Tag: Psychologist

An Overview of Situationism (in Psychology)

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Introduction

Under the controversy of person–situation debate, situationism is the theory that changes in human behaviour are factors of the situation rather than the traits a person possesses. Behaviour is believed to be influenced by external, situational factors rather than internal traits or motivations. Situationism therefore challenges the positions of trait theorists, such as Hans Eysenck or Raymond B. Cattell. This is an ongoing debate that has truth to both sides; psychologists are able to prove each of the view points through human experimentation.

Brief History and Conceptions

Situationists believe that thoughts, feelings, dispositions, and past experiences and behaviours do not determine what someone will do in a given situation, rather, the situation itself does. Situationists tend to assume that character traits are distinctive, meaning that they do not completely disregard the idea of traits, but suggest that situations have a greater impact on behaviour than those traits. Situationism is also influenced by culture, in that the extent to which people believe that situations impact behaviours varies between cultures. Situationism has been perceived as arising in response to trait theories, and correcting the notion that everything we do is because of our traits. However, situationism has also been criticised for ignoring individuals’ inherent influences on behaviour. There are many experiments and evidence supporting this topic, and shown in the sources below but also in the article itself. But these experiments do not test what people would do in situations that are forced or rushed, most mistakes are made from rushing and or forgetting something due to lack of concentration. Situationism can be looked at in many different ways, this means that situationism needs to be tested and experimented in many different ways.

Criticisms for Situationism

While situationism has become an increasingly popular theory in the field of philosophy, some wonder why it never quite garnered the same attention in the field of psychology. One reason for this could be the criticisms put forth by psychologists who believe that there just because a personality effect does not account for the entirety of an observed behaviour, there is no reason to believe that the rest is determined by situational effect. Rather, many psychologists believe that trait-situation interactions are more likely responsible for observed behaviours; that is, we cannot attribute behaviour to just personality traits or just situational effects, but rather an interaction between the two processes. Additionally, the popularity of the Big Five-Factor Model of Personality within the field of psychology has overshadowed the theory of situationism. Because this model of personality identifies specific personality traits and claims they can explain behaviour and decisions of an individual, situationism has become a bit obsolete.

Experimental Evidence

Evidence For Situationism

Many studies have found series of evidence supporting situationism. One notable situationist study is Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment. This study was considered one of the most unethical because the participants were deceived and were physically and psychologically abused. The goal of the study was that Zimbardo wanted to discover two things. If prison guards abused prisoners because of their nature, or because of the power and authority they were given in the situation. They also wanted to figure out if prisoners acted violent and savage because of their nature or because of being in a secluded and violent environment. To carry out this experiment, Zimbardo gathered 24 college men and paid them 15 dollars each an hour to live two weeks in a mock prison. The participants were told that they were chosen to be guard or prisoner because of their personality traits, but they were randomly selected. The prisoners were booked and given prison clothes and no possessions. They were also assigned a number to be referred to with the intent of farther dehumanizing them. Within the first night, the prisoner and guard dynamics began to take place. The guards started waking up the prisoners in the middle of the night for count, and they would yell and ridicule them. The prisoners also started developing hostile traits against the guards and having prison related conversations. By the second day, the guards started abusing the prisoners by forcing them to do push ups, and the prisoners started rebelling by removing their caps and numbers, and hiding in their cells with their mattresses blocking the door. As the days passed the relationship between the guards and prisoners became extremely hostile- the prisoners fought for their independence, and the guards fought to strip them of it.

There were many cases where the prisoners began breaking down psychologically, and it all started with prisoner 8612. After one day after the experiment started, prisoner number 8612 has anxiety attacks and asked to leave. He was then told “You can’t leave. You can’t quit.” He then went back to the prison and “began to act ‘crazy,’ to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control.” After this, he was sent home. The other prisoner that broke down was 819. 819 had broken down and was told to rest in a room. When Dr. Zimbardo went to check on him he said ” what I found was a boy crying hysterically while in the background his fellow prisoners were yelling and chanting that he was a bad prisoner, that they were being punished because of him.” Zimbardo then allowed him to leave but he said he could not because he was labelled as a bad prisoner, to which Zimbardo responded “Listen, you are not 819. My name is Dr. Zimbardo, I am a psychologist, and this is not a prison. This is just an experiment and those are students, just like you. Let’s go.” He stopped crying suddenly and looked up at me just like a small child awakened from a nightmare and said, “OK, let’s go.”

The guards also began to have extremely abusive relations with the prisoners. Zimbardo claimed there were three types of guards. The first were the guards that followed all the rules but got the job done, the second felt bad for the prisoners, and the third were extremely hostile and treated them like animals. This last type showed behaviours of actual guards and seemed to have forgotten they were college students, they got into their roles faster, and seemed to enjoy tormenting the prisoners. On Thursday night, 6 days into the experiment, Zimbardo described the guards as having “sadistic” behaviour, and then decided to close down the study early.

This study showed how regular people can completely disassociate with who they are when their environment changes. Regular college boys turned into broken down prisoners and sadistic guards.

Studies investigating bystander effects also support situationism. For example, in 1973, Darley and Batson conducted a study where they asked students at a seminary school to give a presentation in a separate building. They gave each individual participant a topic, and would then tell a participant that they were supposed to be there immediately, or in a few minutes, and sent them on their way to the building. On the way, each participant encountered a confederate who was on the ground, clearly in need of medical attention. Darley and Batson observed that more participants who had extra time stopped to help the confederate than those who were in a hurry. Helping was not predicted by religious personality measures, and the results therefore indicate that the situation influenced their behaviour.

A third well-known study supporting situationism is an obedience study, the Milgram experiment. Stanley Milgram made his obedience study to explain the obedience phenomenon, specifically the holocaust. He wanted to explain how people follow orders, and how people are likely to do unmoral things when ordered to by people of authority. The way the experiment was devised was that Milgram picked 40 men from a newspaper add to take part in a study at Yale University. The men were between 20 and 50 years old, and were paid $4.50 for showing up. In this study, a participant was assigned to be a “teacher” and a confederate was assigned to be a “learner”. The teachers were told the learners had to memorise word pairs, and every time they got it wrong they were shocked with increasing voltages. The voltages ranged from 15 to 450, and in order for the participants to believe the shock was real, the experimenters administered to them a real 45v shock, The participant was unaware that the learner was a confederate. The participant would test the learner, and for each incorrect answer the learner gave, the participant would have to shock the learner with increasing voltages. The shocks were not actually administered, but the participant believed they were. When the shocks reached 300v, the learner began to protest and show discomfort. Milgram expected participants to stop the procedure, but 65% of them continued to completion, administering shocks that could have been fatal, even if they were uncomfortable or upset. Even though most of the participants continued administering the shocks, they had distressed reactions when administering the shocks, such as laughing hysterically. Participants felt compelled to listen to the experimenter, who was the authority figure present in the room and continued to encourage the participant throughout the study. Out of 40 participants, 26 went all the way to the end.

Evidence against Situationism

Personality traits have a very weak relationship to behaviour. In contrast, situational factors usually have a stronger impact on behaviour; this is the core evidence for situationism. In addition, people are also able to describe character traits of close to such as friends and family, which goes to show that there are opposing reasons showing why people can recall these traits.

In addition, there are other studies that show these same trends. For example, twin studies have shown that identical twins share more traits than fraternal twins. This also implies that there is a genetic basis for behaviour, which directly contradicts situationist views that behaviour is determined by the situation. When observing one instance of extroverted or honest behaviour, it shows how in different situations a person would behave in a similarly honest or extroverted way. It shows that when many people are observed in a range of situations the trait-related reactions to behaviour is about .20 or less. People think the correlation is around .80. This shows that the situation itself is more dependent on characteristics and circumstances in contrast to what is taking place at that point in time.

These recent challenges to the Traditional View have not gone unnoticed. Some have attempted to modify the Traditional View to insulate it from these challenges, while others have tried to show how these challenges fail to undermine the Traditional View at all. For example, Dana Nelkin (2005), Christian Miller (2003), Gopal Sreenivasan (2002), and John Sabini and Maury Silver (2005), among others, have argued that the empirical evidence cited by the Situationists does not show that individuals lack robust character traits.

Current Views: Interactionism

In addition to the debate between trait influences and situational influences on behaviour, a psychological model of “interactionism” exists, which is a view that both internal dispositions and external situational factors affect a person’s behaviour in a given situation. This model emphasizes both sides of the person-situation debate, and says that internal and external factors interact with each other to produce a behaviour. Interactionism is currently an accepted personality theory, and there has been sufficient empirical evidence to support interactionism. However, it is also important to note that both situationists and trait theorists contributed to explaining facets of human behaviour.

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Who is Lyn Yvonne Abramson (1950-Present)?

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Introduction

Lyn Yvonne Abramson (born 07 February 1950) is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was born in Benson, Minnesota. She took her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1972 before attaining her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at University of Pennsylvania in 1978.

Refer to Depressive Realism.

Achievements

As a clinical psychologist, her main areas of research interest have been exploring vulnerability to major depressive disorder and psychobiological and cognitive approaches to depression, bipolar disorder, and eating disorders. She was the senior author of the paper “Learned Helplessness in Humans: Critique and Reformulation” published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1978, proposing a link between a particular explanatory style and depression.

