the authority to guide thinking) (f) Gestalt Psychology (g) Psychoanalytic theory/practice All of the above can be considered a school of thought in that they tried to create an interpretative framework for doing psychology. In some cases, the proponents were located at a single institution or the authority figure was a specific school, giving rise to the notion of, say, the Chicago school. I think that it is fair to say that today the major distinctions involve whether is primarily focused on: (i) Behavior (ii) Cognition (iii) Neuroscience These are not schools in the sense used by Heidbeder and others, rather, these represent area of focus that one believes is of greatest relevance to the psychological phenomena that one is interested in. One can focus on only one area (e.g., old school behaviorists who follow Skinner in ignoring cognitive and neuroscience) or some combination. Researchers who are methodological behaviorists (i.e., they believe that cognitive and neuropsychological processes have to be explicitly linked to observable behavior in order to be valid theories) obviously rely heavily on behavior while others may not (e.g., theorists who use computer simulation of cognitive processing as proof of concept initially -- whether animals and/or humans engage in such processing is a later question). (2) One could argue that the critical distinction today is whether or not cognitive and brain processes should be considered some form of computational process, either rule and symbol systems (e.g., the Atkinson Shiffrin model of memory, Newell Simon theories of problem solving and cognition, Chomsky's syntactic theory of language) or connectionist/neural network models (i.e., artificial networks of idealized neurons structured to perform particular tasks, such as NetTalk, a three layer neural network that learns the rules of correspondence between printed text and it spoken version, and the various PDP models by Rumelhart, McClelland, and others). Even purely behavioral approaches are incorporated into a computational framework if one thinks of classical and operant conditioning as forms of associative learning -- this can be modeled by a neural network, thus, they are no longer noncognitive. A critical issue is whether the computational models we have are really adequate for psychological processing and what relationship they have to basic brain processes which they appear to mimic. The question is whether to use them as models and guides or to reject them as inadequate. The third way is to argue that hybrid models composed of rule and symbol system components and connectionist components provide better accounts than either one separate -- a situation similar to theories of color vision where in the 19th century one either supported a trichromaticity theory or an opponent process theory and it is not until the mid 20th century the Hurvich and Jameson showed that both were needed. The computational perspective goes back to the 19th century in psychology and one can use the phone books of readings on Neurocomputing as a guide to the history and theoretical developments that have come to influence most of contemporary psychology. Finally another colleague asked me to ask the list about theories of personality. It is currently taught, pretty much, as the history of the theories of personality with an extremely strong emphasis on psychodynamic and humanistic approaches. Are there no 21st century theories? Again, I defer to others with greater knowledge in issues of personality theory but I would point out two points to consider: (1) From a purely behavioral perspective, personality theory has little meaning given that behavior is seen as a function of its consequences and as an adaptation to one's environment. One has to assume either some cognitive mechanism for the
[tips] Time To Revise The Common Rule For Ethical Research?
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has an editorial by Susan Fiske and Robert Hauser that goes over revisions to the common rule to deal with situations like the Facebook study. The editorial can be read for free at: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/38/13675.full One wonders how research such as a content analysis of posts to Tips would be covered? -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@mail-archive.com. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5n=Tl=tipso=38519 or send a blank email to leave-38519-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
RE: [tips] Time To Revise The Common Rule For Ethical Research?
Content analysis of TIPS would be pretty non-invasive but I have wondered if certain TIPSters are conducting a longitudinal study of responses to various provocative stimuli posted regularly to the list over the course of many years. I haven't seen any publications come of it yet so probably not (or maybe it hasn't been published because journal editors feel it violates ethical guidelines for manipulating emotional responses of TIPSters). Rick Dr. Rick Froman Professor of Psychology Box 3519 John Brown University 2000 W. University Siloam Springs, AR 72761 rfro...@jbu.edu (479) 524-7295 http://bit.ly/DrFroman -Original Message- From: Mike Palij [mailto:m...@nyu.edu] The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has an editorial by Susan Fiske and Robert Hauser that goes over revisions to the common rule to deal with situations like the Facebook study. The editorial can be read for free at: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/38/13675.full One wonders how research such as a content analysis of posts to Tips would be covered? --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@mail-archive.com. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5n=Tl=tipso=38520 or send a blank email to leave-38520-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
[tips] Do You Know A Nomophobe?
