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demonstrated, was supported by the behavior of the rats in the latent learning condition.
For these rats, the number of errors matched that of the control group for the first 10 days.
However, on the 11th day, when reward was introduced, the number of errors of these rats was dramatically reduced and quickly became fewer in number than those of the learning group. Tolman interpreted this as supportive of his theory that learning is purposive, or goal directed.
This work, and more like it, became the cen- ter of experimental psychology in the period between the wars. While the number of experi- mental psychologists was not large, it is accurate to state that work on conditions of learning or adaptation was central. If we look beyond the center, as we do next, we see that other significant bodies of psychological research and application emerged in this period.
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growth of developmental psychology, especially studies of children’s development.
The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM) fund (one of the Rockefeller Foundation funds) played the key role in these efforts in the 1920s. In 1923, the director of the memorial, psy- chologist Beardsley Ruml assigned social scientist Lawrence Frank the task of articulating a plan to spend $1 million a year to benefit children. Frank came up with a plan to do so through encourag- ing research and education related to children’s development. Out of this plan, research institutes were established as independent centers at sev- eral universities across North America. The list is impressive.
Teachers College at Columbia began the Child Development Institute, which was able to lure Woolley, then the nation’s most prominent woman psychologist, from the Merrill-Palmer School in Detroit; the IowaChild Welfare Re- search Station was also endowed with funds to add to the support they received from the state of Iowa. Over the next few years, the LSRM gave money to begin child research institutes at the University of Toronto, University of Minnesota, and the University of California, Berkeley. In each case, the memorial insisted that the insti- tutes be set up as separate from the established academic departments, partly because the re- search was intended to be interdisciplinary and partly to keep academic department heads from diverting funds away from child research. This last point sounds harsh, but many departments of psychology did not perceive research on children as serious experimental science, seeing it instead as a place for women who were not wanted in academic departments of psychology. In addi- tion, many researchers did not want children around their laboratories.
University-based institutes were the major focus of foundation support, but not the only focus. The LSRM also provided the money to establish a Committee on Child Development at the prestigious NRC. Led by well-known experimental psychologist, Robert Sessions Woodworth (1869–1962) of Columbia, the
committee administered an important fellowship program that made it possible for many graduate students to earn their doctorates while doing developmental research. Most recipients were women; the list of NRCfellows in this program is impressive even today and includes several women who went on to make major scien- tific contributions, including Myrtle McGraw (1899–1988) and MaryCover Jones (1896–1987).
Knowledge dissemination was also a critical role played by the Committee on Child De- velopment and funded by the LSRM. Several key conferences were held under the commit- tee’s auspices, where leading researchers from various relevant fields were brought together to share research results and identify key issues for future research. Perhaps even more impor- tantly, Woodworth was able to overcome many obstacles to help found the interdisciplinary sci- entific organization, the Society for Research in Child Development, in 1933. Two years later, the society began its journal, Child Development, with funds from the General Education Board, another of the Rockefeller philanthropies. The organization andChild Development became the preeminent society and scientific journal for de- velopmental research.
Out of this initiative, several longitudinal studies were inaugurated and continued for many years. Here, we give just a brief overview of these studies. Lewis Terman (1877–1956; for more on Terman, see Chapter 6) was funded by the Commonwealth Fund to conduct a longitudinal study of gifted children. More than 1,500 children were identified as gifted and enrolled in the research program in 1923. While the IQ was the basic predictor used in this study, personality and social variables were also included. The goal was to determine how well the IQ predicted life outcomes. The study has continued until the present day, although almost all of the original participants have died.
The major group of longitudinal studies was conducted at the Institute for Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley, beginning in the late 1920s. Each
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study had its own personnel, with little overlap.
These studies were interdisciplinary, with psychologists and physicians typically providing the leadership. The Guidance Study was led by psychologist Jean W. Macfarlane (1894–1989).
The study was meant to examine the impact of parental guidance on child outcomes, such as performance in school. The experimental group consisted of intense interaction between child and parent around issues related to school and relationships, with the control group not receiving any particular emphasis on parental guidance. In January 1939, a young child psychoanalyst joined the staff of the Guidance Study. Erik Homburger, a Danish artist who had been personally trained in child analysis by Anna Freud (1895–1982), had fled the Nazis with his American wife in the early 1930s. After a few years at Harvard’s PsychologicalClinic and Yale’s Institute of Human Relations, he accepted the offer to come to Berkeley. Homburger had never known who his real father was, especially since his mother had misled him more than once about his father. With the move to California, Homburger saw an opportunity to do what so many Americans do: reinvent himself. He legally changed his last name to Erikson, declaring that since he did not know his real father he would be- come his own father. Erik Erikson (1902–1994),
became one of the 20th century’s best-known psychologists and public intellectuals. His theory of identify formation and development became standard fare in most undergraduate courses.