With her co-authors William T.L. Cox, Patricia Devine, and Steven D. Hollon, she proposed the integrated perspective on prejudice and depression, which combines cognitive theories of depression with cognitive theories of prejudice. Lyn and her co-authors propose that many cases of depression may be caused by prejudice from the self or from another person.

“This depression caused by prejudice – which the researchers call deprejudice — can occur at many levels. In the classic case, prejudice causes depression at the societal level (e.g., Nazis’ prejudice causing Jews’ depression), but this causal chain can also occur at the interpersonal level (e.g., an abuser’s prejudice causing an abusee’s depression), or even at the intrapersonal level, within a single person (e.g., a man’s prejudice against himself causing his depression).”

Along with her frequent collaborator Lauren Alloy, Abramson was awarded the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for 2008–2009 by the Association for Psychological Science. She is on the Institute for Scientific Information list of highly cited researchers.

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Who is Lauren B. Alloy (1953-Present)?

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Introduction

Lauren B. Alloy (born Lauren Helene Bersh; 22 November 1953) is an American psychologist, recognised for her research on mood disorders. Along with colleagues Lyn Abramson and Gerald Metalsky, she developed the hopelessness theory of depression. With Abramson, she also developed the depressive realism hypothesis. Alloy is a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Biography

Alloy was born in Philadelphia in 1953. She earned her B.A. in Psychology in 1974 and her Ph.D. in experimental and clinical psychology in 1979, both from the University of Pennsylvania. Her graduate school mentors were psychologists Martin Seligman and Richard Solomon.

Alloy was a faculty member at Northwestern University from 1979 to 1989. She has been a professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology at Temple University since 1989. Her research focuses on cognitive, interpersonal, and biopsychosocial processes in the onset and maintenance of depression and bipolar disorder. She is the author of over 250 scholarly publications.

In the late 1970s, Alloy and her long-time collaborator Abramson demonstrated that depressed individuals held a more accurate view than their non-depressed counterparts in a test which measured illusion of control. This finding, termed “depressive realism”, held true even when the depression was manipulated experimentally.

Selected Awards

  • 2014 – Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Lifetime Achievement Award (jointly with Lyn Abramson)
  • 2014 – Society for Research in Psychopathology Joseph Zubin Award
  • 2009 – Association for Psychological Science James McKeen Cattell Award for Lifetime Achievement in Applied Psychological Research (jointly with Lyn Abramson)
  • 2003 – Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology Distinguished Scientist Award (jointly with Lyn Abramson)
  • 2002 – American Psychological Association Master Lecturer Award in Psychopathology (jointly with Lyn Abramson)
  • 1984 – American Psychological Association Young Psychologist Award

Selected Works

  • Alloy, L.B., & Abramson, L.Y. (2007). Depressive realism. In R. Baumeister & K. Vohs (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Social Psychology (pp. 242–243). New York: Sage Publications.
  • Alloy, L. B., Kelly, K. A., Mineka, S., & Clements, C. M. (1990). Comorbidity of anxiety and depressive disorders: a helplessness-hopelessness perspective.
  • Abramson, L. Y., Metalsky, G. I., & Alloy, L. B. (1989). Hopelessness depression: A theory-based subtype of depression. Psychological review, 96(2), 358.
  • Alloy, L.B., & Abramson, L.Y. (1988). Depressive realism: Four theoretical perspectives. In L.B. Alloy (Ed.), Cognitive processes in depression. New York: Guilford.
  • Alloy, L. B., & Tabachnik, N. (1984). Assessment of covariation by humans and animals: the joint influence of prior expectations and current situational information. Psychological review, 91(1), 112.
  • Alloy, L. B., & Abramson, L. Y. (1979). Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: Sadder but wiser?. Journal of experimental psychology: General, 108(4), 441.

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Who was James Ward (1843-1925)?

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Introduction

James Ward FBA (27 January 1843 to 04 March 1925) was an English psychologist and philosopher. He was a Cambridge Apostle.

Life

Ward was born in Kingston upon Hull, the eldest of nine children. His father was an unsuccessful merchant. Ward was educated at the Liverpool Institute and Mostyn House, but his formal schooling ended when his father became bankrupt.

Apprenticed to a Liverpool architect for four years, Ward studied Greek and logic and was a Sunday school teacher. In 1863, he entered Spring Hill College, near Birmingham, to train for the Congregationalist ministry. An eccentric and impoverished student, he remained at Spring Hill until 1869, completing his theological studies as well as gaining a University of London BA degree.

In 1869–1870, Ward won a scholarship to Germany, where he attended the lectures of Isaac Dormer in Berlin before moving to Göttingen to study under Hermann Lotze. On his return to Britain Ward became minister at Emmanuel Congregational Church in Cambridge, where his theological liberalism unhappily antagonised his congregation. Sympathetic to Ward’s predicament, Henry Sidgwick encouraged Ward to enter Cambridge University. Initially a non-collegiate student, Ward won a scholarship to Trinity College in 1873, and achieved a first class in the moral sciences tripos in 1874.

With a dissertation entitled The Relation of Physiology to Psychology, Ward won a Trinity fellowship in 1875. Some of this work, An Interpretation of Fechner’s Law, was published in the first volume of the new journal Mind (1876).

For the rest of his life, the Dictionary of National Biography reports that he:

…held himself aloof from all institutional religion; but he did not tend towards secularism or even agnosticism; his early belief in spiritual values and his respect for all sincere religion never left him.

During 1876–1877 he returned to Germany, studying in Carl Ludwig’s Leipzig physiological institute. Back in Cambridge, Ward continued physiological research under Michael Foster, publishing a pair of physiological papers in 1879 and 1880.

From 1880 onwards Ward moved away from physiology to psychology. His article Psychology for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica – criticising associationist psychology with an emphasis upon the mind’s active attention to the world – became enormously influential.

Ward was a strong supporter of women’s education, and met his Irish-born suffragist wife-to-be, Mary (née Martin), when she attended one of his series of lectures. The couple married in Nottingham on 31 July 1884, and settled in Cambridge in a house built for them by J.J. Stevenson. She went on to become a lecturer in moral sciences at Newnham College, and a member of the Ladies Dining Society. They had two daughters and a son.

Ward was elected to the new Chair of Mental Philosophy and Logic in 1897, his students including G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Mohammed Iqbal and George Stout. He served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1919 to 1920.

Ward died in Cambridge, and was cremated at Cambridge Crematorium.

Philosophical Work

Ward defended a philosophy of panpsychism based on his research in physiology and psychology which he defined as a “spiritualistic monism”. In his Gifford Lectures and his book Naturalism and Agnosticism (1899) he argued against materialism and dualism and supported a form of panpsychism where reality consists in a plurality of centres of activity. Ward’s philosophical views have a close affinity to the pluralistic idealism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Ward had believed that the universe is composed of “psychic monads” of different levels, interacting for mutual self- betterment. His theological views have been described by some as a “personal panentheism”.

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Who was Gardner Murphy (1895-1979)?

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Introduction

Gardner Murphy (08 July 1895 to 18 March 1979) was an American psychologist who specialized in social and personality psychology and parapsychology. His career highlights include serving as president of the American Psychological Association and the British Society for Psychical Research.

Biography

Family Life and Education

Murphy was born on 08 July 1895, in Chillicothe, Ohio, US. He was the son of Edgar Gardner Murphy, an Episcopal minister and activist. Upon graduating with a BA from Yale University in 1916, Murphy attended Harvard University, working with L.T. Troland in a telepathy experiment, and achieving his MA in 1917. Murphy succeeded Troland as holder of the Hodgson Fellowship in Psychical Research at Harvard University. After the first world war, in 1919, Murphy continued his studies at Columbia University, working towards his PhD, which he was awarded in 1923. During this time he was also working under the Hodgson Fellowship. He later married Lois Barclay and had two children, Al and Margaret.

Murphy was recognised for being generous and kind, such as by offering assistance or loans if a student or colleague was in trouble. He also spoke out against racial conflicts and advocated for peaceful relations.

Inspiration

Murphy was inspired by the work of psychologists and scientists such as Herbert Spencer, Sigmund Freud, William James, and Charles Darwin. Most of his works integrated aspects of each of these previous scientists. Murphy was a strong admirer of Freud, often drawing from his psychoanalytic theories. He considered Freud a true artistic genius while also remaining capable of taking a critical view. Murphy was especially interested in Freud’s perspective of the self, including regression and needs. The world was sceptical of Freud at the time, yet Murphy still embraced his ideas, even when encountering ridicule.

While researching William James, Murphy took interest in James’ philosophical perspective. He admired how James easily defined the boundaries between man, the world, and consciousness. Along with James and Freud, Murphy also took to Darwin, specifically his theory of evolution. Murphy became particularly focused on the theory of behavioural adaption in organisms, which posits that animals adapt to their environments for their own survival. This particular theory of evolutionary adaption was woven into multiple personality theories later presented by Murphy.