I admit that I did not know what a nomophobe was until the iPhone 6/6+ feature of turning the iPhone into an iPod (i.e., it had disconnected the phone from the telephone network among things). ABC News has a brief article on this; see: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/nomophobes-cope-ios-bugs-apple-iphone/story?id=25751532 So, if any of your students appear in class sweaty, jittery, and distracted, it could be that they're going through iPhone withdrawal and are suffering from nomophobia (no more mobile phone phobia). The fastest solution might be to get them an android phone. ;-) -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu P.S. Have not done, not currently doing, and not planning on doing content analysis studies of posts to Tips. Now, Psychteacher ;-) --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@mail-archive.com. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5n=Tl=tipso=38522 or send a blank email to leave-38522-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
Re: [tips] History System
I defer to Chris but... I taught the class for ages, but no longer. It is still called History and Systems here. I don't think there is much in the name, and no colleague has mentioned this new trend. I am older and out of touch with pop trends in psych ha. I think systems or schools of thought is still fine. Should we start a discussion about the mis-use or understanding psychologists have regarding what counts as a scientific theory? The class today (we have two faculty who do it most) may involve more emphasis on cross-cultural issues and the nasty way Western psychologists ignored non-western epistemological views, or a more traditional perspective emphasizing historical/philosophical perspectives. Regardless, students are expected to participate in discussions and produce a paper looking at current psych topics/theories, and show integration with the historical/philosophical background for such. I haven't seen the latest reviews of our class but it appears to serve the function of a capstone class as we wish regardless of who is teaching the class. My area of emphasis is Social-Personality and I have taught the Personality class most of my teaching career. I am now on a reduced load approaching retirement, and that was one class I was happy to give up. I would love to teach a class with emphasis on current theoretical ideas and research. However, the class we have is the old-fashioned perspectives that go from Freud to humanistic ideas, Cattell and Eysenck and trait views, then near the end, Skinner, Rotter and Bandura. The scientific utility of these perspectives vary considerably. I do stress also, what I think Mike P. noted, Skinnerian views of personality might question the common way personality has been conceptualized. I would love some effort to alter the usual psych curriculum and develop a class with some appreciation of historical contributions, but with emphasis on what might be actually going on in the field. And so it goes... - Original Message - From: Annette Taylor tay...@sandiego.edu To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) tips@fsulist.frostburg.edu Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2014 11:24:49 AM Subject: [tips] History System The response from my department has been: a rose by any other name I argue that it's not the same and would like more input from the list for this topic that omitting systems is a significant departure. I have some ideas but they are probably not sufficiently strong to sway the rose by any other name folks. Finally another colleague asked me to ask the list about theories of personality. It is currently taught, pretty much, as the history of the theories of personality with an extremely strong emphasis on psychodynamic and humanistic approaches. Are there no 21st century theories? Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph. D. Professor, Psychological Sciences University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110-2492 tay...@sandiego.edu Subject: Re: History Systems From: Christopher Green chri...@yorku.ca Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 15:39:20 -0400 One other thought: no one in the know uses history and systems anymore. That was a phrase popularized in the 1950s (though it may date back to the 1930s) that marks a course as one that hasn't been rethought in a very long time. Plain history of psychology (or sometimes history theory, which was a 1980s phenomenon) signals a more contemporary approach. Chris - Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M6C 1G4 Canada chri...@yorku.ca --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: peter...@svsu.edu. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13445.e3edca0f6e68bfb76eaf26a8eb6dd94bn=Tl=tipso=38515 or send a blank email to leave-38515-13445.e3edca0f6e68bfb76eaf26a8eb6dd...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@mail-archive.com. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5n=Tl=tipso=38523 or send a blank email to leave-38523-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
