The Story of Psychology (127 page)
Read The Story of Psychology Online
Authors: Morton Hunt
To this hodgepodge of images we could add any of the scores of others that have already been described or alluded to—everything from a psychotherapist Socratically leading a patient to recognize his unrealistic beliefs to a developmental psychologist recording the eye movements of an infant watching images flashed on a screen, and from a behavioral neuroscientist injecting epinephrine into a rat that has learned a maze to see how the hormone affects its memory to a cognitive scientist painstakingly constructing the thousands of steps of a computer program that, presented with hundreds of sentences, will learn language more or less as an infant does.
Beyond all this are many psychologists whose special interests and activities we have not taken time to explore, although some are of considerable relevance to everyday life. A few instances:
—Some are investigating the psychology of love and mate selection. At one time this was a much-researched field; then, being deemed too “soft”—not rigorously testable—it was sidelined. In the past couple of decades, however, there has been something of a resurgence of love research based on sophisticated statistical analyses of survey data and interviews, brain scans, cross-cultural data, and neurotransmitter science. Researchers have been using all these methods to distinguish between kinds of love (passionate, romantic, intimate, companionate, and so on), how some of these interact with sexuality, and how love changes over time.
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These sound like familiar and classic topics, but some of the methods of inquiring into them are strictly contemporary and cutting-edge. An example: Helen Fisher, a psychologically oriented anthropologist, says in her latest book,
Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
, that the feeling of love is the result of elevated levels of either dopamine or norepinephrine or both, as well as decreased levels of serotonin. She argues that this hypothesis is supported by fMRI scans of the areas of the brain that light up when subjects who are passionately in love are shown pictures of their adored one. (Still, one might interpret this as an
effect
of feeling romantic love rather than its
cause.
)
—Teams of researchers have been conducting long-term longitudinal studies of individuals who suffer recurrent periods of depression. Typically, they track the events and changes of their subjects’ lives,
correlate these with their emotional states, and statistically disentangle the influence of each possible cause of depression. Findings have lent weight to such stressful influences as childhood abuse, family conflicts, spousal abuse, and other traumas, and the counteracting force of such compensatory factors as the support of friends and relatives.
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The Stirling County Study, the longest-running of all such studies (it was started in 1948), has yielded a mass of published results. One recent example is the finding that women born after World War II are at greater risk for depressive illness than older women, possibly because many of the younger women entered the labor force and employment is a major stressor. Another finding is that men with long-term depression have far higher mortality and morbidity rates than long-term depressed women, perhaps because men are less willing to seek treatment.
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—The nature of intelligence has been explored intensively for many decades, but in recent years some current researchers have advanced the concept that intelligence is neither overall intellectual ability nor a collection of correlated abilities but a set of different processes and strategies that may operate at different levels in the same person. As mentioned earlier, Howard Gardner of Harvard, for one, argues that each individual has seven distinct intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Robert J. Sternberg of Yale, for another, offers research data pointing to a “triarchic” structure of intelligence: the mind’s knowledge of its own abilities, its use of its accumulated experience, and its appraisal of the existing situation.
—A good many researchers are probing deeper than ever into the sources of gender role behavior and sexual preference. Some focus on prenatal influences on brain development, some on genetic anomalies, others on familial influences, and still others on cultural factors. Each group portrays its factors as the most influential, but the emerging view is that all are involved and to varying degrees in each case; it is the specific kinds of interactions, in any individual’s history, that determine the outcome.
—The nature of consciousness, possibly the most profound puzzle of psychology, was long set aside as either not investigable or not useful
either theoretically or practically. However, since the cognitive revolution and the cognitive neuroscience revolution, it has again been seen by some investigators as a question of paramount importance, and one they believe can eventually be answered. A few years ago Francis Crick suggested that a continuous, semi-oscillatory firing of sets of neurons creates a temporary unity of neural activity in many parts of the brain; the self-activating nature of the pattern is the basis of consciousness. Philip Johnson-Laird has likened consciousness to a computer’s “operating system,” a set of instructions that direct and control the flow of information in whatever programs are running. Gerald Edelman has proposed two levels of consciousness. A low-level form arises from the interaction between the part of the brain governing internal physiological drives and the part processing information from the outside world. A high-level form arises from the interaction between the linguistic and concept-forming parts of the brain, with the ability to label things and fit them into categories, thereby freeing the mind from subservience to events in real time and enabling it to be aware of its own thoughts.
Finally, there is “spin-mediated consciousness” theory (which you need not try to decode into comprehensible language). It holds that quantum spin is the seat of consciousness: In the words of one theorist, “Consciousness is intrinsically connected to the spin process and emerges from the self-referential collapses of spin states… The nuclear spins inside neural membranes and proteins form various entangled quantum states some of which survive decoherence through quantum Zeno effects.”
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Whatever.
So much for the vain effort to stereotype the special interests and activities of psychologists. But can we not at least picture the typical psychologist as a person? We cannot. Psychologists come in both sexes and in all sizes, shapes, colors, ages, and levels of training and status.
Many people envision a psychologist as white, male, a “doctor,” and, as mentioned, the possessor of special insight into human nature and a healer of the mentally ailing. The last two descriptors, having to do with insight and healing, do apply to about 60 percent of the more than 102,000 doctorate-level psychologists. But nearly a third of the 102,000 are academics and researchers who have nothing to do with healing, and smaller minorities perform various services in industry, government agencies, other service settings, and schools.
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But the first descriptor,
white, is reasonably correct: Nationally, fewer than 4 percent of all employed doctorate-level psychologists are black, 3.4 percent are Hispanic, and fewer than 3 percent are Asian.