Career

Murphy studied the medium Leonora Piper and collaborated with French chemist René Warcollier on a transatlantic telepathy experiment. From 1921 to 1925, he lectured in psychology at Columbia University. In 1925, at a psychical research symposium at Clark University, Murphy and Harvard psychologist William McDougall advocated for the academic study of telepathy, while acknowledging scientific scepticism due to past debunking efforts. From 1925 to 1929, Murphy was an instructor and assistant professor at Columbia. He became the Hodgson Fellow at Harvard in 1937 and served as professor and chairman of psychology at City College, New York, from 1940 to 1942. In 1952, he became director of research at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas.

Murphy was elected to the presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1944. He subsequently served as the President of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1949 (which he joined in 1917) and was Director of the Parapsychology Foundation in 1951. Murphy authored several texts in psychology, including, Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology (1928; 1949), Personality (1947), and Human Potentialities (1958). He was a contributor to personality, social and clinical psychology and an early exponent of humanistic psychology.[9] During these years, Murphy continued his association with psychical research, including sitting on the council of the American Society for Psychical Research, and serving as chair of its research committee; serving as an editor of the Journal of Parapsychology (1939–1941), speaking at professional symposium on psychical research; writing reports, reviews, and critical articles in general scientific, psychological, as well as parapsychological journals. He also supported (through his own book royalties) experimental studies by J.G. Pratt at Columbia (1935–1937); authoring an introductory review to the field, The Challenge of Psychical Research (1961), as well as William James and Psychical Research (1973) (with R. Ballou), and a 20-page article on parapsychology for the Encyclopaedia of Psychology (1946); editing an English-language publication of Warcollier’s reports (1938) and writing forewords for several parapsychological monographs.

Murphy died on 18 March 1979 in Washington, D.C.

Contributions to Psychology

Social Psychology

Murphy proposed the biosocial personality theory, in which personality is understood as both biological and social in nature. At the centre of the theory is the term “canalization.” Murphy used “canalization” to indicate that human needs may be impacted or changed by what, when and how they are satisfied. In Murphy’s model, two primary mechanisms impact human need: regularity, and relevance. The theory was presented in his book Personality published in 1947.

In Personality, Murphy proposed three main components to personality. First, personality acts within a larger structure, and second, has its own inner workings. Third, personality is shaped by its environment. Other parts of the book discuss his biosocial theory canalisation and autism. Autism, as Murphy depicts it, is actions designed by the satisfaction of needs while placing special emphasis on the self.

Murphy also studied parapsychology, which at the time was not taken seriously. Many thought it was a joke and should not be considered a real science. Murphy thought differently. He believed that it is the scientist’s job to expand the known science and push beyond the set boundaries. He produced numerous studies on the paranormal, specifically about telekinesis, psychokinesis, and despite constant ridicule.

Humanistic Psychology

The humanistic psychology movement did not occur until the 1960s. However, much of Murphy’s writings were an early component of the movement and really set the stage for its beginnings. Generally, Murphy believed in the good of humanity, often producing works on the problems and solutions of societies, human nature, and individualism. These particular works were so inspiring that, at the time, many European refugee psychologists referenced his ideas in their arguments for peace in their countries.

Murphy’s book Human Potentialities (1958) covered a wide range of topics about the welfare of the human being. In general, Murphy rejected the idea of human nature being predetermined and unable to change. Instead he proposed three distinct human natures.

  • First, because of the theory of evolution, human nature is in a constant state of flux, and therefore, always changing.
  • Second, man’s various cultures were brought about by the instability of human nature. Finally, man has an essential artistic view of the world that allows for the expansion of its boundaries.

These human natures were essential to his idea of human potentiality and prejudices. Prejudices are formed because of man’s constant state of flux. Researching these ideas, Murphy concluded that prejudices did not exist because of logical reasoning. Rather, prejudices come about through natural spontaneous reactions. With that in mind, Murphy suggested three principles when researching human potential. Firstly, the environment plays a role in the individuals’ ideas of gaining experience. Second potentialities are created through new experiences of the self rather than through cultural experience. He concludes that there is no limit to the number of new potentialities that can be created.

He also published papers focusing on the boundaries between the individual, society, and world order. Murphy identified what he believed to be the source of conflict: individualism. He believed too much emphasis was placed on the definition of individualism; so much so that the true definition has been replaced by the idea of competition. In other words, the idea of winning and losing. Individualism only allows the person to view what is in their direct view, not the big picture. The idea of competition is non societal; it takes care of the individual and their needs, but not the needs of society.

Murphy wrote Science and World Order (1962) in an effort to address societal problems. He proposed ten ideas that he considered beneficial, despite their radical nature. First, he proposed the idea of disarmament. Instead of weaponry, he suggested using common knowledge to come to an understanding. Second, he proposed that newer technology would enable less reliability on weapons. In recommendations three, four, and five, Murphy suggested using different research methods to study the paths, decisions, and predictions that lead to war. In his last four recommendations, Murphy suggested studying politicians’ personalities to better handle situational crises. He also suggested updating the educational system to fully include a firm understanding of the world and what is at stake; while also promoting more communication techniques to better understand adversaries.

Later within his career he served as a consultant to the Indian Government researching solutions to the Hindu-Muslim conflict. During this time, he gained knowledge of the local cultures and personalities of the native people. His time there led him to collect numerous data of Indian cultures and life incorporating the data into solutions for western problems. This work became known as Asian Psychology.

Other Notable Works and Theories

Murphy had many prominent theories and ideas throughout his lifetime. Before his ideas of social psychology, Murphy bounced around different learning theories and ideas, building off of what was already known. His learning theories are a good example. Murphy believed that perception is learned the same way as behaviours, through reward and punishment. Murphy believed that perception fulfils multiple roles beyond relaying the sensory information to the brain. It was a way of fulfilling needs as well. This satisfaction of needs is displayed in many of his other publications.

Reception

Murphy’s Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology (1929) received a positive review in the British Medical Journal which stated “no purely objective record could be as successful as Dr. Gardner Murphy’s presentation of the history, which bears evidence everywhere of a judicious choice of material and of such emphasis as is free from any prepossession.” Edwin Boring described it as “an exceptionally good book”. The 1949 revised edition received a mixed review by Alphonse Chapanis in The Quarterly Review of Biology who wrote the book did not present a balanced synopsis of research but recommended it as a “useful addition to the psychologist’s library”. However, Ralph H. Turner wrote Murphy maintained an “exceptional order of objectivity through most of his presentation” and described it as “a very useful text”.

Murphy’s introductory psychological textbook An Introduction to Psychology (1951) received positive reviews. Alastair Heron described it as a:

“textbook for the interested and not-too-sophisticated reader who hopes to become more interested without becoming at the same time more sophisticated.”

In his book Challenge of Psychical Research (1961), Murphy documented research into clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and telepathy. John L. Kennedy wrote there was inadequate information about the role of the experimenter during psychical research experiments. Ralph W. Gerard gave the book a positive review but stated the results from the experiments may be explainable by alternative factors such as misinterpretation or unintended cues without recourse to the paranormal.

Psychologist L. Börje Löfgren heavily criticised the Challenge of Psychical Research stating that Murphy hardly ever considered the “possibility that spontaneous occurrences might actually be memory falsifications (conscious or unconscious), simple lies, or similar phenomena.” He concluded his review by suggesting the book is “especially apt to do much damage and seduce people into believing in things for which there is extremely scant evidence.”

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Who was Emile Coue (1857-1926)?

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Introduction

Émile Coué de la Châtaigneraie (26 February 1857 to 02 July 1926) was a French psychologist, pharmacist, and hypnotist who introduced a popular method of psychotherapy and self-improvement based on optimistic autosuggestion.

“It was in no small measure [Coué’s] wholehearted devotion to a self-imposed task that enabled him, in less than a quarter of a century, to rise from obscurity to the position of the world’s most famous psychological exponent. Indeed, one might truly say that Coué sidetracked inefficient hypnotism [mistakenly based upon supposed operator dominance over a subject], and paved the way for the efficient, and truly scientific.” (Orton, 1935).

“Coué’s method was disarmingly non-complex—needing few instructions for on-going competence, based on rational principles, easily understood, demanding no intellectual sophistication, simply explained, simply taught, performed in private, using a subject’s own resources, requiring no elaborate preparation, and no expenditure.” (Yeates, 2016a).

“Most of us are so accustomed … to an elaborate medical ritual … in the treatment of our ills … [that] anything so simple as Coué’s autosuggestion is inclined to arouse misgivings, antagonism and a feeling of scepticism.” (Duckworth, 1922).

Coué’s method was based upon the view that, operating deep below our conscious awareness, a complex arrangement of ‘ideas’, especially when those ideas are dominant, continuously and spontaneously suggest things to us; and, from this, significantly influence one’s overall health and wellbeing.

“We possess within us a force of incalculable power, which, when we handle it unconsciously is often prejudicial to us. If on the contrary we direct it in a conscious and wise manner, it gives us the mastery of ourselves and allows us not only to escape … from physical and mental ills, but also to live in relative happiness, whatever the conditions in which we may find ourselves.” (Coué, 1922b, p.35).

