Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences最新文献

Ambivalent Tolman: Indirect Influence on Enactivism of Tolman's Sign-Gestaltism Through Merleau-Ponty 矛盾的托尔曼：梅洛-庞蒂对托尔曼符号格式主义行动主义的间接影响。

IF 0.5 3区历史学

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Pub Date : 2026-04-13 DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.70053

Hiroshi Matsui, Kohei Yanagawa

{"title":"Ambivalent Tolman: Indirect Influence on Enactivism of Tolman's Sign-Gestaltism Through Merleau-Ponty","authors":"Hiroshi Matsui, Kohei Yanagawa","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70053","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jhbs.70053","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Edward Tolman, an experimental psychologist renowned for his research on the “cognitive map” and “latent learning” in rats, pursued his career within the tradition of behaviorisms. In the history of psychology, he is positioned as a precursor to cognitivism. This is because the concepts he introduced as intervening variables were later interpreted as having a representational nature. On the other hand, the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty was also influenced by Tolman's concepts, particularly his theory of sign-Gestalt. Merleau-Ponty's ideas, especially as developed in <i>The Structure of Behavior</i>, have had a profound impact on the notion of embodiment within enactivism. Enactivism, as a school of thought opposing representationalism, sharply contrasts with cognitivism, which places Tolman at the intersection of two opposing intellectual currents. This paper, thus, reexamines Tolman's ambivalent nature, exploring how it arose and reassessing his ideas as a precursor not only to cognitivism but also <i>indirectly</i> to enactivism. We argue that Merleau-Ponty inherited Tolman's concept of sign-Gestalt as having a non-representational nature and utilized it within his relational account of behavior. While Tolman's own theoretical framework remained ontologically ambiguous, Merleau-Ponty recast his insights into a conception of behavior as a structured, embodied interaction between organism and environment. These reformulated insights subsequently provided a conceptual foundation for enactivist cognitive science, particularly in its emphasis on the co-constitution of perception and action, and the dynamic coupling of agent and environment. Tolman maintained a behaviorist outlook throughout his early career, but his writing often remained ambiguous; as a result, that ambiguity enabled his work to exert influence on two opposing intellectual traditions at once.</p>","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jhbs.70053","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147677533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Psychic Mechanics: The Foundational Role of Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch (1802–1896) in the Development of Psychophysics 心理力学：莫里茨·威廉·德罗维许（1802-1896）在心理物理学发展中的基础作用。

IF 0.5 3区历史学

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Pub Date : 2026-04-13 DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.70052

Giuseppe Guastamacchia

{"title":"Psychic Mechanics: The Foundational Role of Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch (1802–1896) in the Development of Psychophysics","authors":"Giuseppe Guastamacchia","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70052","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jhbs.70052","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This paper examines the pivotal role played by Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch (1802–1896) in the development of mathematical psychology, and his influence on the emergence of Fechner's psychophysics in 19th-century Germany. As a key figure in the Herbartian tradition in Leipzig, Drobisch refined Herbart's initial framework for applying mathematics to psychological phenomena while also addressing the fundamental theoretical challenges inherent in measuring intensive mental magnitudes. The study sheds light on how Drobisch's dual expertise in mathematics and philosophy enabled him to develop innovative methods for quantifying mental representations, most notably through his formulation of the “three-representation problem” as psychology's analog to celestial mechanics, and his mathematical treatment of qualitative color continua. By reconstructing the crucial yet overlooked connection between Drobisch's mathematical psychology and Gustav Theodor Fechner's psychophysics, this study sheds light on a critical chapter in the prehistory of experimental psychology, offering new perspectives on the mathematical foundations of modern behavioral sciences.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147677519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Member News. 成员的消息。

IF 0.5 3区历史学

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Pub Date : 2026-04-01 DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.70054

引用次数: 0

Interdisciplinarity in Transition: The Formation and Transformation of the Committee on Human Development, 1930s–1950s 转型中的跨学科：人类发展委员会的形成和转变，1930 -1950年。

IF 0.5 3区历史学

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Pub Date : 2026-03-31 DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.70051

Liping Wang, Zhengtao Zhang

{"title":"Interdisciplinarity in Transition: The Formation and Transformation of the Committee on Human Development, 1930s–1950s","authors":"Liping Wang, Zhengtao Zhang","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70051","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jhbs.70051","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>In 1929, Robert Hutchins became the president of the University of Chicago and one of his first reforms was to build the Committee on Child Development (CCD). The CCD came into existence when the nationwide Child Development Movement started waning. Hutchins and his old associates in the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial were interested in Child Development as a form of interdisciplinary social science, and their ideas greatly shaped the initial design of the Committee. Without wholehearted support from the department chairs, however, the CCD was eventually established as a compromise between the departments and the president. Into the late 1930s, the appointments made by the new divisional dean, Robert Redfield, opened new channels for cross-departmental collaboration. Under the chairmanship of Ralph Tyler, the Committee′s name was changed to Human Development (CHD) in 1940. Meanwhile, community studies became the central focus of the Committee, which reflected the societal concerns of restoring social order while war and social dissolution were impinging upon the country. This paper analyzes two modes of interdisciplinarity emerging in two distinct stages of the development of the Committee, which were contingent upon the changing university structure, the shifting interests of the foundations, and the visions of different generations of scholars.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147595354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

“The Way They Speak of Masters and Johnson”: The Rise and Disappearance of Sex Therapy, 1960–2000 “他们谈论马斯特斯和约翰逊的方式”：性治疗的兴起和消失，1960-2000。

IF 0.5 3区历史学

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Pub Date : 2026-03-07 DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.70049