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(Within the APA, for unclear reasons, only 1.7 percent of members are black, 2.1 percent Hispanic, and 1.9 percent Asian.
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)
The second descriptor, male, once was accurate but has long since ceased to be. In 1910, only 10 percent of doctorate-level psychologists were women, but by 1938 the figure was 22 percent, and by 1990 40 percent, while today women make up 50 percent nationally (and within the APA, 53 percent).
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This shift is largely due to the growth of clinical psychology, which has always been relatively open to women. Academic psychology has not; for many decades, male psychologists all but excluded women from academic posts with the rationalization that they would abandon their research for years or permanently when they had children. Accordingly, male psychologists produced most research papers and held nearly all high-level academic and research positions. Only in relatively recent years have women come close to sharing academic appointments, but they still lag far behind as to equality in tenure; and while women’s names now appear on research papers as often as men’s, as of 2000 (the most recent year for which a report is available) they held fewer of the important chairs in psychology departments than their numbers warrant.
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The title “doctor,” meaning holder of a Ph.D. or other doctorate degree, is another inaccurate component of the stereotype. True, three quarters of the APA’s 90,000 members and an even higher proportion of the 12,000 full members of the APS (Association for Psychological Science, formerly known as the American Psychological Society) do hold Ph.D.’s or, in a few cases, Psy.D.’s, or Ed.D.’s. But at a lower level of advanced training there are well over 50,000 psychologists, most of them outside APA and APS, who hold only master’s degrees but who perform useful services, including testing, counseling, psychotherapy, and various routine psychological services in industry, nursing homes, schools, clinics, government agencies, and private practice.
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All of which demonstrates that psychologists come in a variety of models, some as unlike others as if they had nothing in common except the generic name.
What is true of psychologists and their activities is equally true of their field of interest: Although called a science, it is too heterogeneous to be defined or described in any simple, clear-cut fashion.
The vignettes above and what we have seen throughout this history document psychology’s sprawl and diversity. But to get a still better idea of how diversified and chaotic a field psychology has become, one has only to leaf through half a dozen volumes of
Annual Review of Psychology.
Each year’s volume contains about a score of chapters reviewing recent work in such disparate major areas of psychology as perception, reasoning, and motor skill acquisition, others covering more recondite and remote subjects such as brain dopamine and reward, auditory physiology, social and community intervention, hemispheric asymmetry, music psychology, various applications of brain scanning, and the psychology of religion. In the course of half a dozen years the
Annual
covers roughly a hundred different fields, each with its own subtopics, any of which could consume a researcher’s full time and effort.
An even clearer and more variegated picture emerges from the gargantuan programs of the APA’s conventions. Consider, for instance, this random sampling of the titles of the plenary sessions at the August 2006 meeting:
—“Emerging Findings from Multicultural Psychiatric Epidemiology”
—“Fear and Anxiety: Breaking News from Neuroscience”
—“Uses and Abuses of Evolutionary Psychology”
—“The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”
—“Failure of Visual Awareness”
—“How Do People Change?”
A similarly random sampling of the vast array of addresses, sessions, and workshops at that meeting would yield a taste not of a consommé but a mulligan stew of psychological science.
The contents page of APS’s
Current Directions in Psychological Science
, though research oriented—APS allows clinical material in only through a crack in the door—is just as variegated and wide-ranging; here are a few titles of articles in recent issues:
—“Infants’ Differential Processing of Female and Male Faces”
—“The Structure of Emotion: Evidence from Neuroimaging Studies” —“Talking and Thinking with Our Hands”
—“Comparing Exemplar- and Rule-Based Theories of Categorization”
—“Brain Mechanisms for Interpreting the Actions of Others from Biological-Motion Cues”
—“Stress and Adaptation: Toward Ecologically Relevant Animal Models”
Can any discipline so untidy, multifarious, and disorganized be called a science? Are we justified in believing that its statements about human nature and the human mind are scientific truths?
A century ago William James, after brilliantly setting forth what psychology was at the time, ruefully said that it was not yet a science but only “the hope of a science.” We have seen how he characterized it:
A string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinions; a little classification and generalization on the mere descriptive level; a strong prejudice that we have states of mind, and that our brain conditions them; but not a single law in the sense in which physics shows us laws, not a single proposition from which any consequence can causally be deduced.
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Compare that with what psychology has become: a massive accretion of facts, observations, and laboratory research findings, not raw but digested by sophisticated statistical analysis; much gossip and wrangle, but mostly about testable interpretations and theories, not mere opinions; a wealth of classifications and generalizations at the theoretical level; and a profusion of laws and propositions about our states of mind and their relation to brain events whose consequences can be, and regularly are, causally deduced and put to the proof. Psychology has long since grown beyond the hope of a science to become the reality of a science.
But one unlike most others in perplexing and troubling ways.
In the natural sciences, knowledge is cumulative and moves toward a deeper understanding of nature. Relativity theory did not disprove Newtonian physics but absorbed it and went beyond it to deal with phenomena
Newton could not observe; modern evolutionary theory does not disprove Darwinism but adds details, exceptions, and complications that take into account evidence Darwin did not know of. Psychology, in contrast, has spawned many special theories that either were disproved or turned out to apply to so limited a range of phenomena as to provide no basis for a larger and more inclusive theory. Behaviorism is the prime example. It brilliantly explored and explained a variety of psychological processes—and completely ignored almost all of the phenomena of mind; psychology was able to progress only when it escaped from the behaviorist cage.