“As long as we look on autosuggestion as a remedy we miss its true significance. Primarily it is a means of self-culture, and one far more potent than any we have hitherto possessed. It enables us to develop the mental qualities we lack: efficiency, judgment, creative imagination, all that will help us to bring our life’s enterprise to a successful end. Most of us are aware of thwarted abilities, powers undeveloped, impulses checked in their growth. These are present in our Unconscious like trees in a forest, which, overshadowed by their neighbours, are stunted for lack of air and sunshine. By means of autosuggestion we can supply them with the power needed for growth and bring them to fruition in our conscious lives. However old, however infirm, however selfish, weak or vicious we may be, autosuggestion will do something for us. It gives us a new means of culture and discipline by which the “accents immature”, the “purposes unsure” can be nursed into strength, and the evil impulses attacked at the root. It is essentially an individual practice, an individual attitude of mind.” (Brooks, 1922, p.116).

Life and Career

Coué’s family, from the Brittany region of France and with origins in French nobility, had only modest means. A brilliant pupil in school, he initially intended to become an analytical chemist. However, he eventually abandoned these studies, as his father, who was a railroad worker, was in a precarious financial state. Coué then decided to become a pharmacist and graduated with a degree in pharmacology in 1876.

Working as an apothecary at Troyes from 1882 to 1910, Coué quickly discovered what later came to be known as the placebo effect. He became known for reassuring his clients by praising each remedy’s efficiency and leaving a small positive notice with each given medication. In 1886 and 1887, he studied with Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim, two leading exponents of hypnotism, in Nancy.

In 1910, Coué sold his business and retired to Nancy, where he opened a clinic that continuously delivered some 40,000 treatment-units per annum (Baudouin, 1920, p.14) to local, regional, and overseas patients over the next sixteen years. In 1913, Coué and his wife founded The Lorraine Society of Applied Psychology (French: La Société Lorraine de Psychologie appliquée). His book Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion was published in England (1920), and in the United States (1922). Although Coué’s teachings were, during his lifetime, more popular in Europe than in the United States, many Americans who adopted his ideas and methods, such as Elsie Lincoln Benedict, Maxwell Maltz, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Robert H. Schuller, and W. Clement Stone, became famous in their own right by spreading his words.

Considered by Charles Baudouin to represent a second Nancy School, Coué treated many patients in groups and free of charge.

The Coué Method: General

The Coué Method

“Continuously, unjustly, and mistakenly trivialised as just a hand-clasp, some unwarranted optimism, and a ‘mantra’, Coué’s method evolved over several decades of meticulous observation, theoretical speculation, in-the-field testing, incremental adjustment, and step-by-step transformation. It tentatively began (c.1901) with very directive one-to-one hypnotic interventions, based upon the approaches and techniques that Coué had acquired from an American correspondence course. As his theoretical knowledge, clinical experience, understanding of suggestion and autosuggestion, and hypnotic skills expanded, it gradually developed into its final subject-centred version—an intricate complex of (group) education, (group) hypnotherapy, (group) ego-strengthening, and (group) training in self-suggested pain control; and, following instruction in performing the prescribed self-administration ritual, the twice daily intentional and deliberate (individual) application of its unique formula, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”. (Yeates, 2016c, p.55).

The application of his mantra-like conscious autosuggestion, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” (French: Tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux) is called Couéism or the Coué method. Some American newspapers quoted it differently, “Day by day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” The Coué method centred on a routine repetition of this particular expression according to a specified ritual—preferably as many as twenty times a day, and especially at the beginning and at the end of each day. When asked whether or not he thought of himself as a healer, Coué often stated that “I have never cured anyone in my life. All I do is show people how they can cure themselves.” Unlike a commonly held belief that a strong conscious will constitutes the best path to success, Coué maintained that curing some of our troubles requires a change in our unconscious thought, which can be achieved only by using our imagination.

Although stressing that he was not primarily a healer but one who taught others to heal themselves, Coué claimed to have effected organic changes through autosuggestion.

Self-Suggestion

Coué identified two types of self-suggestion: (i) the intentional, “reflective suggestion” made by deliberate and conscious effort, and (ii) the involuntary “spontaneous suggestion”, that is a “natural phenomenon of our mental life … which takes place without conscious effort [and has its effect] with an intensity proportional to the keenness of [our] attention”. Baudouin identified three different sources of spontaneous suggestion:

A. Instances belonging to the representative domain (sensations, mental images, dreams, visions, memories, opinions, and all intellectual phenomena);
B. Instances belonging to the affective domain (joy or sorrow, emotions, sentiments, tendencies, passions);
C. Instances belonging to the active or motor domain (actions, volitions, desires, gestures, movements at the periphery or in the interior of the body, functional or organic modifications).

Two Minds

According to Yeates, Coué shared the theoretical position that Thomson Jay Hudson had expressed in his Law of Psychic Phenomena (1893): namely, that our “mental organization” was such that it seemed as if we had “two minds, each endowed with separate and distinct attributes and powers; [with] each capable, under certain conditions, of independent action”.

Further, argued Hudson, it was entirely irrelevant, for explanatory purposes, whether we actually had “two distinct minds”, whether we only seemed to be “endowed with a dual mental organization”, or whether we actually had “one mind [possessed of] certain attributes and powers under some conditions, and certain other attributes and powers under other conditions”.

The Coué Method: Development and Origins

Coué noticed that in certain cases he could improve the efficacy of a given medicine by praising its effectiveness to the patient. He realised that those patients to whom he praised the medicine had a noticeable improvement when compared to patients to whom he said nothing. This began Coué’s exploration of the use of hypnosis and the power of the imagination.

Coué’s initial method for treating patients relied on hypnosis. He discovered that subjects could not be hypnotised against their will and, more importantly, that the effects of hypnosis waned when the subjects regained consciousness. He thus eventually turned to autosuggestion, which he describes as

… an instrument that we possess at birth, and with which we play unconsciously all our life, as a baby plays with its rattle. It is however a dangerous instrument; it can wound or even kill you if you handle it imprudently and unconsciously. It can on the contrary save your life when you know how to employ it consciously.

Coué believed in the effects of medication. But he also believed that our mental state is able to affect and even amplify the action of these medications. Coué recommended that patients take medicines with the confidence that they would be completely cured very soon, and healing would be optimal. Conversely, he contended, patients who are sceptical of a medicine would find it least effective. By consciously using autosuggestion, he observed that his patients could cure themselves more efficiently by replacing their “thought of illness” with a new “thought of cure”. According to Coué, repeating words or images enough times causes the subconscious to absorb them. The cures were the result of using imagination or “positive autosuggestion” to the exclusion of one’s own willpower.

The Coué Method: Underlying Principles

Coué thus developed a method which relied on the principle that any idea exclusively occupying the mind turns into reality,[citation needed] although only to the extent that the idea is within the realm of possibility. For instance, a person without hands will not be able to make them grow back. However, if a person firmly believes that his or her asthma is disappearing, then this may actually happen, as far as the body is actually able physically to overcome or control the illness. On the other hand, thinking negatively about the illness (ex. “I am not feeling well”) will encourage both mind and body to accept this thought. Likewise, when someone cannot remember a name, they will probably not be able to recall it as long as they hold onto this idea (i.e. “I can’t remember”) in their mind. Coué realised that it is better to focus on and imagine the desired, positive results (i.e. “I feel healthy and energetic” and “I can remember clearly”).

Willpower

Coué observed that the main obstacle to autosuggestion was willpower. For the method to work, the patient must refrain from making any independent judgment, meaning that he must not let his will impose its own views on positive ideas. Everything must thus be done to ensure that the positive “autosuggestive” idea is consciously accepted by the patient; otherwise, one may end up getting the opposite effect of what is desired.

For example, when a student has forgotten an answer to a question in an exam, he will likely think something such as “I have forgotten the answer”. The more they try to think of it, the more the answer becomes blurred and obscured. However, if this negative thought is replaced with a more positive one (“No need to worry, it will come back to me”), the chances that the student will come to remember the answer will increase.

Coué noted that young children always applied his method perfectly, as they lacked the willpower that remained present among adults. When he instructed a child by saying “clasp your hands and you can’t open them”, the child would thus immediately follow.

Self-Conflict

A patient’s problems are likely to increase when his willpower and imagination (or mental ideas) are opposing each other, something Coué would refer to as “self-conflict”. In the student’s case, the will to succeed is clearly incompatible with his thought of being incapable of remembering his answers. As the conflict intensifies, so does the problem: the more the patient tries to sleep, the more he becomes awake. The more a patient tries to stop smoking, the more he smokes. The patient must thus abandon his willpower and instead put more focus on his imaginative power in order to succeed fully with his cure.

The Coué Method: Efficacy

Thanks to his method, which Coué once called his “trick”, patients of all sorts would come to visit him. The list of ailments included kidney problems, diabetes, memory loss, stammering, weakness, atrophy and all sorts of physical and mental illnesses. According to one of his journal entries (1916), he apparently cured a patient of a uterus prolapse as well as “violent pains in the head” (migraine).

C. (Cyrus) Harry Brooks (1890–1951), author of various books on Coué, claimed the success rate of his method was around 93%. The remaining 7% of people would include those who were too sceptical of Coué’s approach and those who refused to recognise it.

Criticism

“That Coué’s formula could be applied with a minimum of instruction was challenging; and the accounts of Coué’s method curing organic disease were just as threatening to the conventional medicine of the day, as they were inspiring to Coué’s devotees.”

