Encyclopedia of Psychology - About | Introduction

Psychology is one of the most fascinating fields of study. Almost everyone seems interested in understanding his or her own behavior, as well as the actions of others. Psychology is, by far, the most popular of the social and behavioral sciences and one of the most attractive to those who are interested in knowing more about people and their behavior. In college and universities, psychology has been one of the most popular majors for over three decades, and students are more likely to take an elective course in psychology than one from any other field. Not surprisingly, psychology has also become a popular high school offering.

Initially, psychology courses at the secondary school level tried to meet the needs of rapidly maturing adolescents who were interested in the changes they were experiencing in themselves and in their relationships with others—family, friends, the world of adults. We are living in times of dramatic social change. Each of us continually faces new challenges about how we will make our place in the world. As the discipline of psychology matured, adjustment courses gave way to substantive content courses that offered not just psychology's latest findings about developmental and identity issues, but also featured those more traditional areas of cognitive, experimental, physiological, and social psychology. These courses were joined by newly developed offerings such as neuropsychology and psycholinguistics. The advances in the scientific side of psychology were paralleled by the remarkable growth of counseling, clinical, and school psychology.

To keep up with the rapidly expanding field, the newly revised second edition of the Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology has added about a third more entries and biographies. Coverage includes the key concepts on which the science is built, as well as major theoretical advances in psychology. Clinical information is broadly covered, noting the various psychological theories and techniques currently in use and the scientific evidence that supports then. Biographical profiles of major figures in the field of psychology are included, ranging from the earliest historical pioneers to current clinicians.

Psychology is one of our youngest sciences. People first looked at the stars to predict and control their destiny and the science of astronomy was born. Mathematics was necessary to count and measure, and eventually the physical sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology, emerged. The study of human psychology, however, developed later. It has only been a bit over a century since scientists and philosophers turned their eyes from the planets to people and tried to understand human behavior in a systematic, scientific way. In the late l9th century, philosophers and physiologists began to examine the ways people perceive and interact with the world around them. How do individuals use their senses of sight, hearing, and touch to make sense of the world? How do people remember what has happened to them or know how to plan for the future?

In the late second half of the 1800s, a number of young North American men and a few women traveled to Germany to study with Wilhelm Wundt, who had established a laboratory and the first graduate program of study in psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany. They returned to teach psychology and train other students in the major universities of this country with the intent of quantifying individual differences and important elements of human perception and memory.

About the same time (1896), Lightner Witmer established a Psychological Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania to help children who were having difficulty in school.

Being a psychologist, he assumed that his new profession—dedicated to learning and memory—would help him assist children who were having trouble reading, writing, spelling, and remembering information. Unfortunately, Witmer could find no help from the complex, theoretical notions within the experimental laboratories, and he turned to schoolteachers and social workers for practical advice.

Thus began the long struggle between the scientific study and practice of psychology, theory and action. Scientists want to know that the data that they gather in their experiments are valid and replicable (that is, others pursuing the same questions with appropriate methods would find the same results). They sometimes feel that clinicians, for example, use psychotherapy techniques that have not been proven to be useful and may even be harmful. Practitioners, on the other hand, faced with pressing and immediate problems of clients who are anxious, depressed, or psychotic, need immediate treatments to relieve suffering and may use methods that have not have been fully proven in the laboratories.

The earliest psychologists worked primarily with children, usually those who were delinquent or having trouble in school. They were particularly taken with assessing intelligence and translated a test developed by a Frenchman, Alfred Binet, to quantify "mental age." Unfortunately, they moved well beyond the limitations of the test that had been designed to identify children who were having trouble in school. They began testing soldiers recruited for the First World War and immigrants who wanted to come to this country. According to their tests, they found almost half of the young, white male recruits and some 80% of Eastern European immigrants to be "morons." This led them to rethink the uses of intelligence tests, especially because of opinions like that of journalist Walter Lippman, who recommended that the "intelligence testers and their tests should be sunk without warning in the… sea." But serious harm had been done. Some six million immigrants were denied entrance into this country, and intelligence testing laid the base for human eugenics laws that allowed individuals who were found "intellectually unfit" to be sterilized.

Nonetheless, psychology became something of a national mania in the 1920s. With the introduction of psychoanalysis into this country, people wanted to "adjust" through self-examination and the probing of the unconscious. The scientific psychologists were dismayed at the excesses of pseudopsychologists, whose ranks included mind readers and charlatans. Psychological clinicians were concerned as well and took steps to develop a standard of ethics and ways of identifying appropriately trained psychologists.

With the advent of the Second World War, psychologists joined the military effort and were surprised themselves by how much they had to offer. Human factors psychologists designed airplane cockpits and the lighting on runways that we still use today. Gestalt psychologists taught American citizens how to identify enemy planes should they fly overhead. B. F. Skinner taught pigeons to guide missiles toward enemy targets. Psychologists worked for the Office of Strategic Services (which eventually became the CIA) to develop propaganda and disinformation. This group also developed assessments to determine who might be good officers (or spies). On the battlefield, clinicians were helping troops who were experiencing "traumatic neurosis, " originally called "shell shock" in the First World War and now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. When the soldiers returned home, they led therapy groups for wounded military personnel.

At the end of the Second World War, the National Research Council urged the American Psychological Association (APA) to heal the schism between scientists and clinicians and reorganize with full membership benefits for all doctoral psychologists. The Veteran's Hospitals, in particular, needed well-trained personnel to provide mental health services for their patients. A major 1949 conference held in Boulder, Colorado established standards of education and training for clinical psychologists. Their recommendations were that clinical psychologists should be trained as generalists who were both scientists and clinicians. Doctoral students would complete at least a year of internship and receive the Ph. D. (doctor of philosophy) degree. These standards are still in place today, although newer of training are available for students who want to place more emphasis on practice and less on doing research. In addition to university graduate programs, a large number of professional schools have been established, often offering a Psy. D (doctor of psychology) degree. Currently, some 4,000 students graduate each year with a doctoral degree in psychology and perhaps three times that many receive a master's degree. The overwhelming majority of these graduates go into clinical or applied work, although changing conditions in the health fields, such as the growth of HMOs, have raised concerns about job opportunities for clinical psychologists.

A field as broad as psychology, which stretches from the study of brain cells to that of prison cells, is an active, argumentative, and exciting adventure that offers opportunities in science, practice, and social policy. Most of the pressing economic and social issues of our generation, such as the environment, health needs, poverty, and violence, will only be alleviated if we understand the ways in which people create or creatively solve the problems that we bring upon ourselves. The student who is interested in unraveling the secrets of the human brain to see the mind at work, who is fascinated about how children grow up and become competent adults, who is dedicated to bringing people together to resolve conflict, who is committed to helping people with physical, emotional, or behavioral difficulties, or who is challenged by the desire to develop social policy in the public interest is welcomed in psychology. We hope this encyclopedia will provide useful information that will help students and others understand this fascinating field and its opportunities.

Bonnie R. Strickland, Ph.D.

Bonnie Ruth Strickland received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from The Ohio State University in 1962. She has been on the faculties of Emory University and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst as a teacher, researcher, administrator, clinician, and consultant. A Diplomate in Clinical Psychology, she has also been in practice for over 35 years. Dr. Strickland has served as President of the American Psychological Association, the Division of Clinical Psychology and the American Association for Applied and Preventive Psychology; she was a Founder and on the first Board of Directors of the American Psychological Society. An advocate for minority concerns, she has published more than a hundred scholarly works including two Citation Classics in psychology.