Re: [tips] History Systems
To be clear, I don't think that too much hangs on a name. One can teach a crappy course under a cool name, no doubt, and vice versa. I think the problem that was being addressed by this change is that history systems signalled (and often was) a course that was centrally focused on intellectual issues (cognitive resources, as historians of science like to say) to the exclusion of social and material resources (e.g., institutional developments with character of the university; social influences such as universal public education, immigration, labor strife; the new opportunities afforded by technological developments not specifically related to psychology or the laboratory (e.g., electrification, telephony)). As the old intellectual history fell out of favor generally, ( in the 1970s) history courses as taught in economics, psychology, medicine, and philosophy department became increasingly anachronistic. The change to just history or history and theory was picked up by those who wanted to bring newer, more inclusive historiographic trends into their courses. If you're tempted to dismiss these changes as mere fashion or dismiss them as post-modernism or some such, I would put it to you that trying to teach the history of, say, intelligence testing without teaching at least a bit of the history of immigration and ethnic strife in turn-of-the-20th-century American cities is to simply miss the reason intelligence tests became so popular so fast in the US (as compared to, say, France -- see John Carson's book _The Measure of Merit_ on this last issue). So, it doesn't really matter what you call your course, but if you want those whose research specialty is the history of psychology to presume (perhaps unfairly) that you're teaching a course in the style of 25 or 30 or even 40 years ago, calling it history systems will probably do the trick. Best, Chris ... Christopher D Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 chri...@yorku.ca http://www.yorku.ca/christo On Sep 25, 2014, at 12:43 PM, Mike Palij m...@nyu.edu wrote: In these matters I generally defer to Chris Green's knowledge and expertise but one can evaluate for oneself whether a course title like History and Systems makes any sense. Consider: (1) What is the definition of a system? If one uses Edna Heidbeder's classic book Seven Psychologies, then one can claim that once upon a time in psychology there were several theoretical-metatheoretical-philosophical positions that guided the study and interpretation of psychological phenomena, such as: (a) Structuralism (first Wundt's, later Titchener's) (b) Functionalism (such as Dewey's) (c) Pragmatism (somewhat William James-ish, Peirce-ish) (d) Dynamic psychology (after Robert S. Woodworth) (e) Behaviorism (different flavors depending upon the the expert being used as the authority to guide thinking) (f) Gestalt Psychology (g) Psychoanalytic theory/practice All of the above can be considered a school of thought in that they tried to create an interpretative framework for doing psychology. In some cases, the proponents were located at a single institution or the authority figure was a specific school, giving rise to the notion of, say, the Chicago school. I think that it is fair to say that today the major distinctions involve whether is primarily focused on: (i) Behavior (ii) Cognition (iii) Neuroscience These are not schools in the sense used by Heidbeder and others, rather, these represent area of focus that one believes is of greatest relevance to the psychological phenomena that one is interested in. One can focus on only one area (e.g., old school behaviorists who follow Skinner in ignoring cognitive and neuroscience) or some combination. Researchers who are methodological behaviorists (i.e., they believe that cognitive and neuropsychological processes have to be explicitly linked to observable behavior in order to be valid theories) obviously rely heavily on behavior while others may not (e.g., theorists who use computer simulation of cognitive processing as proof of concept initially -- whether animals and/or humans engage in such processing is a later question). (2) One could argue that the critical distinction today is whether or not cognitive and brain processes should be considered some form of computational process, either rule and symbol systems (e.g., the Atkinson Shiffrin model of memory, Newell Simon theories of problem solving and cognition, Chomsky's syntactic theory of language) or connectionist/neural network models (i.e., artificial networks of idealized neurons structured to perform particular tasks, such as NetTalk, a three layer neural network that learns the rules of correspondence between printed text and it spoken version, and the various PDP models by Rumelhart, McClelland, and others). Even purely behavioral approaches are incorporated into a computational