Some critics, such as Barrucand and Paille (1986), argue that the astonishing results widely attributed to Coué were due to his charisma, rather than his method. In contrast, Barcs-Masson (1962, p. 368), observes that Coué was the complete opposite of Jules Romains’ character, Dr. Knock – “whose exceptional commercial success came from his ability to convince healthy individuals that they had a heretofore-unrecognised ailment” – and rather than, as Knock did, find unrecognised disease within the healthy, Coué activated dormant health within the ailing.

Although Coué never produced any empirical evidence for the efficacy of his formula (and, therefore, his claims have not been scientifically evaluated), three subsequent experimental studies, conducted more than half a century later, by Paulhus (1993), “seem to offer some unexpected support for Coué’s claims”.

The Psycho-Medical Establishment

According to Yeates (2016a, p. 19), the protests routinely made by those within the psychomedical establishment (e.g., Moxon, 1923; Abraham, 1926) were on one or more of the following grounds:

(1) “Healing of organic disease by ‘self-mastery’ was impossible! Aside from ‘spontaneous remissions’ of authentic disease (efficacious vis medicatrix naturæ!), reported ‘cures’ were either due to mistaken diagnosis (it was never that disease!), or mistaken prognosis (it was always going to get better!). Anyway, even if it had been diagnosed correctly, there was no compelling evidence to suggest that Coué’s approach had been in any way responsible for the cure.”
(2) “Even if it was true that, in some extraordinary circumstances, healing by ‘self-mastery’ was possible, Coué’s failure to immediately eliminate those with counterproductive limitations — such as, for example, those lacking the required dedication, mind-set, talent, diligence, persistence, patience, etc. — resulted in many (clearly unsuited) individuals mistakenly postponing (otherwise) life-saving operations and delaying (otherwise) radical medical treatment far beyond any prospect of recovery or cure.”
(3) “Despite the obvious fact that each ‘disease’ had a unique cause, a unique history, and a unique (and idiosyncratic) personal impact, Coué treated a wide range of disparate individuals in the same, single group session, in the same way; and, moreover, he treated them without any sort of detailed examination or differential diagnosis.”
(4) “The method’s central ‘magical incantation’ — a specific formula, uttered a specific number of times, in a special way, using a knotted string — aroused strong opposition, as it reeked of outmoded superstitious practices and beliefs.”

The Press

While most American reporters of his day seemed dazzled by Coué’s accomplishments, and did not question the results attributed to his method, a handful of journalists and a few educators were sceptical. After Coué had left Boston, the Boston Herald waited six months, revisited the patients he had “cured”, and found most had initially felt better but soon returned to whatever ailments they previously had. Few of the patients would criticise Coué, saying he did seem very sincere in what he tried to do, but the Herald reporter concluded that any benefit from Coué’s method seemed to be temporary and might be explained by being caught up in the moment during one of Coué’s events. Whilst a number of academic psychologists looked upon his work favourably, others did not. Coué was also criticised by exponents of psychoanalysis, with Otto Fenichel concluding: “A climax of dependence masked as independent power is achieved by the methods of autosuggestion where a weak and passive ego is controlled by an immense superego with magical powers. This power is, however, borrowed and even usurped”.

Memorials

On 28 June 1936, a monument erected to the memory of Coué, funded by worldwide subscription, and featuring a bust of Coué created by French sculptor Eugène Gatelet, was dedicated in St Mary’s Park, in Nancy. The bust was stored for safe-keeping during World War II and, post-war, was restored to its former position in 1947.

In Popular Culture

  • 1922: In the same year as the English translation of Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion is published, the song I’m Getting Better Every Day (words by Percy Edgar, music by Mark Strong) is released.
  • 1923: A Swedish translation of Strong’s “I’m Getting Better Every Day” is released by entertainer Ernst Rolf, Bättre och bättre dag för dag (Better and better day by day). It is still a popular refrain in Sweden almost a century later.
  • 1923: The Coué Method is taught in Elsie Lincoln Benedict’s How to Get Anything You Want to train the subconscious mind.
  • 1924: In the Broadway musical “Sitting Pretty” (music by Jerome Kern), in the song “Tulip Time in Sing-Sing”, P.G. Wodehouse’s lyrics include “I’d sit discussing Coué With my old pal Bat-eared Louie”.
  • 1926: The Coué Method is mentioned in P.G. Wodehouse’s short story, “Mr. Potter Takes a Rest Cure”.
  • 1928: Coué and Couéism are referred to frequently in John Galsworthy’s novel The White Monkey from his Modern Comedy trilogy. Fleur Mont (née Forsyte), expecting what her husband (the tenth baronet) keeps referring to as the eleventh, repeats daily “every day in every way my baby’s becoming more and more male”. Other characters in the novel are also Coué followers, including, rather improbably, the strait-laced and sensible Soames (although he remains sceptical).
  • 1930: Miss Milsome, in The Documents in the Case, written by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace, dabbles in all sorts of self-improvement schemes, including using “In every day …”
  • 1934: in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night The protagonist Bardamu thinks “In her despair I sniffed vestiges of the Coue method”.
  • 1946: In Josephine Tey’s novel Miss Pym Disposes, the title character, herself a psychologist, refers to Coué with apparent scepticism.
  • 1948: In Graham Greene’s novel, The Heart of the Matter, the narrator dismisses the Indian fortune teller’s reading of Inspector Wilson’s hand: “Of course the whole thing was Couéism: if one believed in it enough, it would come true.”
  • 1969: In the film The Bed Sitting Room Room (1969), the character “Mate”, played by Spike Milligan, repeatedly utters the phrase “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” while delivering a pie.
  • 1970: Brief mention in Robertson Davies’ book Fifth Business; the passage ends with a criticism of Couéism:
  • “So Dr. Coué failed for her, as he did for many others, for which I lay no blame on him. His system was really a form of secularized, self-seeking prayer, without the human dignity that even the most modest prayer evokes. And like all attempts to command success for the chronically unsuccessful, it petered out.”
  • 1973: The leading character, Frank Spencer (played by Michael Crawford), in the BBC’s situation comedy Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, often recites the mantra, on occasion when trying to impress the instructor during a public relations training course.
  • 1976: In the film The Pink Panther Strikes Again, the mentally-ill Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus, repeatedly uses the phrase “Every day and in every way, I am getting better, and better” as directed by his psychiatrist.
  • 1980: The chorus in the song “Beautiful Boy” — which John Lennon wrote for his son, Sean — makes a reference to Coué’s mantra:
    • Before you go to sleep
    • Say a little prayer
    • Every day in every way
    • It’s getting better and better.
  • 1981: The protagonist in Emir Kusturica’s 1981 film Do You Remember Dolly Bell? often recites the mantra as a result of studying hypnotherapy and autosuggestion.
  • 1992: In Kerry Greenwood’s novel, Death at Victoria Dock, investigative detective Phryne Fisher recites the mantra during a particularly trying case.
  • 1994: In the film Barcelona, Fred Boynton, making light of his cousin Ted’s commitment to various business-efficiency techniques, recites the mantra. Ted quickly dismisses Fred’s quote stating that Coué and autosuggestion is today considered “unserious”.
  • 1998: In Nest Family Entertainment’s animated children’s film The Swan Princess III and the Mystery of the Enchanted Treasure, a character uses the mantra while training for a competition.
  • 2005: In the HBO drama Six Feet Under (Season 5, episode 4), George Sibley repeats the mantra to Billy Chenowith in discussing the effectiveness of the former’s treatment.
  • 2012: In Boardwalk Empire (season 3, episode 1) the fugitive Nelson Van Alden (played by Michael Shannon), now a salesman, looks into a mirror and repeats to himself the mantra: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better”.

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Who is Elliot Hirshman (1961-Present)?

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Introduction

Elliot Lee Hirshman (born 21 February 1961) is an American psychologist and academic who is the president of Stevenson University in Owings Mills, Maryland since 03 July 2017. Prior to Stevenson University he served as president at San Diego State University and served as the provost and senior vice president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Education

Hirshman earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics from Yale University in 1983. He received a master’s degree (1984) and a PhD in cognitive psychology (1987) from UCLA. While at UCLA he was a member of the Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab and Cogfog. He then took a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at New York University.

Career

He taught in the psychology department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1989 to 2000. He chaired the psychology departments at the University of Colorado at Denver (2000–2002) and at George Washington University (2002–2005), where he later served as chief research officer (2005–2008). From 2008 to 2011 he was provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He became the eighth president of SDSU in 2011. SDSU, founded in 1897, is a part of the California State University system; it has 36,000 students and a faculty and staff of 7,000. It offers undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees through eight academic colleges and is an NCAA Division One school offering 19 sports. During his tenure he is credited with greatly improving the university’s reputation and rankings, fundraising, and graduation rates. In March 2017 he announced his intention to resign from SDSU, effective June 2017, to become president of Stevenson University in Maryland.

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Who was Ole Ivar Lovaas (1927-2010)?

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Introduction

Ole Ivar Løvaas (08 May 1927 to 02 August 2010) was a Norwegian-American clinical psychologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is most well known for his research on what is now called applied behaviour analysis (ABA) to teach autistic children through prompts, modelling, and positive reinforcement. The therapy is also noted for its use of aversives (punishment) to reduce undesired behaviour.