The Berkeley Growth Study at the Institute for Human Development was led by psychologist Nancy Bayley (1899–1994). The study followed 74 infants for 40 years and covered mental and physical development. Bayley, who later in her career worked at the National Institute of Mental Health in suburban Washington, DC, is prob- ably best known for the assessment instrument that grew out of this study, the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. Most graduate students in North American clinical and counseling pro- grams become familiar with this scale in their training.
The Oakland Growth Study (originally the Adolescent Growth Study) was led by Harold and Mary Cover Jones. The study began in 1931 and followed adolescent boys and girls well into adulthood to assess their physical and psychological development. For example, Mary Cover Jones reported that boys who were slow to develop physically often also showed evidence of slower psychological maturity, although they typically were able to ‘‘catch up’’ psychologically in their 20s.
Sidebar 7.1 Focus on Mary Cover Jones
Mary Cover Jones was an important developmental psychologist, but many students may recognize her name not because of her association with the Oakland Growth Study but because she conducted the classic follow-up to John B. Watson’s famous Little Albert study. In her last year of undergraduate studies at Vassar College, Mary Cover attended a weekend lecture given by Watson in New York City, in which he described his work on the conditioning of fear in the infant known as Little Albert. In this study, conducted with Cover’s friend and Vassar graduate Rosalie Rayner, Watson presented Albert with several white furry objects, including a white rat, paired with a loud noise. Although he was not initially afraid of any of the objects, including the rat, the loud noise did startle Albert. With enough pairings, he began to exhibit a fear response in the presence of the objects even when the loud noise was absent. Watson’s description of this study cemented Cover’s desire to pursue psychology as a career and convinced her that, if fear (Continued)
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could be established where none existed before, she might be able to reduce or eliminate an already-established fear.
Cover began her graduate work at Columbia University in fall 1919 and completed her master’s degree by summer 1920. That same summer, she married fellow graduate student Harold Jones. In 1923, she was appointed associate in psychological research at the Institute of Educational Research, Teachers College, Columbia University. During this time, she conducted her study of Peter. Briefly, as part of her position as a research associate for the Institute of Educational Research, Mary and her family were living in Hecksher House, an organization that housed children who had been abandoned by, or temporarily separated from, their parents. Here she ran across an appropriate subject for her study, a boy who had developed a strong fear of white rabbits.
She decided to treat Peter’s fear with various fear-reducing procedures to see which would be most effective. The most successful procedure, she discovered, was that of direct conditioning, in which a pleasant stimulus (food) was presented simultaneously with the rabbit on several successive occasions. At first the rabbit was placed far enough away from Peter that he was not nervous. As the rabbit was gradually brought closer to him in the presence of his favorite food, Peter grew more tolerant, and he was finally able to touch it without fear.
After publishing these results (1924), Mary completed her dissertation work, writing a thesis on the development of early behavior patterns in young children.
In summer 1927, the Jones family (they now had two young daughters) packed their bags and headed West. Harold had been offered a position at the recently established Institute for Child Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, and was given an academic position in the Department of Psychology at the university. Mary took a position as research associate at the institute, since antinepotism rules prevented her from being offered a position in psychology. She soon became involved in the Oakland Growth Study, and her involvement would color the rest of her career. She would eventually publish more than 100 studies using data from the study.
In 1952, Mary and her husband produced the first educational television course in child psychology.
In 1960, she served as president of the Division of Developmental Psychology of the APA, and in 1968 she received the organization’s G. Stanley Hall Award. In a keynote address delivered at a 1974 conference, she offered this assessment of her career and her personal and theoretical outlook:
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My last 45 years have been spent in longitudinal research in which I have watched the psychobiological development of our study members as they grew from children to adults now in their fifties.. . . My association with this study has broadened my conception of the human experience. Now I would be less satisfied to treat the fears of a 3-year-old, or of anyone else, without a later follow-up and in isolation from an appreciation of him as a tantalizingly complex person with unique potentials for stability and change. (Jones, 1975, p. 186)
Developmental research in psychology as a scientific endeavor dates from this era. Certain universities came to be known as the best places to go if one wanted to be trained as a developmen- tal psychologist. The University of California, Berkeley, was one of those sites, as were the programs at University of Minnesota, led for many years by John Anderson (1893–1966), and the University of Iowa. The number of scien- tists engaged in developmental research did not approach the number engaged in behaviorist re- search; still, this became one of the streams that ran parallel to the mainstream of experimental psychology in these years and represents the di- versity of psychology that only grew after World War II.