Re: [tips] History Systems
A few other comments: On Sep 25, 2014, at 12:43 PM, Mike Palij m...@nyu.edu wrote: (a) Structuralism (first Wundt's, later Titchener's) Never Wundt's. An invention of Titchener's, picked up as fact by T's student Boring. (b) Functionalism (such as Dewey's) Dewey never adopted the term, though his student, Angell, did. The term originated as a term of derision from Titchener. (c) Pragmatism (somewhat William James-ish, Peirce-ish) Hmm. Is pragmatism really part of the history of psychology? I used to think of Functionalism as the psychological counterpart to Pragmatism, but Angell -- the leading self-described Functionalist -- published deep doubts about the adequacy of Pragmatism. Although James picked up from Peirce the name of Pragmatism for his own philosophy in the late 1890s, Peirce became so horrified by came to be attached to the term that he changed the name of his own philosophy to Pragmaticism, a term he described in 1905 as being so ugly that it will be safe from kidnappers. (d) Dynamic psychology (after Robert S. Woodworth) Heidbredder seems to have been wrong about this. There was no school, there was just Woodworth, who has long since been assimilated to the Columbia branch of Functionalism (and who argued in the 1930s that the vast majority of psychologist belonged to no school -- a very good reason NOT to organize your history of psychology course around schools). (e) Behaviorism (different flavors depending upon the the expert being used as the authority to guide thinking) Which is why I call this unit of my Hist of psych course Behaviorisms (f) Gestalt Psychology (g) Psychoanalytic theory/practice Americans got so keen about the school as the fundamental structure of a scholarly discipline, that they began applying it willy nilly to things far outside of their experience. Gestalt -- maybe, but it was so badly misunderstood by Americans (who mostly never read the original German works) that it may deserve its own separate kind of treatment. Psychoanalysis? Interestingly, there was no real *school* here at all, just Freud's parlor (and later, bigger rooms elsewhere). It was kind of the anti-school (although American applied psychology of all kind mostly developed outside of schools too. Yes, there are exceptions like late Münsterberg, Harry Hollingworth, and Walter Dill Scott). Best, Chris ... Christopher D Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 chri...@yorku.ca http://www.yorku.ca/christo --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@mail-archive.com. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5n=Tl=tipso=38534 or send a blank email to leave-38534-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
RE:[tips] History System
Annettte It's been my experience that many faculty have had such a course at the undergraduate or even graduate level. So they think they know it, well enough. That's what leads to many of the rose comments. Alas, we've had to bank the course till we get past the rapid staffing changes we've been going through (maybe next year!). A lot of those people are also convinced they can teach it just as well as someone with extensive experience and readings. Including the, Anyone can teach that, comments. Tim ___ Timothy O. Shearon, PhD Professor and Chairperson, Department of Psychology The College of Idaho Caldwell, ID 83605 email: tshea...@collegeofidaho.edu teaching: intro to neuropsychology; psychopharmacology; general; vision -Original Message- From: Annette Taylor [mailto:tay...@sandiego.edu] Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2014 9:25 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [tips] History System The response from my department has been: a rose by any other name I argue that it's not the same and would like more input from the list for this topic that omitting systems is a significant departure. I have some ideas but they are probably not sufficiently strong to sway the rose by any other name folks. Finally another colleague asked me to ask the list about theories of personality. It is currently taught, pretty much, as the history of the theories of personality with an extremely strong emphasis on psychodynamic and humanistic approaches. Are there no 21st century theories? Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph. D. Professor, Psychological Sciences University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110-2492 tay...@sandiego.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@mail-archive.com. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5n=Tl=tipso=38550 or send a blank email to leave-38550-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