Løvaas founded the Lovaas Institute and co-founded the Autism Society of America. He is also considered a pioneer of ABA due to his development of discrete trial training and early intensive behavioural intervention for autistic children.

His work influenced how autism is treated, and Løvaas received widespread acclaim and several awards during his lifetime.

Personal Life

Løvaas was born in Lier, Norway on 08 May 1927 to Hildur and Ernst Albert Løvaas. He had two siblings: an older sister named Nora and a younger brother named Hans Erik. Løvaas attended Hegg Elementary School in Lier from 1934 to 1941. He attended junior high school at Drammen Realskole until 1944, and then moved on to Drammen Latin School for high school, graduating in 1947.

Following World War II, Løvaas moved to the United States. There he married Beryl Scoles in 1955, and together they had four children. Lovaas later divorced his wife and remarried Nina Watthen in 1986.

Career

After graduating from high school, Løvaas served in the Norwegian Air Force for 18 months. He was a forced farm worker during the 1940s Nazi occupation of Norway, and often said that observing the Nazis had sparked his interest in human behaviour.

He attended Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, graduating in 1951 after just one year with his B.A. in sociology. Løvaas received his Masters of Science in clinical psychology from the University of Washington in 1955, and his PhD in learning and clinical psychology from the same school 3 years later.

Early in his career, Løvaas worked at the Pinel foundation, which focused on Freudian psychoanalysis. After earning his PhD, he took a position at the University of Washington’s Child Development Institute, where he first learned of behaviour analysis. Løvaas began teaching at UCLA in 1961 in the Department of Psychology, where he performed research on children with autism spectrum disorder at the school’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. He started an early intervention clinic at UCLA called the UCLA Young Autism Project, which provided intensive intervention inside the children’s homes. He was named professor emeritus in 1994. Løvaas also established the Lovaas Institute for Early Intervention (LIFE) that provides interventions based on his research.

Løvaas taught now prominent behaviourists, such as Robert Koegel, Laura Schreibman, Tristram Smith, Doreen Granpeesheh, John McEachin, Ron Leaf, Jacquie Wynn, and thousands of UCLA students who took his “Behaviour Modification” course during his 50 years of teaching. He also co-founded what is today the Autism Society of America (ASA), published hundreds of research articles and several books, and received many accolades for his research. Due to this research, a number of school districts have adopted his programmes. His work influenced how autism is treated.

Research

Autism Intervention

Early Research

Løvaas established the Young Autism Project clinic at UCLA in 1962, where he began his research, authored training manuals, and recorded tapes of him and his graduate students implementing errorless learning—based on operant conditioning and what was then referred to as behaviour modification—to instruct autistic children. He later coined the term “discrete trial training” to describe the procedure, which was used to teach listener responding, eye contact, fine and gross motor imitation, receptive and expressive language, academic, and a variety of other skills. In an errorless discrete trial, the child sits at a table across from the therapist who provides an instruction (i.e. “do this”, “look at me”, “point to”, etc.), followed by a prompt, then the child’s response, and a stimulus reinforcer. The prompts are later discontinued once the child demonstrates proficiency. During this time, Løvaas and colleagues also employed physical aversives (punishment), such as electric shocks and slaps, to decrease aggressive and self-injurious behaviour, as well as verbal reprimands if the child answered incorrectly or engaged in self-stimulatory behaviour.

1987 Study

In 1987, Løvaas published a study which demonstrated that, following forty hours a week of treatment, 9 of the 19 autistic children developed typical spoken language, increased IQs by 30 points on average, and were placed in regular classrooms. A 1993 follow-up study found that 8 maintained their gains and were “indistinguishable from their typically developing peers”, scoring in the normal range of social and emotional functioning. His studies were limited because Løvaas did not randomise the participants or treatment groups. This produced a quasi-experiment in which he was able to control the assignment of children to treatment groups. His manipulation of the study in this way may have been responsible for the observed effects. The true efficacy of his method cannot be determined since his studies cannot be repeated for ethical reasons. A 1998 study subsequently recommended that EIBI programmes be regarded with scepticism. In 1999, the United States Surgeon General’s office wrote:

“Thirty years of research has demonstrated the efficacy of applied behavioral methods in reducing inappropriate behavior and in increasing communication, learning, and appropriate social behavior”, and he also endorsed the 1987 study.

Literature Reviews

According to a 2007 review study in Paediatrics:

“The effectiveness of [EIBI] in [autism spectrum disorder] has been well-documented through 5 decades of research by using single-subject methodology and in controlled studies… in university and community settings.”

It further stated:

“Children who receive early intensive behavioral treatment have been shown to make substantial, sustained gains in IQ, language, academic performance, and adaptive behavior as well as some measures of social behavior, and their outcomes have been significantly better than those of children in control groups.”

However, the study also recommended to later generalise the child’s skills with more naturalistic ABA-based procedures, such as incidental teaching and pivotal response treatment, so their progress is maintained.

Another review in 2008 described DTT as a “‘well-established’ psychosocial intervention for improving the intellectual performance of young children with autism spectrum disorders…” In 2011, it was found that the intervention is effective for some, but “the literature is limited by methodological concerns” due to there being small sample sizes and very few studies that used random assignment, and a 2018 Cochrane review subsequently indicated low-quality evidence to support this method. Nonetheless, a meta-analysis in the same journal database concludes how some recent research is beginning to suggest that because of the heterology of ASD, there are a wide range of different learning styles and that it is the children with lower receptive language skills who acquire spoken language from Løvaas’ treatment. In 2023, a multi-site randomised control trial study of 164 participants indicated similar findings.

UCLA Feminine Boy Project

Løvaas co-authored a study with George Rekers in 1974 where they attempted to modify the behavior of feminine male children through the use of rewards and punishment with the goal of preventing them from becoming adult transsexuals. The subject of the first of these studies, a young boy at the age of 4 at the inception of the experiment, died by suicide as an adult in 2003; his family attribute the suicide to this treatment. Despite the follow-up study (which Løvaas was not involved in) writing that the therapy successfully converted his homosexuality, his sister expressed concerns that it was overly biased as “he was conditioned to say that”, and she read his journal, which described how he feared disclosing his sexual orientation due to his father spanking him as a child as punishment for engaging in feminine behaviour, such as playing with dolls.

In October 2020, the Journal of Applied Behaviour Analysis officially issued an Expression of Concern about the Rekers and Løvaas study. In the editorial accompanying the Expression of Concern, the journal discusses the damage done by the study. It emphasizes that the study inflicted personal harm upon the study’s subject and his family, as well as to the gay community, for inappropriately promoting the study as evidence that conversion therapy is effective. It also argues that the field of behaviour analysis was harmed by the false portrayal that the study and the use of conversion therapy are currently representative of the field.

Awards and Accolades

Løvaas received praise from several organisations during his lifetime. In 2001, he was given the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Distinguished Career Award. He received the Edgar Doll Award from the 33rd Division of the American Psychological Association, the Lifetime Research Achievement Award from the 55th Division of the American Psychological Association, and the Award for Effective Presentation of Behaviour Analysis in the Mass Media by the Association for Behaviour Analysis International. Løvaas also earned a Guggenheim fellowship and the California Senate Award, which is an honorary doctorate. He was named a Fellow by Division 7 of the American Psychological Association and was given the Champion of Mental Health Award by Psychology Today.

Criticism

The goal of making autistic people indistinguishable from their peers has attracted significant backlash from autistic advocates. Julia Bascom of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) has said:

“ASAN’s objection is fundamentally an ethical one. The stated end goal of ABA is an autistic child who is ‘indistinguishable from their peers’ – an autistic child who can pass as neurotypical. We don’t think that’s an acceptable goal. The end goal of all services, supports, interventions, and therapies an autistic child receives should be to support them in growing up into an autistic adult who is happy, healthy, and living a self-determined life.”

Løvaas has also been criticised for his view of autistic people in relation to other people, as he said in a statement during an interview:

“You start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic person. You have a person in the physical sense – they have hair, a nose, a mouth – but they are not people in the psychological sense.”

Aversives

Løvaas is credited with popularising the use of aversives in behaviour modification, as shown in a Life magazine photo spread in 1965.

He later admitted that they were only temporarily effective and punishments became less effective over time. Eventually, Løvaas abandoned these tactics, telling CBS in a 1994 interview:

“These people are so used to pain that they can adapt to almost any kind of aversive you give them.”

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_Ivar_Lovaas >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

Who was George Alexander Kelly (1905-1967)?

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Introduction

George Alexander Kelly (28 April 1905 to 06 March 1967) was an American psychologist, therapist, educator and personality theorist. He is considered a founding figure in the history of clinical psychology and is best known for his theory of personality, personal construct psychology. Kelly’s work has influenced many areas of psychology—including constructivist, humanistic, existential, and cognitive psychology.

Biography

George Alexander Kelly was born in 1905 on a farm near Perth, Kansas to two strictly religious parents. He was their only child. They moved frequently during his childhood years, resulting in a fragmented early education. He later attended Friends University and Park College, where he received a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics. Early on, he was interested in social problems, and he went on to get his master’s degree in sociology at the University of Kansas, where he wrote a thesis on workers’ leisure activities. He also completed minor studies in labour relations.