Hannie Smolyanitsky

{"title":"“The Way They Speak of Masters and Johnson”: The Rise and Disappearance of Sex Therapy, 1960–2000","authors":"Hannie Smolyanitsky","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70049","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jhbs.70049","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A keyword search of “sex therapy” in the <i>New York Times</i> shows a rapid rise for articles covering the discipline in the 1970s, an equally rapid reduction in the 1980s, and further decline in the 1990s and into the 2000s. This surprising inflection, given that sex as a marketable construction did not decline in the late 20th century, opens room to examine sex therapy in the contexts in which it could and could not be successful. Sex therapy as a distinct intervention emerged in the 1960s, based on Masters' and Johnson's obstetric-gynecological research focus on satisfying, conjugal sex, and was boundaried by the optics of medical respectability. Sex therapy viewed sex as a bodily, visible, and behavioral phenomenon, with sexual problems conceived as overt and physiological symptoms and syndromes of the body. Correspondingly, sex therapy offered behavioral techniques to white middle-class clients to ameliorate dissatisfying sex. These conceptions were met with success and popularity in the 1970s, with thousands of sex therapy centers opening nationwide in just a few years. However, with the Reagan administration and AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, sex therapy quickly regressed as a respectable source of medical expertise about sex. Simultaneously, biomedical interventions more broadly replaced medicalized solutions for pre-conceived medical problematics. The introduction of Viagra in 1998 was a biomedical replacement of the medicalized sexual problems created by sex therapy, situated on the observable body. When a seemingly even more bodily and behavioral bio-medical solution to its problematics competed with sex therapy for its same white middle-class client base, sex therapy could not maintain public awareness of its disciplinarity.</p>","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12967226/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147373324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Hume on the Prospects for a Scientific Psychology. 休谟论科学心理学的前景。

IF 0.5 3区历史学

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Pub Date : 2026-02-01 DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.70050

Michael Jacovides

{"title":"Hume on the Prospects for a Scientific Psychology.","authors":"Michael Jacovides","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70050","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jhbs.70050","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In Section One of an Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume distinguishes between two sorts of writing on human nature: first, one that appeals to common sense to make virtue seem attractive and, second, one that attempts to describe the principles governing the mind. Hume's defence of the second approach is in part a defence of the possibility of scientific psychology. Within the second approach, he distinguishes two parts: first, a descriptive branch he calls 'mental geography' and, second, a branch he compares to Newton's project in astronomy. In his defence of mental geography, Hume sketches an account of his method of enquiry in psychology. Common sense describes some basic faculties, philosophers can make finer distinctions within these, and introspection allows us to reliably describe ground-level processes. Hume's vision of Newtonian psychology is one that appeals to laws and forces and finds the hidden springs of the mind. His attempt to explain causal inference by appealing to the transfer of vivacity across associated perceptions in Part 2 of Section 5 is an attempt at Newtonian psychology: it's speculative, explanatory, and enunciates a putative psychological law.</p>","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 2","pages":"e70050"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13086457/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147699949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The Product of Medicine: How Efficiency Made American Health Care. By Caitjan Gainty. Duke University Press, 2025. 225 pp. $99.95 (cloth). ISBN: 1-47-802842-4 医学的产物：效率如何造就了美国的医疗保健。作者：Caitjan Gainty杜克大学出版社，2025年。225页，99.95美元（布）。ISBN: 1-47-802842-4

IF 0.5 3区历史学

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Pub Date : 2025-12-13 DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.70047

Martin D. Moore

引用次数: 0

Book Review on “A People's History of Psychoanalysis” By Florent Gabarron-Garcia (Shuli Branson, trans.), Pluto Press, 2025. 256 pp. £11.99 (ebook). ISBN: 978-0-74-534959-6 弗洛伦特·加巴伦-加西亚（舒利·布兰森译）著的《精神分析的人民历史》书评，冥王星出版社，2025年。256页，11.99英镑（电子书）。ISBN: 978-0-74-534959-6

IF 0.5 3区历史学

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Pub Date : 2025-12-09 DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.70046

Jean-Baptiste Lamarche

引用次数: 0

Yang Kuo-Shu and the Indigenous Movements of Psychology in China From the Perspective of History 从历史的角度看杨国枢与中国本土的心理学运动。

IF 0.5 3区历史学

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Pub Date : 2025-11-10 DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.70044

Shu Yueyu, Li Jiaming, Wang Zeyu

{"title":"Yang Kuo-Shu and the Indigenous Movements of Psychology in China From the Perspective of History","authors":"Shu Yueyu, Li Jiaming, Wang Zeyu","doi":"10.1002/jhbs.70044","DOIUrl":"10.1002/jhbs.70044","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Yang Kuo-Shu—widely regarded as the <i>Father of Chinese Indigenous Psychology</i>—was the central figure in a four-decade movement that sought to reorient psychological research within Chinese societies toward culturally grounded foundations. The movement succeeded in establishing institutional infrastructures, cultivating successive generations of scholars, and producing a substantial corpus of studies attentive to local meanings and practices. Yet, this article argues that its ultimate aspiration—to construct an autonomous Chinese psychological system—remained unfulfilled. Drawing on extensive archival and historical materials, the study traces the intertwined trajectories of Yang's intellectual career and the indigenization project he led. It contends that the movement's fundamental limitation resided in an unresolved epistemological dependence on Western scientific metaphysics. Despite its anticolonial impetus, it inadvertently reproduced a form of academic self-colonization, remaining confined within the very ontological assumptions it sought to transcend. By situating this paradox within broader debates on decolonization and knowledge production, the article reexamines both the achievements and the enduring dilemmas of psychological indigenization in the Chinese context.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46047,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145490571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Debunking “When Prophecy Fails” 揭穿“当预言失败”

IF 0.5 3区历史学

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Pub Date : 2025-11-04 DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.70043

Thomas Kelly

引用次数: 0