Kelly taught at various colleges and other institutions, with course topics ranging from speech-making to “Americanization”. In 1929, after receiving an exchange scholarship, he completed a Bachelor of Education degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, writing a thesis dealing with the prediction of teaching success. He then returned to the United States to continue psychology studies and completed a graduate and doctoral degrees in psychology at the State University of Iowa in 1931. After he received his Ph.D. in psychology, Kelly worked as a psychotherapist in Kansas. His dissertation was on speech and reading disabilities. For some years before World War II, Kelly worked in school psychology, developing a program of travelling clinics which also served as a training ground for his students. He had a keen interest in clinical diagnosis. It was during this period that Kelly left behind this interest in psychoanalytic approach to human personality, because he said people were more troubled by natural disasters than any psychological issue, such as the libidinal forces.

During World War II, Dylan Brundage and Kelly worked as aviation psychologists, where, among other things, Kelly was responsible for a training program for local civilian pilots. After the war and a brief tenure as a psychology faculty member at the University of Maryland, he was appointed professor and director of clinical psychology at the Ohio State University, where he remained until 1965. Under his guidance, OSU’s graduate psychology training programs became some of the best in the United States, offering a unique blend of clinical skills and a strong commitment to scientific methodology.

It is also at OSU that Kelly developed his major contribution to the psychology of personality. The Psychology of Personal Constructs was published in 1955 and achieved immediate international recognition, gaining him visiting appointments at various universities in the US as well as in Europe, the former Soviet Union, South America, the Caribbean, and Asia. He was also elected president of the clinical and the consulting divisions of the American Psychological Association, and served as president of the American Board of Examiners in Professional Psychology, providing expertise and insight, especially regarding ethical issues.

Kelly went on a world tour in 1961, invited to speak about his essays and articles all over the country. In 1964, Kelly wrote a paper for the First Old Saybrook Conference, which has been renamed to Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP). Kelly’s paper, “The threat of aggression”, was later published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Kelly transferred from Ohio State University to Brandeis University in the United States for the psychology department.

Kelly noted: “Johann Herbart’s work on education and particularly mathematical psychology influenced me. I think mathematics is the pure instance of construct functioning—the model of human behavior” Although Kelly was influenced by Herbart—a philosopher, psychologist, and founder of pedagogy as an academic discipline – some of Kelly’s inspiration for the theory of personal constructs came from a close friend of his. Namely, this friend had been an actor in some drama in college, and for two or three weeks he really got into his character and lived it as it was the real him. Kelly, unlike many people who would see this only as a sheer affectation, thought this was the expression of his real self and the behaviour was authentic.

Kelly also worked extensively on researching the implications and applications of his theory, while continuing to work in clinical psychology. Joseph Rychlak is among his prominent students who expanded on his theories. Brendan A. Maher, who became a professor himself, published a selection of Kelly’s essays and articles after his death. Kelly had all his students refer to him as “Professor Kelly”, however when they would receive a Ph.D. dissertation they could call him George and he would also call them by their first name instead of “Miss”, “Mrs.”, or “Mister”.

George Kelly left OSU to take an endowed faculty position as the Mashulam and Judith Riklis Chair in Behavioural Science at Brandeis University in 1965. Kelly died on March 6, 1967, at the age of 61, just two years after accepting the Riklis Chair of Behavioural Science at Brandeis University.

Kelly’s ideas are still used in today’s findings to explore personality into greater depths. His ideas also help to uncover the patterns of behaviour.

Work

Kelly’s Concerns

Kelly did not like his theory being compared to other theories. Oftentimes, people believed Kelly’s personal construct theory was similar to humanistic theories or cognitive theories, but Kelly thought of his theory as its own category of theories. Some say Kelly was similar to Ulric Neisser, “the father of cognitive psychology”, because they both studied cognitive psychology characteristics, others say Kelly was similar to Abraham Maslow, the creator of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, because they both studied humanistic psychology characteristics. Although Kelly’s research had some humanistic psychology characteristics, it differed from that field in many ways as well. Kelly rejected being labelled as a cognitive psychologist—to the extent that he almost wrote another book stating his theory had no link to cognitive theories.

Kelly saw that current theories of personality were so loosely defined and difficult to test that in many clinical cases the observer contributed more to the diagnosis than the patient. If people took their problems to a Freudian analyst, they would be analysed in Freudian terms; a Jungian would interpret them in Jungian terms; a behaviourist would interpret them in terms of conditioning; and so on.

Kelly acknowledged that both the therapist and patient would each bring a unique set of constructs to bear in the consulting room. Therefore, the therapist could never be completely “objective” in construing their client’s world. The effective therapist was, however, one who construed the patient’s material at a high level of abstraction within the patient’s (as opposed to the therapist’s) system of construction. The therapist could then comprehend the ways in which the patient saw the world that were disordered and help the patient to change their maladaptive constructs.

Personal Construct Psychology

Refer to Personal Construct Theory.

Kelly’s fundamental view of personality was that people are like naïve scientists who see the world through a particular lens, based on their uniquely organised systems of construction, which they use to anticipate events. Personal construct theory explores the individual’s map they form by coping with the psychological stresses of their lives. But because people are naïve scientists, they sometimes employ systems for construing the world that are distorted by idiosyncratic experiences not applicable to their current social situation. A system of construction that chronically fails to characterise and/or predict events, and is not appropriately revised to comprehend and predict one’s changing social world, is considered to underlie psychopathology (or mental illness.)

The body of Kelly’s work, The Psychology of Personal Constructs, was written in 1955 when Kelly was a professor at Ohio State University. The first three chapters of the book were republished by W.W. Norton in paperback in 1963 and consist only of his theory of personality which is covered in most personality books. The re-publication omitted Kelly’s assessment technique, the rep grid test, and one of his techniques of psychotherapy (fixed role therapy), which is rarely practiced in the form he proposed.

Kelly believed that each person had their own idea of what a word meant. If someone were to say their sister is shy, the word “shy” would be interpreted in different ways depending on the person’s personal constructs they had already associated with the word “shy”. Kelly wanted to know how the individual made sense of the world based on their constructs. Kelly believed that a person’s own meaning and definition is the foundation of who and what that person is and helps give shape to a person’s idea of what the world is based on their individual constructs.

On the other hand, Kelly’s fundamental view of people as naïve scientists was incorporated into most later-developed forms of cognitive-behavioural therapy that blossomed in the late 70s and early 80s, and into intersubjective psychoanalysis which leaned heavily on Kelly’s phenomenological perspective and his notion of schematic processing of social information. Kelly’s personality theory was distinguished from drive theories (such as psychodynamic models) on the one hand, and from behavioural theories on the other, in that people were not seen as solely motivated by instincts (such as sexual and aggressive drives) or learning history but by their need to characterise and predict events in their social world. Because the constructs people developed for construing experience have the potential to change, Kelly’s theory of personality is less deterministic than drive theory or learning theory. People could conceivably change their view of the world and in so doing change the way they interacted with it, felt about it, and even others’ reactions to them. For this reason, it is an existential theory, regarding humankind as having a choice to reconstrue themselves, a concept Kelly referred to as constructive alternativism. Constructs provide a certain order, clarity, and prediction to a person’s world. Kelly referenced many philosophers in his two volumes but the theme of new experience being at once novel and familiar (due to the templates placed on it) is closely akin to the notion of Heraclitus: “we step and do not step in the same rivers.” Experience is new but familiar to the extent that it is construed with historically derived constructs.

Kelly defined constructs as bipolar categories – the way two things are alike and different from a third—that people employ to understand the world. Examples of such constructs are “attractive,” “intelligent,” “kind.” A construct always implies contrast. So when an individual categorises others as attractive, or intelligent, or kind, an opposite polarity is implied. This means that such a person may also evaluate the others in terms of the constructs “ugly,” “stupid,” or “cruel.” In some cases, when a person has a disordered construct system, the opposite polarity is unexpressed or idiosyncratic. The importance of a particular construct varies among individuals. The adaptiveness of a construct system is measured by how well it applies to the situation at hand and is useful in predicting events. All constructs are not used in every situation because they have a limited range (range of convenience). Adaptive people are continually revising and updating their own constructs to match new information (or data) that they encounter in their experience.

Kelly’s theory was structured as a testable scientific treatise with a fundamental postulate and a set of corollaries.

  • Fundamental postulate: “A person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he [or she] anticipates events.”
  • The construction corollary: “a person anticipates events by construing their replications.” This means that individuals anticipate events in their social world by perceiving a similarity with a past event (construing a replication).
  • The experience corollary: “a person’s construction system varies as he successively construes the replication of events.”
  • The dichotomy corollary: “a person’s construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs.”
  • The organization corollary: “each person characteristically evolves, for his convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs.”
  • The range corollary: “a construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only.”
  • The modulation corollary: “the variation in a person’s construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within whose range of convenience the variants lie.”
  • The choice corollary: “a person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system.”
  • The individuality corollary: “persons differ from each other in their construction of events.”
  • The commonality corollary: “to the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, his psychological processes are similar to the other person.”
  • The fragmentation corollary: “a person may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other.”
  • The sociality corollary: “to the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person.”

Disordered constructs are those in which the system of construction is not useful in predicting social events and fails to change to accommodate new information. In many ways, Kelly’s theory of psychopathology (or mental disorders) is similar to the elements that define a poor theory. A disordered construct system does not accurately predict events or accommodate new data.

Dimensions of Transitions

Transitional periods in a person’s life occur when they encounter a situation that changes their naïve theory (or system of construction) of the way the world is ordered. They can create anxiety, hostility, and/or guilt and can also be opportunities to change one’s constructs and the way one views the world.

The terms anxiety, hostility, and guilt had unique definitions and meanings in personal construct theory (The Psychology of Personal Constructs, Vol. 1, 486–534).

Anxiety develops when a person encounters a situation that their construct system does not cover, an event unlike any they have encountered. An example of such a situation is a woman from the western United States who is accustomed to earthquakes, who moves to the eastern United States and experiences great anxiety because of a hurricane. While an earthquake might be of greater magnitude, she experiences greater anxiety with the hurricane because she has no constructs to deal with such an event. She is caught “with her constructs down.” Similarly, a boy who has been abused in early childhood may not have the constructs to accommodate kindness from others. Such a boy might experience anxiety in an outstretched hand that others view as benevolent.

Guilt is dislodgement from one’s core constructs. A person feels guilt if they fail to confirm the constructs that define them. This definition of guilt is radically different from in other theories of personality. Kelly used the example of the man who regards others as cow-like creatures “making money and giving milk.” Such a man might construe his role in relationship to others in terms of his ability to con favours or money from them. Such a man, who other psychologists might call a ruthless psychopath, and see as unable to experience guilt, feels guilt, according to Kelly’s theory, when he is unable to con others: He is then alienated from his core constructs.

Hostility is “attempting to extort confirmation of a social prediction that is already failing.” When a person encounters a situation in which they expect one outcome and receive quite a different one, they should change their theory or constructs rather than trying to change the situation to match their constructs. But the person who continually refuses to modify their belief system to accommodate new data, and in fact tries to change the data, is acting in bad faith and with hostility. Hostility, in Kelly’s theory, is analogous to a scientist “fudging” their data. An example might be a professor who sees himself as a brilliant educator who deals with poor student reviews by devaluing the students or the means of evaluation.

Rep Test

Rep stands for repertory grid. In 1955, George Kelly created an interactive grid known as the rep test based on his personal construct theory. The repertory grid is a mathematical way of giving meaning to one’s own, or other people’s, personal constructs. The repertory grid test needs a set of elements (such as people or things), and a set of constructs created by the individual. The test asks a person to list people or things that are important, then the responses are split into groups of three. There are three role-titles in each row; the person is to think how two of the constructs are alike, and how the other is different from the two that are alike. The responses are sorted into two poles, an emergent pole and implicit pole. The emergent pole is the way in which two elements are similar, while the implicit pole is the way in which the third element differs from the two that are similar. After extracting a construct, the individual analyses the role-titles and checks the elements that are best described under the emergent pole and leaves blank the elements best described under the implicit pole. Kelly’s repertory grid test can be used in many different situations, from clinical psychology to marketing, due to its ability to apply constructs to any kind of event. Kelly believed the repertory grid provided a “basis for a mathematics of psychological space”—a way to mathematically model any person’s “psychological space”.

Select Publications

  • 1955: The psychology of personal constructs. Vol. I, II. Norton, New York. (2nd printing: 1991, Routledge, London, New York)
  • 1963: A theory of personality. The psychology of personal constructs. Norton, New York (= Chapt. 1-3 of Kelly 1955).
  • 1969: Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly. John Wiley & Sons, New York.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Kelly_(psychologist) >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Personal Construct Theory?

Published on by Andrew Marshall2 Comments

Introduction

Within personality psychology, personal construct theory (PCT) or personal construct psychology (PCP) is a theory of personality and cognition developed by the American psychologist George Kelly in the 1950s. The theory addresses the psychological reasons for actions. Kelly proposed that individuals can be psychologically evaluated according to similarity–dissimilarity poles, which he called personal constructs (schemas, or ways of seeing the world). The theory is considered by some psychologists as forerunner to theories of cognitive therapy.

From the theory, Kelly derived a psychotherapy approach, as well as a technique called the repertory grid interview, that helped his patients to analyse their own personal constructs with minimal intervention or interpretation by the therapist. The repertory grid was later adapted for various uses within organizations, including decision-making and interpretation of other people’s world-views. The UK Council for Psychotherapy, a regulatory body, classifies PCP therapy within the experiential subset of the constructivist school.

Principles

A main tenet of PCP theory is that a person’s unique psychological processes are channelled by the way they anticipate events. Kelly believed that anticipation and prediction are the main drivers of our mind. “Every man is, in his own particular way, a scientist”, said Kelly: people are constantly building up and refining theories and models about how the world works so that they can anticipate future events. People start doing this at birth (for example, a child discovers that if they start to cry, their mother will come to them) and continue refining their theories as they grow up.

Kelly proposed that every construct is bipolar, specifying how two things are similar to each other (lying on the same pole) and different from a third thing, and they can be expanded with new ideas. (More recent researchers have suggested that constructs need not be bipolar.) People build theories—often stereotypes—about other people and also try to control them or impose on others their own theories so as to be better able to predict others’ actions. All these theories are built up from a system of constructs. A construct has two extreme points, such as “happy–sad,” and people tend to place items at either extreme or at some point in between. People’s minds, said Kelly, are filled up with these constructs at a low level of awareness.

A given person, set of persons, any event, or circumstance can be characterized fairly precisely by the set of constructs applied to it and by the position of the thing within the range of each construct. For example, Fred may feel as though he is not happy or sad (an example of a construct); he feels as though he is between the two. However, he feels he is more clever than he is stupid (another example of a construct). A baby may have a preverbal construct of what behaviours may cause their mother to come to them. Constructs can be applied to anything people put their attention to, and constructs also strongly influence what people fix their attention on. People can construe reality by constructing different constructs. Hence, determining a person’s system of constructs would go a long way towards understanding them, especially the person’s essential constructs that represent their very strong and unchangeable beliefs and their self-construal.

Kelly did not use the concept of the unconscious; instead, he proposed the notion of “levels of awareness” to explain why people did what they did. He identified “construing” as the highest level and “preverbal” as the lowest level of awareness.

Some psychologists have suggested that PCT is not a psychological theory but a metatheory because it is a theory about theories.

Therapy Approach

Kelly believed in a non-invasive or non-directive approach to psychotherapy. Rather than having the therapist interpret the person’s psyche, which would amount to imposing the doctor’s constructs on the patient, the therapist should just act as a facilitator of the patient finding his or her own constructs. The patient’s behaviour is then mainly explained as ways to selectively observe the world, act upon it and update the construct system in such a way as to increase predictability. To help the patient find his or her constructs, Kelly developed the repertory grid interview technique.

Kelly explicitly stated that each individual’s task in understanding their personal psychology is to put in order the facts of his or her own experience. Then the individual, like the scientist, is to test the accuracy of that constructed knowledge by performing those actions the constructs suggest. If the results of their actions are in line with what the knowledge predicted, then they have done a good job of finding the order in their personal experience. If not, then they can modify the construct: their interpretations or their predictions or both. This method of discovering and correcting constructs is roughly analogous to the general scientific method that is applied in various ways by modern sciences to discover truths about the universe.

The Repertory Grid

The repertory grid serves as part of various assessment methods to elicit and examine an individual’s repertoire of personal constructs. There are different formats such as card sorts, verbally administered group format, and the repertory grid technique.

The repertory grid itself is a matrix where the rows represent constructs found, the columns represent the elements, and cells indicate with a number the position of each element within each construct. There is software available to produce several reports and graphs from these grids.

To build a repertory grid for a patient, Kelly might first ask the patient to select about seven elements (although there are no fixed rules for the number of elements) whose nature might depend on whatever the patient or therapist are trying to discover. For instance, “Two specific friends, two work-mates, two people you dislike, your mother and yourself”, or something of that sort. Then, three of the elements would be selected at random, and then the therapist would ask: “In relation to … (whatever is of interest), in which way are two of these people alike but different from the third?” The answer is sure to indicate one of the extreme points of one of the patient’s constructs. He might say for instance that Fred and Sarah are very communicative whereas John is not. Further questioning would reveal the other end of the construct (say, introvert) and the positions of the three characters between extremes. Repeating the procedure with different sets of three elements ends up revealing several constructs the patient might not have been fully aware of.

In the book Personal Construct Methodology, researchers Brian R. Gaines and Mildred L.G. Shaw noted that they “have also found concept mapping and semantic network tools to be complementary to repertory grid tools and generally use both in most studies” but that they “see less use of network representations in PCP studies than is appropriate”. They encouraged practitioners to use semantic network techniques in addition to the repertory grid.

Organisational Applications

PCP has always been a minority interest among psychologists. During the last 30 years, it has gradually gained adherents in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia, Ireland, Italy and Spain. While its chief fields of application remain clinical and educational psychology, there is an increasing interest in its applications to organisational development, employee training and development, job analysis, job description and evaluation. The repertory grid is often used in the qualitative phase of market research, to identify the ways in which consumers construe products and services.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_construct_theory >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.